The Midwest was not the home of high style. The roadhouses had whole aisles devoted to beef jerky, some places you could assemble your own hot dog or taco, and although the pour-your-own coffee sections often had cappuccino machines, they had several spouts, labelled “Vanilla Capuccino”, “Caramel Capuccino” or “Chocolate Capuccino”. I began to suspect that they did not conceal an espresso machine inside!

Coffee was a continuing problem. At home, I can walk into Artoven in Manuka, ask for a “super-ginormous family size slender latte” and get exactly what I want. But they know me there.

In the USA, I had not only my accent cloaking my desires, but the varied interpretations of what the coffeefolk thought I’d said, filtered through whatever technology they had available. One “slender latte” from a McCafe in Iowa turned out to be filter coffee with some very dubious milk pumped in. I’m not entirely sure it was liquid milk.

Then there was the time I was served an iced coffee. Heavy on the milk, so I guess it was a latte of some sort.

Top marks for a “slender latte” went to an Oklahoma Starbucks, who produced a latte, possibly made with low-fat milk, topped with whipped cream and caramel syrup.

“Uh, you want Splenda in your latte?” asked one barista. Discoverylover cracked up and I repeated “slender, please!” as I sucked in my gut.

Discoverylover became my interpreter after a while, and my coffees became less random. And not quite as much fun.

I’ll talk about the food another time, but let’s just say that rural America was pretty rural.

We hit Kansas City late one night after a whole day of Midwest, and I was determined to find some style. Somewhere. Anywhere.

We’d booked into the Raphael, which was an indulgence on my part, but was a pretty classy joint, right across from the Plaza. We spotted a restaurant/bar opening off the lobby and went in for a nightcap after a day on the road.

It was really nice. Dim light, a piano player, bar staff in formal clothes. Instead of my usual beer, I ordered a martini, and sat there sipping it, basking in the glow.

The piano player was quite an entertainer. Believe it or not, he had a pet monkey, and he talked to it and it did tricks as part of the act. Sat on his shoulder, reached down and tinkled a few keys, waved to the audience.

The musician took a few requests and was rattling out some good tunes. “Piano Man!” someone asked, and he gave us a great version, rolling his eyes and voice in over-the-top Billy Joel.

The monkey hammed it up for a while and then went visiting, jumping up on tables, begging for pretzels and nuts. It came to us, squatted over my drink, and then to my astonishment and horror dangled its testicles into the glass.

“Get away out of it, yer filthy little bastard!” I snarled, and it scampered back to its master.

I followed, fuming, and the piano man looked up at me as his monkey sought refuge on his shoulder.

“Do you know your monkey dunked his nuts in my martini?”

“Uh no,” he replied, “but if you hum a few bars I’ll pick it up.”

The meal

Kansas City – in Kansas – on a Saturday night. We headed off to Legends, a vast shopping mall built around a racetrack and sportsfields. An island building in the huge carpark, Cheeseburger in Paradise was our destination. There were thirty hungry BookCrossers to be fed. Just one of those convention meals that arise. You know how it goes.

“Say, where we all eating tonight?”

“Anywhere you want, honey.”

“We thought we’d ask a local. Like you.”

“Well, there’s this cheeseburger place that’s kind of fun. There’s a Books-A-Million branch nearby…”

“I’m sold!”

And before you know it, half the convention is joining you for dinner and you need a whole bunch of tables.

The song

I’ve been listening to Jimmy Buffett since the 1980s. His bouncy ballads of island life and margaritas and sailing and just lazing about have hit my buttons. Perfect for conjuring up a different lifestyle when your own is full of grey clouds and storms. He’ll have you smiling by the end of the first track, tapping your toes in the second, and if you haven’t got a party going with jugs full of cold drinks halfway through the album, you’re in serious trouble.

Cheeseburger in Paradise is a typical bit of Buffett fluff. It sold about a bazillion copies, and it describes the perfect meal for a sailor finishing a cruise where the only food left aboard is peanut butter and beans. This is the meal Jimmy was dreaming about:

…at night I’d have these wonderful dreams
Some kind of sensuous treat
Not zucchini, fettucini, or bulgar wheat
But a big warm bun and a huge hunk of meat

Cheeseburger in paradise
Heaven on earth with an onion slice
Medium rare with mustard’d be nice
Not too particular, not too precise
I’m just a cheeseburger in paradise

I like mine with lettuce and tomato
Heinz 57 and french fried potatoes
Big kosher pickle and a cold draught beer
Well, good god Almighty which way do I steer?

The plate

I stuck to the Jimmy Buffett prescription exactly. Apart from the medium rare part. I don’t hold with minced meat being anything less than cooked all the way through. Fine for a steak to be pink inside, but with mince, some of the original surface could be in the middle of the pattie. You want any germs that may have been on the surface to be well and truly cooked out.

I was also driving, so I swapped out the cold draft beer for a mug of root beer. Well, it’s beer, innit?

Whatever, the meal was one to dream about, and one to remember fondly forever. You can bet every time I hear that song, I’ll be back in Kansas City!

The burger was superb, the service smiling and perky from some young thing who looked like she’d just come from her day job as a waitress at a tropic beach resort, and the atmosphere was good fun, the decor themed down to Hawai’ian labels on the restrooms. Windsurfers, palms, sails and shells. Food and drinks to match. I loved it. It was perfect.

The place

We were staying in Overland Park at the DoubleTree, and there’s actually another Cheeseburger in Paradise restaurant closer to the hotel, but we went off to Legends. I plugged the closer one into the GPS just to make sure if we lost the car we were following, and all the way there the GPS would tell us to do a u-turn and it was “Recalculating, dammit”. I was certain that the people ahead had made a serious mistake and we’d eventually have to turn around and go all the way back, late for dinner.

Quite a drive, and I was lost after about the sixth big highway! It was a relief to find a park and see the big neon sign, with a platoon of hungry BookCrossers outside.

Books-A-Million at Legends

The Art of Racing in the Rain: A Novel

This was also the place where I discovered Maurice Sendak, reading his Where the Wild Things Are to Discoverylover, and being arterly charmed.

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The BookCrossing

BookCrossing is this crazy American idea where you go to the BookCrossing.com website, enter some details about your book, get an ID number which you write on the book (usually on a label which gives instructions) and then release it “into the wild” on a park bench, a coffeeshop table, on a cable car…

Or in this case, into one of the many fountains in Legends in Kansas City. Here’s Discoverylover from New Zealand setting one free:

There is nothing quite like getting a bunch of BookCrossers together and doing crazy stuff, just giving books away!

–Skyring

Resources

• The restaurant website
• The Wikipedia entry for the song
• The Wikipedia entry for the restaurant chain