Saturday, July 25, 1998

So, what's wrong with this menu?

By Bob Greene

ERIE, Pa. - This was a shocking - shocking! - event. What made it all the more startling was the place where it happened:

A Bob Evans restaurant.

No sight in the world is as pleasing to me as a Bob Evans restaurant by the side of a road. A Bob Evans - with its red facade, with its friendly service, with its promise of amiable food - is a smiling vision of American beauty in a cold, gray, indifferent world. A Bob Evans menu is a work of art - laminated and shining under Bob's ceiling lights, full of color pictures of country fried steaks and Cajun catfish and cheeseburgers and chicken salads. A Bob Evans menu belongs in a museum, so thrilling are its lines, its shading, its beauty.

Anyway - I like Bob Evans, right?

So the other day I woke up in Erie, saw there was a Bob Evans across the highway from my hotel, and decided to walk over for breakfast. The weather was lousy, the highway was going to be difficult to cross on foot - but that Bob Evans logo on the front of the restaurant was winking at me.

I wasn't even all that hungry - I just wanted to start the day by immersing myself in the Bob Evans aura.

I was shown to a table for one. I ran my hand over the glossy menu, not even needing to look at it, just wanting to feel it.

I told the waitress:

"I'll just have some cereal. Cornflakes, Wheaties - whatever you have."

And she said:

"We don't serve cereal."

I thought I had misheard her. "You're out of cereal?" I said.

"We're not out of cereal," she said. "We just don't carry cereal at Bob Evans."

"You don't carry cereal," I said, thinking I had awakened on another planet. "You don't carry cereal. Bob Evans is the most famous breakfast place in America. You don't carry cereal."

"That's right," she said. "We don't serve cold cereal. No Bob Evans serves cold cereal. If you want oatmeal, we have oatmeal."

I was dizzy. Bob Evans serves breakfast all day and all evening long - hotcakes, skillets, sausages, waffles, omelettes, fruit plates, biscuits, mush gravy. Bob Evans is the Mt. Olympus of breakfast.

No cereal.

Faithful readers of this space will know what this was reminding me of:

The no-tomatoes-at-the-best-cheeseburger-place-in-the-world incident.

It happened last summer, at a place in St. Louis called O'Connell's. Bob Costas, who lives in St. Louis, took some friends and me to O'Connell's late one evening. O'Connell's, Costas promised, served the best cheeseburgers known to man.

He was right - the cheeseburgers were delicious. But when I asked for a tomato on my cheeseburger, the waitress said that at O'Connell's, the best cheeseburger place in the world, no tomatoes were served.

Not this night. Not any night. It wasn't that O'Connell's was out of tomatoes. It was that they chose never to serve them.

I had staggered out of O'Connell's; the other morning I staggered out of the Erie Bob Evans.

I went to a phone and called Bob Evans' headquarters in Ohio.

A very personable Bob Evans-style Bob Evans spokeswoman named Tamara Roberts Myers informed me there are 407 Bob Evans restaurants in the U.S., that they did $645 million in business last year and that the whole thing started on Bob Evans' farm in Rio Grande, Ohio.

I asked if any Bob Evans served cereal.

"Oatmeal," she said.

"Oatmeal is not really cereal," I said.

"Oatmeal is hot cereal," she said.

"But you serve everything for breakfast," I said. "Why don't you serve cold cereal?"

"We have done thorough testing on this," she began. "We have tested cold cereals, and there is no demand for ..."

"Testing?" I interrupted. "You have to test to see if people might like a bowl of cereal? This is America. This is breakfast. You are Bob Evans. You have to test to decide whether you'll serve breakfast cereal?"

"Our tests show that people don't want it," she said.

I began to weep. She offered me a loophole.

"If you look on the children's menu, we offer Cap'n Crunch," she said. "We will serve it to an adult if asked."

Cap'n Crunch. At Bob Evans. My pathetic life has come to this.

Maybe if you put some mush gravy on it ...

Chicago Tribune