Offbeat Eats

Despite the many changes in Columbia, most of my favorite spots to visit are still alive and well (Flat Branch for on of my favorite brownie sundaes anywhere and Shakespeare’s Pizza, to name two), some parts of town have seen a lot of nice development. The North Village part of town has seen a lot of recent development, such as the very excellent Logboat Brewing. Indeed, on the way to Logboat, we found a relatively new place in town (from my perspective), Cafe Berlin, and decided on our last morning in town that we’d try them for breakfast.

Our next culinary stop in Columbia was another reminder that my last major visit to Columbia was back when this was a relatively new blog, and thus some of my standard Columbia places hadn’t gotten a proper writeup. In this case, I’m talking about Ernie’s (or, to use the full name “Ernie’s Cafe and Steakhouse”), to which my first visit was well over 20 years ago. Ernie’s is a Columbia tradition, indeed, the sign proudly proclaims “Since 1934”, so even on my first visit the place was over 60 years old. In any case, it’s still a great place to get a breakfast in Columbia.

Every once in a while when doing this blog I stumble upon a real gem, finding really good food in an unusual setting. In this case, it involves going to a campground; from Columbia, you head south on Providence, follow it around as it become Highway K, and look for “Old Plank Road”. Following that for a bit, it branches and if you take Smith Hatchery Road, and eventually you come to both the Katy Trail and the Missouri river, and the Cooper’s Landing campground. Cooper’s Landing is your basic campground, albeit with a very pleasing panoramic view of the Missouri river, but aside from being a campground, the campground store is home to a small store where you can buy beer and barbecue, and, during the warmer months of the year, you can head outside to the trailer parked at the end of the building and buy food at Chim’s Thai Kitchen. Yup, Thai food at a campground. This actually isn’t my first visit to Chim’s, I’ve been here once before back in 2007, and for some odd reason that I can’t recall, I neglected to write up that visit. I’m pretty sure I also remember at one point going to another Chim’s location on Nifong back in town, but these days the campground is the only location, but I’m glad to see that, 10 years later, Chim’s is still doing some great Thai food.

I’ve been visiting Columbia, MO periodically for more than 20 years, and over those years I’ve gained some favorite places, but it’s a large enough city that there’s a fair bit of turnover in the restaurant scene. Since it’s been several years since my last visit, it’s refreshing to see both that several of my favorite places are still alive and well, and that some some new places have sprung up around town. In this case, when we arrived in town our friends Rob and Sarah were still hard at work, so we decided to tool around downtown and find some lunch. On the north side of the Mizzou campus, we happened across a small pre-fab building with a restaurant that just pulled us in due to our Eastern European heritage (Carol’s background is Polish, mine is Lithuanian): Cafe Poland.