You've Gotta Know the Territory

"What the heck, you're welcome, join us at the diner...

The first stop on my recent trip across the Midwest was at the Joliet, Illinois Rax which I initially visited and wrote about last summer, for a quick, just for fun, pre-Raxgiving Rax lunch. While enjoying a dessert of salad bar Oreo fluff and strawberry shortcake, I got my phone out to view my route to my next stop, a bootleg Zantigo all the way in Minnesota. I had expected to take I-90 across Wisconsin, but my navigation app instead routed me across Iowa via I-80. Since this unexpected turn of events had occurred under the solarium of the Joliet Rax, I could only conclude that my new route was the result of the divine intervention of Uncle Alligator. I had recently learned from a reader (Thanks Alex!) that the uniquely Iowan restaurant chain, Maid-Rite, had shrunk well past the Cici’s Point and into broken chain territory. This unexpected route change gave me the perfect opportunity to have a Maid-Rite experience. I hastily plotted a route to a Maid-Rite location near the interstate in Davenport, and left Rax, offering up a salad bar crouton to Uncle Alligator as tribute on my way out.

Two hours and one Mississippi River crossing later, I had entered The Hawkeye State, like a modern-day Professor Harold Hill, handsome smooth-talking charlatan that I am, and no sooner had exited the interstate in search of the Maid-Rite that would provide my second lunch of the day. This would be the second Maid-Rite experience of my life. The first was a disappointing stop at the only official Maid-Rite in Ohio, which is attached to a dirty Sunoco station in Piqua. (A formerly-affiliated, presently unofficial Maid-Rite is a beloved institution in Greenville, Ohio.) I was looking forward to a definitively Iowan Maid-Rite experience at what I hoped was a long-standing location. Maid-Rite is, after all, among the oldest surviving American restaurant chains.

Maid-Rite began with Fred Angell, a butcher from Muscatine, Iowa who developed a unique blend of beef cuts and spices, ground to a proprietary texture. In 1926, he opened his first restaurant, selling sandwiches containing his beefy creation, not pressed into patties, but loose, like a sauceless sloppy joe, also known as a tavern sandwich. The single, carry-out only restaurant grew to a chain of franchised sit-down units across Iowa and surrounding states, peaking somewhere around 130 to 150 locations. Angell’s family lost control of the chain in 1984 when Maid-Rite was sold to a pair of business partners, one of whom abruptly backed out of the deal shortly before the other died. A years-long legal battle then ensued as the families of each of the partners fought in court over ownership of the Maid-Rite brand. During that time, a court order prevented new locations from opening, and a lack of corporate organization oversight resulted in a decline in quality and widespread closures. The brand never seemed to fully recover from that era, and today, Maid-Rite is down to 31 operating locations, 20 of which are in Iowa.

The Maid-Rite story as told by vinyl letter decals.
It's hardly Chaucer, Rabelais, Balzac, or any of them other highfalutin' Greeks.

The format of surviving Maid-Rite locations seems to vary wildly, with some Maid-Rites operating out of decades-old family-owned restaurants, while others are modern free standing units. Others still, like the one I visited years ago in Ohio, operate out of gas station, strip mall, or food court slots. Had I planned a trip to Maid-Rite more than a couple of hours in advance, I would have attempted to carefully select the Maid-Rite I’d be visiting, ensuring that it best exemplified both the history and the current state of the brand. Instead, I chose the closest location to I-80 in Davenport.

Back in Davenport, I was proceeding up the street in a suburban commercial area. As I approached the location where my GPS said the Maid-Rite would be, I eagerly scanned the horizon for the telltale stop sign of the Maid-Rite logo, which confusingly, never seemed to appear. As I arrived at the promised Maid-Rite location, I found only a Family Video. Something wasn’t right. I pulled into the Family Video lot to study the GPS screen more closely, and suddenly I saw it.

The Glenview, Illinois-based Family Video operates over 500 video rental stores in the U.S. and Canada. Thanks to low corporate overhead, and some savvy business moves, they outlived Blockbuster to become the largest video rental chain in North America. One of Family Video’s many strategies that has allowed them to remain in business nearly a decade into the streaming era is leasing out subdivided retail space in their stores to other businesses. It’s not uncommon to see a hair salon, gym, or a pizza joint occupying space under the green metal roof of a Family Video store. Just off I-80 in Davenport Iowa, one corner of an operating Family Video building houses a Maid-Rite location. Upon discovering this, my first impulse was to look for other Maid Rite locations in the area that might be a bit more Maid-Riteish, but I ultimately decided to eat at the Family Video Maid-Rite. It was simply too weird to pass up. 

