Akron, Ohio: Flipping for more than burgers
AKRON, Ohio -- There is only one place in the world that lays claim to being the birthplace of of the synthetic rubber tire, ice cream cones, hamburgers and, more recently, a vegan restaurant co-owned by Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders rock group.
I'm not askin', I'm sayin' it's Akron.
Hynde, an Akron native, opened her VegiTerranean restaurant and coffeehouse late last year in the Northside Lofts, the centerpiece of a new arts area north of downtown Akron.
"At the beginning Chrissie was, 'I'm not here to educate people about food. I want to do this for animal rights,'" said VegiTerranean executive chef Scot Jones. "I told her I had the other side, what our responsibilities are not only as chefs but as human beings and what we're doing to this earth. Who is raising these things? Where is it coming from?"
Jones buys corn, tomatoes and melons from Amish farmers within 30 miles of Akron and other produce from the four farmers markets in the Canton-Akron area.
You might pass some of the farmland on the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad that runs through a ravine behind the restaurant. The historic railroad runs from Akron 26 miles north to Cleveland and through the 33,000 acres of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. You can catch the train at the Northside Station, a block north of VegiTerranean.
A Pretenders Haute Dog -- a vegan hot dog served on toasted baguette with horseradish mustard and cipollini onions -- is a great way to cap off a train ride. Let's see. Do the Pretenders have any train songs? "Back on the Chain Gang" would work.
Akron visitors who are carnivores also will want to drop by the meaty Menches Brothers restaurant to pay homage to the creators of the hamburger -- a title hotly disputed by others who claim to have invented this all-American favorite.
The Menches' story begins in the late 1880s, when brothers Frank and Charles Menches were serving sausage patty sandwiches and sauerkraut at county and world fairs.
"They used to carry 100 people with them," said Charles' great-granddaughter, Judy Menches-Kusmits. The caravan transported a circus-size tent, cigars, orange cider and burgers on three railroad cars.
One summer the brothers ran out of pork. Their supplier, who didn't want to butcher more hogs in the summer heat, suggested a beef substitute. He was clearly not a Pretenders fan.
They fried the beef on a propane grill but thought it was bland. They added brown sugar and coffee to spice things up.
Since they were vending at the Erie County Fair in Hamburg, N.Y., the brothers named their new sandwich the "hamburger." Good call. "Erieburger" just doesn't sound right.
"It's an absolute true story," Menches-Kusmits said.
I told her I heard a similar spiel in Seymour, Wis., where they also cited 1885 as the hamburger's birth date. Fifteen-year-old "Hamburger Charlie" Nagreen reportedly debuted his meatball/hamburger concoction at the 1885 Seymour Fair.
Seymour even opened a Hamburger Hall of Fame, which has since closed. But pieces of the collection can be seen at the Seymour Community Museum. (Louis' Lunch in New Haven, Conn., also takes credit for serving the very first hamburger sandwich.)
"The Wisconsin story is the popular one," Menches-Kusmits said. "We do a lot with them in promoting the hamburger. They're wonderful. But their story is more fiction than fact. The city does a terrific job promoting that and we don't have that here. We're just a family telling our story."
That story also includes a chapter on the ice cream cone.
"They invented that at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair," Menches-Kusmits said. Frank and Charles got the idea to wrap warm waffles around a cone-shaped splicing tool for tent ropes and fill it with ice cream.
After Menches-Kusmits found the original hamburger recipe in 1991 on a piece of brown paper, she decided to bring the legacy to life along with the help of several brothers, sisters and cousins. They opened the Menches Brothers Restaurant in Uniontown, about 10 minutes south of Akron, in 1994. They opened another outpost in downtown Akron next to the Canal Park baseball stadium in 2001. That one is open during the baseball season.
Menches Brothers still makes the burger with coffee, sugar and a secret seasoning that packs a lot of bite. I had a cheddar cheeseburger with a generous serving of french fries ($7.99). The crisp buns are corn flour dusted, just as the original sandwiches were framed.
Akron is home to the annual National Hamburger Festival, where this year's competition included a vegan burger from none other than VegiTerranean's Jones.
Jones, 41, grew up in west Akron. He attended Firestone High School, Hynde's alma mater.
These days, Hynde calls London, England, home. She's working on a country music CD, and the Pretenders will appear Sept. 20 at Farm Aid outside of Boston. She returns to Akron every other month to visit the restaurant, where the dining room walls display black and white pictures of her friends and celebrity PETA members, such as Paul McCartney, Pamela Anderson and Morrissey.
In an interview published last October in Vegetarian Times magazine, Hynde said she was "ashamed to be from a place where there's not one vegetarian restaurant in the whole town."
Akron drummer Patrick Carney of the blues-rock duo Black Keys had some words of his own for Hynde when he told Harp magazine this spring: "She was born here, but she also sold the f---ing city out and talked s--t on the place for years. Akron is so desperate for notoriety that they'll get behind 'their girl' who lives in England!"
The Black Keys have yet to check out VegiTerranean, but other guests have included meat-eating Chicago Bears Dick Butkus, Ed O'Bradovich and Dan Hampton, who dropped by after last summer's Pro Football Hall of Fame inductions in Canton.
The VegiTerranean centerpiece is the Gardein Chicken, a meatless protein product made from vegetables.
"It's pretty amazing," said Jones, who prepares it as a chicken piccata, sauteed with lemon, white wine, caper and soy butter sauce over braised greens ($19).
"People go, 'I can't believe this isn't chicken,'" he said. "We get that a lot."
There's already a buzz about expanding VegiTerranean to Columbus, Ohio.
"And Chicago would be a great spot," said Jones, who worked at Charlie Trotter's in Chicago in 1991.
No matter which way you cut it, Akron's VegiTerranean twin spin with the birthplace of the hamburger is the foodie's best road trip.
At least since sliced bread.