July 25, 2007


What you need is a loose-meat sandwich

Maid-Rite.jpg

Kathy and I like to take The Sporty Red Car up to Greenville, Ohio whenever we get a hankering for Maid-Rites. It’s a pleasant thirty minute sprint through green canyons of corn to get there. A Maid-Rite is the notorious “loose-meat” sandwich made even more famous by the old Roseanne TV series. It was already a local legend decades before Roseanne Barr choked down her first jar of Gerber’s baby food.


Southwestern Ohio’s local cuisine is also notable for the genesis of White Castle burgers, Skyline chili, and Marion’s pizza. Marion’s makes pizza by coarsely grinding meat, cheese, and vegetables, dumping the somewhat pre-digested granular topping onto a thin but soggy cracker crust, and employing surly teenagers to serve the “pie”. It’s a local favorite.

The downtown Greenville Maid-Rite restaurant is located in a nondescript building whose dominant visual accent is a comprehensive coating of chewed bubble gum stuck to its brick wall exterior. Local custom demands you add your own gumwad. No one knows why. The drive-up window is about two car lengths from a busy street, and vehicles are always lined up into traffic. It’s been that way for years. Apparently, the local cops don’t want to mess up the Maid-Rite sandwich supply.

I always thought the Greenville location was unique — an isolated, iconic purveyor of retro-Americana junk food. Turns out that Maid-Rite is one of the oldest fast food franchises in the U.S., with history dating back to the 1920s. There have been some twists and turns franchise-wise, and I’m not sure if the Greenville restaurant is part of the current corporate Maid-Rite’s quest for world domination or not, and I don’t care. I just want to eat moist crumbly sandwiches at a funky little joint that uses residential-style screen doors to block out houseflies and time.

posted by Michael Grant Smith in anecdotes, branding, food, humor, observations, pop culture 

comments

4 Responses to “What you need is a loose-meat sandwich”

  1. Sheila Ryan on July 25th, 2007 at 12:14 pm

    Hey, how about y’all drop what you’re doing and me and Jon will drop what we’re doing and let’s jump in our cars and rendezvous at the Maid-Rite in Springfield, Illinois? It’s the site of The First Drive-Through Window Ever in the Whole United States (Maybe Even the World)! Or so it is rumored. (You can read a little about it in this 2006 post over at detritus.)

    I believe there’s also a Maid-Rite in Galesburg, Illinois, if that’s more convenient. (It’s right on the way to Davenport, Iowa, and the other three Quad Cities.)

  2. Michael Grant Smith on July 25th, 2007 at 12:22 pm

    I don’t want to go unless there’s chewing gum stuck to the walls.

  3. Sheila Ryan on July 25th, 2007 at 3:10 pm

    Michael, the Springfield Maid-Rite is positively encrusted with ancient wads of gum — Beeman’s, Clove, Black Jack . . . along with samples of even more obscure brands long defunct. The current operators dare not scrape them off for fear of endangering their application seeking to upgrade the joint’s ranking from a place on the National Register to full-fledged National Historic Landmark status, and they’ve had to hire a couple of rent-a-cops to prevent souvenir seekers from prising loose gum nuggets in the dead of night.

  4. Michael Grant Smith on July 25th, 2007 at 3:38 pm

    I’m on my way. I’ll be there in five and a half hours.

    That time zone change always messes me up when I go west.