Cash for the movie rental, cash for the loosemeat, cash for the crinkle fries, cash for the CBD

Family Video with a capital V, and that doesn't rhyme with M, and that stands for Maid-Rite

Giant food! don't you understand?
Friend, either you're closing your eyes
To a situation you do now wish to acknowledge
Or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated
By the presence of giant food in your community.

They'll be trying out Grapette, trying out Mil-Kay, trying out IBC and Hires like root beer fiends! Well, I should say!

Once I was inside the restaurant, I quickly forgot that I was in a Family Video building In fact, it barely even seemed like I was in a chain restaurant. The dining room was completely separate from the video store and lacked the generic corporate feel of a place affiliated with a chain that still has an active corporate structure. Instead, the atmosphere of the place felt like an independent sit-down diner, what my neighbors in Metro Detroit would call a “Coney Island” for reasons I’ve never fully understood. There were servers waiting on tables, vintage advertising signs on the walls, and faux vintage red vinyl chairs at each table with matching stools at the counter, the black and white checkerboard tile floor completed the trifecta of generic, independent faux-retro diner decor, though a massive three-dimensional rendering of Maid Rite sandwich on the wall provided a unique counterpoint to the cliched decor. A little research after the fact revealed that this particular Maid-Rite was owned by a franchisee who operates five locations billed as Maid-Rite Diners, offering the classic Maid-Rite sandwiches plus an expanded menu of breakfast and lunch diner food. There were even several conventional patty-based burgers on the menu. 

...you can eat your fill of all the food that you buy yourself."

I had little interest in the expanded diner menu, and when my server asked for my order, I ordered up an original Maid-Rite with the default mustard, pickle, and onion along with fries. It was mid-afternoon on a weekday, and the place wasn’t terribly busy, so my order arrived quickly. The Maid-Rite sandwich tasted different from the one I remember eating in Ohio a few years previous. The Ohio Maid-Rite had a mild, almost sweet flavor, while the one I was eating in Iowa tasted more bold and beefy. It’s entirely possible that I am remembering the flavor of the Ohio Maid-Rite incorrectly, but it seems at least equally likely that two locations of a diminished, not terribly well-organized chain that are hundreds of miles apart may be using different recipes and preparation methods for a signature product. (That certainly seems to be the case with Taco Tico.) At any rate, the Maid-Rite not quite burger, not quite sloppy joe tasted great. The soft, steamed bun was topped with the perfect amount of meat to compensate for the bit that that inevitably spilled out the bottom, and the toppings complemented the aptly named loose meat without overpowering it. Future trips I make across Iowa will from now on, include at least one Maid-Rite stop. The fries were generic crinkle cuts, but had a slightly olive-ish aftertasted, as if they had been fried in olive oil, but that may have been a hallucination on my part, as I was still recovering from the initial surprise at the prospect of having lunch at Family Video. 

76 French Fries were in my lunch today... 

...with (at least) 110 beefy pebbles close at hand... 

...and with a spoon, in place to help me stuff my face, and save me from using my bare hands!

Seeing that branded to-go cups were available, I asked for a to-go refill of my Diet Dew as well as a chocolate shake for the road, thus ensuring that I, and my cup-collecting pal, Carl Poncherello of Roney’s fame, would each have a Maid-Rite cup to add to our respective collections. The shake was blended to order, but appeared to be based on soft serve ice cream from a machine to which milk and syrup were added. Regardless, it was a perfectly acceptable shake, tasting smooth, yet homemade, without the telltale icy chunks that are often part of shakes blended from scooped ice cream.

The cup on the left gave me a bit of a fright when I got it home...
 I almost shipoopi'd myself!

I continued westward with those, and other cups I had collected along the way on a trip that took me all the way to North Dakota, only washing them out when I returned home a few days later. When I went to wash the Maid-Rite cup that had contained my chocolate shake, I was greeted by a very angry spider inside the cup, the diameter of whose body was a good deal larger than the X-shaped straw opening on the lid that had been in place since Davenport. I can come up with two, roughly equally distasteful explanations for how the spider got there. Either, it was the sole survivor of a milkshake full of Iowa spiders that I had ingested but failed to notice while careening down I-80, or that my car is infested with magical spiders capable of teleportation in and out of sealed vessels. Just to be safe, I’ll plan on avoiding Maid-Rite shakes in the future and enlisting the services of an automotive exterminator/exorcist to ensure my vehicle remains free of enchanted arachnids. I’m not sure what I am meant to learn by encountering a live spider in my milkshake cup, but I suppose Uncle Alligator works in mysterious ways. 

Goodnight my sandwich, goodnight my love. 

If you’re free the day after American Thanksgiving this year and you’ll be within a reasonable distance from the wilds of southeastern Kentucky, consider joining me for Raxgiving at the Harlan, Kentucky Rax where we will dine together under the benevolent gaze of Uncle Alligator.

