I’d never even heard of Dino’s House of Corned Beef until they dropped a stack of their menus off where I work. This happens a lot with restaurants in the area, but when I looked at their menu and saw that they claimed to have the “best corned beef in town” I knew that I had to stop in for a sandwich.

I was a bit confused when I first pulled up to Dino’s and saw that their sign read “Dino’s Steak & Lemonade.” Had they changed their specialty I wondered? Then I noticed that Dino’s House of Corned Beef was located directly next door. When I parked my car and walked in I was even more confused. The doors to both places led to the same giant empty room that only contained a mural on one wall and their menu and an area to walk up and order your food on another. They could have easily fit about ten tables in there for people to eat at, but they apparently decided to take a minimalist approach instead.

After waiting about 15 minutes for my food, and being asked twice by someone who I assume was the owner what I ordered, my corned beef sandwich was finally ready. He offered me a free lemonade since the wait was so long, but not being a huge lemonade fan I politely declined. He then told the cashier to give me a free soda instead. I asked for a diet, but “we don’t have diet soda” was her response. “Oh, OK, I’ll just take my sandwich then” I replied. The owner overheard our exchange and offered to go get me a diet soda. “I’ll be right back!” he exclaimed as he headed next door to the convenience store to grab one for me. It was only after I left that I noticed that the convenience store was called Dino’s Food Mart. Apparently this guy owns the entire strip mall.

Considering how big they are the corned beef sandwiches at Dino’s are a decent deal at $6.50 (or $7 if you want cheese). I think a better price point would be around the $5 range though. They also have an “extra lean” version of their sandwich available for an extra $1.35, but as you can probably tell from my previous blog posts eating healthy isn’t necessarily something I strive for, so I went with the regular corned beef sandwich instead. I’m not sure if these sandwiches are necessarily the best in town, but they certainly come close. The corned beef was amazingly juicy and was actually better than the two sandwiches I tried at Irish Fest a month prior.

I was at a farmers market in Milwaukee recently and came across a booth that was selling something called the “Walking Taco.” A Walking Taco consists of a bag of Fritos (in this case one of the small snack size bags) filled with ground beef, nacho cheese, lettuce, tomatoes and sour cream. It’s then served with a plastic fork so you can eat it while you walk around.

I’ve heard of these before, but never actually had a chance to try one until this day, and I’ve got to say I was pretty impressed. One of the things I dislike about tacos with a crunchy shell is that the shell always seems to fall apart while I’m eating it, which in turn leaves the rest of the taco in a pile on my plate. With the Walking Taco however you still get the crunch of a taco shell because of the Fritos, but since everything is in a bag there’s no chance of the shell breaking apart.

After three different people specifically told me that I need to try the “Local Yokel” burger at Honeypie Cafe, and after hearing what it consisted of (a burger topped with BBQ pork, Swiss cheese, bacon, caramelized onions, mushrooms, beer battered jalapeño sticks, ranch dressing and a sunny side up egg on an egg glazed bun with a giant breakfast sausage skewered on top), I knew that I had to head down there as soon as possible to check it out.

We arrived a little after 2pm on a recent Sunday, were seated at a table and our drink order was taken. After waiting about ten minutes the waitress finally returned to take our food order and bring us our drinks. When it was my turn to order I let the waitress know that I’d like the Local Yokel. I was informed however that they don’t start serving it until 3pm when brunch is over. This wouldn’t have really been a big deal if she hadn’t made it a point to tell us to check out the specials (one of which was the Local Yokel) when she handed us our menus. I know that trying to serve both brunch and non-brunch items at the same time is probably tough due to the small kitchen that Honeypie Cafe has, but if they could figure out a way to make it happen then a burger like this would be perfect for the brunch crowd.

I didn’t want to make the other people that I was with wait until 3pm to order, so I suggested that they get their food and eat it and that I’d just order my burger to go once they stopped serving brunch. Plus I had a Beermosa (a mix of beer and orange juice) to tide me over until then anyway. Once 3:00 hit I ordered my burger, waited for it, we paid our bill and I headed home.

As soon as I arrived back at home I made a beeline for the microwave and heated up my burger and then sat down at the table with it and took a bite. I was a little worried that after the burger sat in a to go box for a while and then was reheated that it might not taste so great, but that wasn’t the case at all. I can only imagine that it would have been even better had I eaten it at Honeypie instead of getting it to go. A lot of the time when restaurants pile so many toppings on a burger all the various tastes don’t necessarily blend too well together and you can tell that they’re doing it more for shock value than anything, but with the Local Yokel you can tell that the proprietors of Honeypie actually made it a point to make sure that all the toppings on this burger complimented one another.