Diner Review: Cafe USA (Sauget)

LOCATION! LOCATION! LOCATION!

Soooooo.... sometimes it is the unhappy duty of your diner reviewer to mercilessly eviscerate an establishment. Recently i was taken to task for my heavy handed (sort of) review of the Plaza Cafe. I will have to go back and try again but it was uninspiring. Generally however I am well know as a joyous fan of breakfast. I am a shameless promoter of even the most humble and average establishment as long as it has something to offer, and they almost all have SOMETHING to offer. Good food, ambience, good service, location....my frame of mind... almost anything can lead to a good review.

Upon my return from over seas (you cannot get bacon or any quality pork products in Istanbul) I had a hankering for some good old American breakfast cuisine. I had been told by two of my partners that the much awaited Cafe USA had finally opened in Sauget. I must digress to clarify that when I say "partners" I refer to two men who I practice law with, not any "life partners" or anything like that. I do not think I could handle more then one, regardless of gender. I say "much awaited" because there is something fun about the idea of a good diner in Sauget. Sauget is a shitty, dirty awful little town, run by a backwards ass sometimes criminal and very possibly inbred family and a small police force legendary for corruption and abuse and dominated by the dollars of the strip clubs it services. In short Sauget is know for it's strip clubs, Pops (where you can drink all night) and Big River Zinc.

The thought of a diner in such a pristine location causes classic diner imaginations to go wild. You think of strippers, coming off shift, being picked up by their boyfriends (who they support) going out for breakfast and fighting as he takes her money and berates her for how she makes it. You picture men coming off all night benders, hopefully sobering up instead of driving the wrong way down the highway, and you picture a place redolent with loud, stupid drunks. So we went.

Let me summarize. The place sucks. On the way in from the parking lot (right across from "Liquor and Lottery" there were two very unattractive employees chain smoking by the back door of the kitchen. Upon coming in, it has an antiseptic atmosphere. Everything looks like it is put together cheaply and i do not think anything holds up past the first major fight. It does look like it was designed to be hosed out every morning but I saw no drains. I liked our waitress and she was very attentive and friendly and even helpful. She did not appear to be a stripper or an ex stripper. The place was over staffed as they were "training". Everyone had on ugly CAfe USA t-shirts once again indicating an over all cheapness and unendearing tackiness.

But maybe the food is good. The first thing is that their iced tea was not brewed. I asked and it appeared they had one of the hated iced tea systems (tea from a large plastic bag mixed with water in iced tea "system". It is an abomination and an anathema to this diner. I was also told that their coffee sucked which is another unforgivable sin. We sampled the menu including their version of the slinger. I had sausage, toast and potatoes. I was originally heartened in that they had tater-tots until i saw that it was the only potato choice. These were also used as the base of the slinger which seems wrong on a number of levels. The sausage had a good flavor and a little spice (this constitutes the only positive part of the review). The gravy for the biscuits and gravy appeared to be out of a bag and the cheese on the slinger was some grotesque and unnaturally colored cheese sauce. Who would allow that?!

The main vibe of the place was cheap, tacky, poorly managed (even with management sitting in a booth) and a poor dining experience. Although the ambience of Sauget at 6:45 A.M. is undeniably alluring I believe I will be staying on this side of the river and if i cross will head down Route 3 to the Korner Kafe or head out to the Collinsville Waffle House. But that is just me.

Stranger in A Strange Land

Soooo the diner review has suffered (been neglected) in my absence. I was forced to leave the country due to a misunderstanding. It has all been cleared up now but related to embezzled client trust accounts, a dead body in my trunk and a butler named Mandrake. In the light of the allegations everyone (me) thought it best if I immediately absent myself from the continent and having little stomach for Hawaii, Paris in Spring or Tahiti, I thought, "I should go to Istanbul!" Even better I thought, "I can go alone!" Brilliant. So as sited earlier I got on a plane and flew through JFK and found myself in Istanbul.