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The Definitive Taco Tico

Last fall, I was enjoying a Sancho (a burrito shell full of taco fixins) and some Cinnamon Crustos (Fried tortillas coated in cinnamon sugar) at Lexington Kentucky’s sole remaining Taco Tico. It occurred to me that despite my lifelong love for the Taco Tico brand and the unique blend of fatty ground beef, fillers, and spices that is at the heart of most of their menu items, that my entire Taco Tico experience had been only at locations in Kentucky. Since Kentucky has only had two Taco Ticos for more than a decade, that worldview was a little too narrow for my taste.

This has been my go-to Taco Tico for more than 15 years

Dan Foley opened the first Taco Tico in Wichita, Kansas in 1962, and there were once 120 locations all over the Midwestern and Southeastern United States. In 2013, following decades of slow decline and shrinking location count, ten company-owned, Wichita area Taco Tico locations were forced to close by the Kansas department of revenue due to their failure to remit sales tax revenue back to the state, leaving only a handful of franchised locations, including the two in Kentucky, open for business. This marked the low point in Taco Tico history, and while things aren’t much better today, there is a faint glow of a bright future for Taco Tico.

Most of the Wichita area Ticos that were forced to close by the state have since re opened, and today, a total of 17 Taco Tico locations are open for business, nine in Kansas, plus two each in Oklahoma, Iowa, and Kentucky, one in Louisiana, and one in Texas. The restaurants are loosely associated today with each owner running a separate website, many of which show nonstandard menu items supplementing the classic tacos and burritos. 

 Like Seymour Skinner, I'm an odd fellow, but I steam a good ham

In the early days of this blog, I set out to replicate Taco Tico’s signature meat using a copycat recipe shared by YouTuber, AverageIowaGuy. I found his recipe to be bland, and lacking in the garlicky pungency of the Taco Tico meat I grew up eating in Kentucky. To paraphrase Seymour Skinner, I came close to madness trying to recreate it here in Michigan, but I just couldn’t get the spices right! That experience caused me to wonder how much regional variation there was in the flavor of Taco Tico meat, and if there was a recipe that could be considered the definitive Taco Tico. 

Mason City's Taco Tico is ridiculously photogenic at night.

My investigation began last December in Iowa, specifically in Mason City, home to one of the state’s two Taco Tico locations. It was the winter solstice, and night had fallen early as it often does on the shortest day of the year. I had been eating all day, storing up fat for winter like the large hairy woodland creature that I am, and Taco Tico was my last stop in a single-day broken chain marathon that included meals at Zantigo, Bonanza, and Happy Chef. 

But it's pretty standard inside. 

 Come to think of it, it's also weird that they had Pepsi. Every other Taco Tico I can remember has had Coke products. 

As one might imagine, I wasn’t terribly hungry, and tried, in vain, to work up an appetite by taking pictures of the exterior of the building, which featured the unique zigzag stripes that many Lexington-area Taco Ticos had during my childhood. (The surviving Lexington Taco Tico appears to have had few updates since the 1970s does not sport the ‘80s vintage zigzags, but functions as a time capsule from an earlier era.)  

Inside, the time warp feeling was milder. While the building still had its original built-in booths and tables, the menu board had been updated with a non-standard unit, and the freestanding tables and chairs were modern. I ordered up three tacos, two crispy, and one Choco after the cashier caught me taking a picture of the menu and asked if I had come to take pictures or order food. I paid, and she handed me a curious little ticket with the Taco Tico logo and my order number on it. I had never seen this before, and I still carry it in my wallet. (I’m a weirdo.) Oddly, it was the the only Taco Tico branded piece of ephemera I received on that visit.

My order came up a few minutes later, and I was greeted by a tray containing two tacos in plain white wrappers and a white Styrofoam drink cup. Despite their relative isolation from the Taco Tico homeland in Kansas, the Lexington and Louisville Taco Ticos have used custom printed cups and wrappers for years, with only a brief interruption around the time the state shut down the company owned Ticos in Wichita. 

Generic wrappers and an odd little order ticket.

A smear of meat up one side of the shell

The construction of the tacos themselves was curious. Firstly, the meat was smeared on one side of the shell rather than along the bottom, but I seemed to recall Louisville’s Taco Tico doing something similar. Secondly, a single tomato slice was in top rather than the diced tomatoes I’d eaten on Taco Tico tacos in Kentucky my whole life. The biggest shock came with my first bite though. The flavor of the meat bore little to no resemblance to what I had become accustomed to in Kentucky. Simultaneously, it tasted nearly identical to AverageIowaGuy’s copycat recipe. Kudos to him for perfectly replicating his local Taco Tico meat formulation, but it didn’t taste like the Taco Tico I know and love. 

