Malteds are Ripe in the Land of the Sleeping Bear

By Norm Wheeler
Sun editor
“Full calories are the delicious moments of your autobiography.”
From The Taste of Life, by Jerome Stern.
OK, so they’re not good for you. As we the people of the most obese nation in the history of the world try to grow fat conscious, shrink our mudslides, and lose our love handles by embracing each new diet du jour, the list of no-no foods grows, too. Eggs. French Fries. Marbled beef. And the list of oxymoronic pseudo-foods grows apace. Light beer? Low calorie submarine sandwiches? Fat-free gravy? Now California bans trans fats in their restaurants, surely a good thing. But “No Fat Ice Cream”? Ugh! What can a poor boy do?

Up to a point this writer complies. I haven’t been to a fast-food joint since the 70’s when I got a hitch-hiking ride (another 21st century no-no!) from a food guru who explained how the rain forests of Brazil are being bought up, burned, and bulldozed by Burger King to make pasture to feed USA’s Whopper mania, and how the steers are enhanced with super-steroidal booster shoots and then pickled in cellophane with carcinogenic nitrites and MSG to improve shelf-life and reddish-pink sale-ability. Like many of my generation, I’ve tried and failed to be a bulgur lovin’ vegetarian while mostly avoiding red meat.
A recent A+ on a cholesterol test enabled me to backslide however temporarily into the bliss of the classical American lunch, especially as it’s available on the streets of Glen Arbor and Empire. If you ride your mountain bike over hill and dale to Glen Arbor, surely you’ve earned a Dune Dog!! Mr. Bill Thompson’s hot dog stand next to the T n’T video store has the perfect start to the All-American lunch. The Blues Brothers CD is playing. You quote Bill’s T-shirt: “What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor? Make me one with everything!!” The fixins of mustard and onions and relish and peppers and the pickle perfectly cover the poppy seed bunned wiener. With two-handed trepidation you slowly slide the aromatic assemblage long-wise through your gaping teeth without dropping even one morsel! Brilliant!! No hasty Coney Island eating-contest gluttony here. Keep the brakes on.
Chew slowly. Taste everything. The hot dog must stay in the slow food category! (Was it Mark Twain, or Will Rogers, who said that most Americans are better off not knowing exactly how either laws or sausages are really made?) One Chicago-style Dune Dog is the perfect first half of the patriotic lunch.
Now back on the bike in search of the piece de resistance. The only real recommended guaranteed-to-please failsafe couldn’t-be-better follow-up to the hot dog is the CHOCOLATE MALTED!! The young now call them “malts.” Or “shakes,” but those don’t have the key ingredient: several scoops of malt powder. (Note that malt is one of the main ingredients in beer, the perfect finisher to the All-American supper, but that’s another story.)
It’s gotta be a malted milkshake, but there are several options for where. My first malted of the summer happened on a warm May afternoon at Cherry Republic. This was before Chris Roberts went to the Bonnaroo Music Festival and got sunburned. She dug into the home-made cherry (duh!) chocolate ice cream, poured milk and two scoops of malt in, and buzzed me up a large on the old single-shaft malted machine without even scraping the sides of the stainless steel container. (Doesn’t the existence of the tall, silver, handle-less pitcher, and the specially designed only-for-making malteds proto-blender testify to the importance of this refreshment in our culture?) Of course it was delicious. And of course my addiction was good for another summer. “My name is Norm, and I’m a shameless user of chocolate malteds.”
In June I stopped almost daily at the Leelanau Coffee Roasters. No need to even order – when I shuffle in with my head hanging, the super-friendly baristas automatically grab an ice-cream scooper and dig into the chocolate tub in the cooler. Jessica, Christina, Theresa, and Carol (despite having a name that doesn’t end with an “a”), all make perfect malteds.
You can also go to Riverfront to get a malted made from soft-serve ice cream. This seems a bit like cheating, as soft serve already has a homogeneous consistency, so with a little milk and malt powder you get that super-smooth finish to your lunch. Riverfront got short shrift in our early summer story highlighting ice cream options, and they are generous with the malt powder if you just ask, so you can’t go wrong there. At the other end of town Wendy Anderson and Rowan Niemisto have been serving both soft serve and regular ice cream at the Pinecone almost since they were born, and the other “Coneheads,” as owner Ann Burroughs calls them, are deft and expert. As a generally retro kind of guy, I still like the old-fashioned malted with the lump of ice cream floating in the middle that the blender machine failed to penetrate, the lump that plugs the end of your straw so you get to pull the straw out and dislodge the plug with your teeth. You get more exercise that way because you have to both drink and eat a malted made with hard ice cream, and the more exercise, the less guilt!
Between the two towns at the Narrows you can get both the hotdog and the malted at K.T.’s Glen Lake Bistro. As with the Pinecone, K.T.’s offers the choice of soft serve or ice cream malteds, along with several other classic lunch sandwiches. They deliver to boats at the Narrows bridge, too, but you’d better get after that malted quickly! The battalions of pontoon boat tanners are thicker than ever this year, and the number of ski boats that just float there bearing bikinis and scorched skin has gone way up with the price of gas. They look languidly voracious; a malted might appease their not skiing.
If, on the other hand, your errands peddle you to Empire at lunch time, what then? The Friendly has a great lunch, as does the Village Inn, and Gemma has cool sandwiches. Many choose the counter at the back of Deering’s Market. The politically correct foodies haven’t converted that hot lunch stand yet! Shiny wedges of warm pizza. Deep-fried chicken parts. Chili Dogs. Take a handful of napkins when you go! How much can you balance on a paper plate and still pay Shawna, Morgan, or Tina Tag’ at the checkout? You can eat out on a sidewalk bench, maybe get a glimpse of Beryl the surfer girl siren of Empire, and then taste a contender for the best chocolate malted anywhere next door at Tiffany’s. Either Maura Niemisto or her side kick Dylan know how to take their time to create just the right balance of milk, malt, and ice cream. If you are feeling devil-may-care that day, get whipped cream on top! A well-made chocolate malted is the best way to wash down any American lunch. It’s the drink and the dessert all blended into one. You can draw it through a straw, or just lean back and pour it down your throat.
Though it may not be as healthy as grape nuts with chilled camomile tea and honey, admit it, you gotta love a hotdog and a real chocolate malted!