Though I’ve lived in Chicago for nearly 22 years, until recently I’d never set foot in Iowa. But when an editor came back from a road trip raving about loose-meat sandwiches and Niman ham with pepper foam and cauliflower polenta, I got excited about our neighbor to the west. My friend Michelle and I set out on Easter weekend, primed to sample a mix of regional specialties and vanguard cuisine.
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The Joensy’s version features an impossibly long and flat slab of pork tenderloin that’s breaded, deep-fried, and served on a hamburger bun, usually with onions and mustard. I’ll buy the restaurant’s claim that it’s the biggest–the thing was larger than my head. But though just about anything tastes good fried, and our sandwiches were fun to wrestle with, they were oddly flavorless. As our waitress removed the generous portions we didn’t finish, she told us about one patron who on two different occasions downed three of the monsters in one sitting.
The only other customers in the place were an elderly foursome celebrating somebody’s birthday with a round of grasshoppers. Thinking we might try an equally quaint cocktail, we visited the spot’s gorgeously appointed lounge after dinner. The bartender suggested an Irish nut–one part Bailey’s, one part Frangelico. “It’s nutty,” explained her coworker, who was smoking a very long cigarette. We decided on scotch.
We left feeling full, but not clutching our bellies in agony. That’s something we couldn’t say about our final meal, at the Ronneburg Restaurant in Amana (4408 220th Trail, 319-622-3641), one of a group of quaint, now touristy villages settled by German immigrants in the 1850s. The Ronneburg is a German restaurant, but though the sauerbraten with spaetzle was terrific (if leaden) comfort food, the baked ham and roast beef Easter special gave me bad flashbacks to Boy Scout banquets of my youth. The ultrathin slices of ham and beef were so dry they seemed sun cured, while the all-you-can-eat sides (mashed potatoes, green beans, red cabbage) all tasted either boxed or canned. The electric green of the string beans belied how overcooked they were–they practically turned to dust on the tongue. And the gravy for the potatoes was so viscous a spoon stood straight up in the bowl.