Taco Tico’s Wikipedia page states there was a change in the meat recipe implemented following Dan Foley’s sale of the brand to a former KFC executive 1988. The change proved unpopular, and was quickly reverted to the original. Were the Iowa Taco Ticos still using the 1988 vintage recipe, the Taco Tico equivalent of New Coke, or was I raised on the supposedly inferior meat recipe in Kentucky? My parents would have started taking me to the Lexington area Taco Ticos right around 1988. Had my exposure at an early age caused me to develop Stockholm Syndrome for the Taco meat everyone else hated?

For better or worse, the next major event in Taco Tico’s history is set to happen in Lexington Kentucky. Longtime Cheddar’s franchisee, The Greer Companies, purchased the Lexington Taco Tico earlier this year along with a 10% stake in the entire Taco Tico brand. They’re planning widespread expansion starting with a second Lexington location across town in a building that was originally a G.D. Ritzy’s. I visited that very building last spring on my trip to every operating Ritzy’s. Taco Tico setting up shop a former G.D. Ritzy’s is a combination of my two favorite fast food brands that had only occurred in my wildest fantasies. The news that it’s set to become a reality had me acting more weirdly obsessive about both Taco Tico and G.D. Ritzy’s than usual for at least a solid week.  

Once a Ritzy's, later an Arby's, soon to be a Taco Tico

Still, the suspicion that the Kentucky Taco Ticos were using the wrong meat recipe was getting to me, even if it was the recipe I preferred. Relief for my foil hat-level paranoia regarding a taco meat recipe came when Esmeralda Fitzmonster suggested we take a trip to New Orleans in the spring, and since  Louisiana’s only surviving Taco Tico is just around the corner from the New Orleans airport, I emphatically agreed with her suggestion. Naturally, Taco Tico was our first stop after we landed and picked up our rental car. For the first time ever, I had flown to a broken chain. 

If you ever visit New Orleans for the food, you can't pass up the Taco Tico by the airport. 

The Kenner, Louisiana Taco Tico is housed in a purpose built Adobe with a near identical layout to its counterpart in Lexington. The main differences being that the Kenner location wears ‘80s vintage zigzag stripes similar to those at the Mason City, Iowa Taco Tico, and that one of the front corners of the dining room is walled off and houses a few slot machines, no doubt the owner taking advantage of local gambling laws to create a second non-taco related revenue stream. The walls inside were decorated with murals that evoke a 1980s southwestern aesthetic. While no such murals are present at either surviving Kentucky Taco Tico, I have vague memories of them being present at other Lexington locations that closed in the mid ‘90s. 

I want this exact mural in my kitchen at home. 

This location is a near perfect 1980s time capsule

I placed my normal order, a #2 combo, two tacos and a Sancho, with cautious optimism, comforted by a decades old menu board identical to the one at the Taco Tico in Lexington. Esmeralda ordered the same. I was delighted to see branded cups and wrappers on the tray when our order was ready, and the first bite of my Sancho took me right back to every Taco Tico meal of my childhood. 

I've never been here before, yet it feels like home. 

Behold the bounty of Taco Tico

Louisiana’s only Taco Tico was using the meat recipe I grew up with. The very same flavor that fueled my lifelong obsession with Taco Tico was here, 750 miles from Lexington. With the Louisville, Lexington, and Kenner Taco Ticos serving my preferred garlicky taco meat, Mason City, Iowa was the outlier, the weirdo selling the bland garlic-less tacos in plain white wrappers.

The tiny Taco Tico casino is behind the partition.

Sadly, though, the nagging taco paranoia continues. I’ve only eaten at four of the 17 total operating Taco Ticos, and in only three of the six states that house them. I’ve never eaten at a Taco Tico in Wichita, home of Taco Tico Enterprises and birthplace of the brand. That’s where the truly definitive Taco Tico flavor is, tax evasion and all. I’d like to make it to every Taco Tico eventually, but regardless of what and where the definitive Taco Tico is and was, it’s likely to be the Lexington flavor in the future. 

Greer Companies’ president, Lee Greer is a longtime Taco Tico fan, and his long term plan includes acquiring a majority stake in the Taco Tico brand and moving headquarters to Lexingon, Kentucky, much to my delight. Lexington, one of the few cities that has been home to a continuously-operating Taco Tico for the past four decades may soon be home to the Taco Tico brand itself. For me that makes Lexington Taco Tico the definitive Taco Tico, regardless of how the Sanchos taste in Mason City or Wichita, but if you're a midwesterner and/or vampire who grew up without garlic in your Taco Tico tacos, YouTube user, AverageIowaGuy has you covered. He even figured out the bean recipe. 

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