Milkshakes are your best bet at Gearhart Junction Café

Published 4:51 am Thursday, March 18, 2010

The fish and chips, made with cod, is served up on the counter at the Gearhart Junction Cafe. Photo by Alex Pajunas.

There are restaurants that exist because of a passion for food and service, and the need to share it with the world. Conversely, there are restaurants that seem to exist solely as a business, set up to make a dollar and a cent as quickly and easily as possible while putting forth minimal effort.

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Gearhart Junction Café is of the latter variety.

If it weren’t enough that the food is incredibly generic and inexcusably unhealthy, it’s also frequently bad, resulting in my not finishing the majority of my meals. Generic? One would need to see the menu to understand how truly undistinguished its offerings are, but let me just say that there is not a single item upon it that I haven’t seen dozens of times over in similarly uninspired eateries, and that includes the “Reuben Dog.” Not one item is cooked or served with pride. Unhealthy? I don’t mean there are a few things on the menu that are fatty and fried. I mean there are hardly any healthy choices, aside from a couple of things at breakfast, and the side salad. All chicken on the menu is fried. All potatoes on the menu are fried. All sandwich breads (Franz) are grilled in margarine. On one visit, the sound of frying food prevailed over the music.

Aside from a few desserts, the only thing on the menu purported to be house-made is a salmon burger. I’m not surprised. While prep time and labor costs are cut drastically by serving predominantly ready-made food, and consistency is almost assured, it’s the wrong kind of consistency.

A sign on the side of the building boasts “hand-dipped milkshakes.” For those unaware, this refers to real milkshakes, made by mixing milk and ice cream with a special immersion blender, not the goop in the churner at the fast food places. The milkshake ($3.95) was really good; it was the unnaturally sheened, oil-based whipped topping that ruined it for me.

The Oh Henry milkshake at the Gearhart Junction Café is made with chocolate and peanut butter. Photo by Alex Pajunas.Clam chowder ($4.25 a cup, $5.25 a bowl) at Gearhart Junction Café is thick and foamy, as if whipped with air. I don’t know how you could naturally achieve such a result.

Factory-formed hamburgers are predictably mediocre. The Patty Melt ($7.75), the usual swiss-cheese-and-grilled-onion-topped-burger-on-toast, tasted mostly of the margarine coating the onions and bread.

The Chicken Fried Steak Sandwich ($7.75) was an abomination. Too tough to eat between a bun, I removed the chicken fried steak and curiously poked and prodded at it. The coating was bland and tasted of grease. The inner beef was of low quality, stringy and chewy. Although a full soup cup of salty, canned country gravy accompanied the sandwich, I don’t know anyone who’d have used it all. It was beyond overkill.

Breakfast is hardly better. The build-your-own Omelet Biscuit section dominates the menu. And while one would assume this is some sort of sandwich, it isn’t. The two-egg omelet biscuit starts at $3.75, and goes up with whatever fillings you choose to add. A mushroom and spinach omelet was soggy and split open, a truly revolting sight. The undercooked spinach and strangely-colored, soy sauce-flavored, rubbery canned mushrooms put me off of eating it at all, so I focused on my biscuit. The yellow, crumbly yet gummy biscuit was no more edible. At this point I wish I’d paid the extra $1.75 for the side of country fried potatoes or tater tots (that’s right) that accompany most other breakfast items. A short stack of pancakes ($3.95) was thankfully satisfactory.

Gearhart Junction Café represents everything that innovative chefs and hard-working scratch-cooks are trying to change about American dining. Sure, it’s more work to buy local, sustainable meat and produce and do the prep fresh and in-house. But in the end it saves money, it tastes better, and it’s better for the local economy as well as the environment.

If this restaurant wasn’t actually set up by a food service distributor, it’s certainly their dream client. I actually urge you to visit Gearhart Junction Café. Not because it’s good, but because it’s a near-extinct brand, a disappearing curiosity to be observed and experienced before it’s gone forever.

– The Mouth

mouth@coastweekend.com

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