The first two days were spent working, either remotely from the hotel or with rafts of Turkish lawyers (this will require a separate post)...(a long separate post). It was an exhausting few days between traveling there and trying to get a job done with people and having NO idea what the other guys were saying without my local counsel and I should of been exhausted and I assume I will be upon my return. Right now I am 30 thousand feet up, just south of Ireland. I am relaxed even as i sit on a cramped plane. But I am OK and the question of the day is....why?

Well for one travel is good. It is broadening and it takes you outside yourself. the stranger the place the more transcendant the experience. This is why we send kids away for servant events and the like rather then just keeping them in their own towns where there are plenty people to serve. So it is a blood chemistry thing. Sure it is stressful to travel. It is very hard to get on a plane and put yourself in a little seat for 9 hours or so. It is stressful to go somewhere that does not contain a lot of people motivated to speak your native tongue. It is stressful getting your life in some semblance of order so that you can leave town... but all of those disappear with plain old excitement and adrenaline.

Figuring out how the money works (and messing it up and being taken advantage of once or twice) ends up feeling empowering. Figuring out a mass transit system (or at least the relevant portions of it makes you feel like you still have the capacity to learn. Figuring where to eat and what to eat when a lot of the food looks and tastes like what you would imagine prison food would look and taste like (in a Star Warts Movies) is challenging and sometimes surprising in good ways. But what is the best thing of all? The best thing of all is that from the time I arrived at Istanbul's airport, really from the time the plane lifted off at JFK (because i had been furiously emailing and tweeting even after the cabin doors were closed) I did not have use of my Blackberry. No blinking message lights for voice, email of instant messaging. No ability to Tweet. No ability to immediately respond... this was great.

I mean it seemed very inconvenient. I had no way to easily get in touch with my local contacts. I had to relearn how to make international calls. Anytime I wanted to check email I needed to go back to my computer or be carrying my computer along and borrow someone elses wireless hook up (and do it in a foreign language. So I would email in the morning when I got up. In two cases I scarily found my clients awake and monitoring emails at midnight but other then that (all was quiet). When you are not reciving a bunch of emails, like during the business day, your ability to cogently respond (or at least min) increases pretty dramatically. I would then work all day and re-engage when it was about lunch time back home. I also found out that a majority of my emails come in the afternoon which I did not know.

It was odd to be on a train or in the back of a cab. I immediately reached for the blackberry to check emails and instant messages.. I could not. It allowed me to do something really weird. Look at the window. Which you would like to think is something you would naturally do in a town of 12 million people that is like 6000 years old. But I would not have. i would have emailed, IM'd or Tweeted. How STUPID is that? But I have no question i would have been doing that. Other people were. because they could. I went to dinner with our local counsel and his lady friend and they both had their phones out (just like I would have) while we were having dinner. So did everyone else at the restaurant (which was a really nice place with a beautiful view of the Bosphorous AND one of the bridges that spans it. Breathtaking. But not breath taking enough to get us to lookl away from our phone... for more then a minute or two.

When did we all get to be so important? This is what kept occuring to me. I mean I was overseas trying to chase down several million dollars for a client but nothing required minute by minute consulation. Indeed in the meeting with the Turkish Lawyers I didn't have to pause and second guess by calling the client on the cell phone every time I had an insecurity. But apart from that when did every client become an important enough cclient to have access to me whenever I was fucking awake? When did my counsel or advice, whether to client or to a partner, an associate, a friend or a family matter become something that everyone had to deal with in real time....NOW! There is both an arrogance and a stupidity to it which is overwhelming but I think it plays on just those two human qualities, arrogance and stupidity. Check, check. thats me, that's me. Very sad. But I escaped for a few days.

It was great. I did not even mond watching them and other people deal with their information flow. I couldn't. it allowed me to sit, often quietly and just look out the window or watch people. I think it rested my brain a little. it might be wishful thinking because I know that when we touch down at JFK I am going to want to light that little son of a bitch up like it is no one's business. But I hope I will noit. There is a lot to see and a lot to hear that have nothing to do with my Blackberry. I want to go back in time to before these handcuffs were sought out. I want to go back inb toime and if I can not go back in time I would settle for going back to Istanbul.