Skip to main content

Taste Article, AMM, May 2018

Taste Article for Appleton Monthly May 2018

Breakfast Anyone?
By Jeffrey Jordan
The history of the sparkling clean and friendly Apple Valley Pancake House restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue in Appleton, Wisconsin, starts in a mountain village in the Balkans.
A young man migrates to a city and learns to be a welder. His friends invite him to join them as they migrate to the United States. His boss tells him,”Stay here, I will pay you more. Besides, you won’t like it there.” He thanks the man, but he packs up his wife,  three children and he moves to the US ending up in Chicago. 
His first job was washing dishes for ten or twelve hours a day seven days a week. At this point he agreed with his former employer,  he didn’t like it here. But he saved some money, got some help from a relative and opened a restaurant in Edgerton outside of Madison Wisconsin. Content to make maybe a thousand dollars or so a month, he was surprised when he made thousands of dollars per month so he expanded his business to other locations
He drafted his boys to work in the restaurant. Because necessity and the boy's curiosity, they ended up attending the finest restaurant management school you could find, by working their way through all of the jobs in their Father’s business. This included the sale of successful ventures and starting up new ones. 
After over thirty years of this family boot camp, one of the sons, Ali Useini took a sabbatical of two years off in Florida. When he decided to start a new restaurant, he returned to Wisconsin. His restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue is built and operated by the three components Ali feels a restaurant must have, consistently good food, made from fresh ingredients and delivered by friendly service. 
He is particularly proud of his staff. “In this labor market people come and go, but I’ve got some very loyal hard working people and that’s why it all works the way it’s supposed to work.”
Maybe loyalty has something to do with it, but maybe it’s a boss who opens at 7:00 am and closes at 3:00 pm so he and his employees can spend time with their families.
The method behind all of this success is the fascination of having one of the most varied and fun breakfast menus in the area. With a build your own skillet and omelet option, there are literally hundreds of dishes that can be created. Besides eggs and pancakes and all of the morning standards, Apple Valley offers waffles and crepes.
Everybody loves breakfast but not everybody likes the same thing. And if the portions are too big for you, that friendly waitress or Ali himself will be glad to box it up for you to take home.

Apple Valley Pancake House
500 E. Wisconsin Ave,
Appleton WI 549111
920 221.3661

Open at 7:00 am closes at 3:00pm

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ring The Bell

 It appears there is a tradition in the radiology department at Ascension Hospital that patients, upon completing their course of treatment, ring a bell. ( We know not for whom this bell tolls.) Ring the Bell with My Sweetheart Jeanne. Jeanne drove me to all but two of the appointments. Pam Frautchi took me to the other two. Today, after being zapped thirty-two times, I rang the bell. This begins a roughly one-month recovery period where the effects of the radiation abate and, I'm assured, a return to normalcy occurs. In my case, I anticipate more energy and greater awareness. Books, Books, & More Books I am simultaneously celebrating the end of the third year of volunteering for the All Saints Hunger Book Sale. Next week, we will wrap up the preparation for the sale and open our doors on August 3 for the public. I ran into this humourous but quite accurate cartoon on a T-Shirt that shows most of the volunteer's sentiments at this point. If you think the printed and bound p...
Post a Comment
Read more
One of my latest efforts. Sketch: The Lady Is Blue Gouache 9 X 12 Reporting: I enjoyed a pleasant evening with my friend Michelle Mooney. I took her out for dinner to celebrate her birthday and to thank her for the many first-rate haircuts she's given me. We were surprised at the number of people who dined alfresco in the balmy night air. Whatever we've done to please Mother Nature, she had deemed acceptable by giving us a shot of summer just when late fall weather was wrapping her fingers around our throat. If I have one complaint about the friendly confines of The County Claire, it's the noise level that makes it difficult to converse. The rumble is an acoustical problem with the customers speaking in normal conversational tones. This is without audible TV showing some game or background music selected by a dance DJ.  I know! We should have eaten outside, where the only noise is the occasional 14 bus snorting by.   Maybe It's Me Since my two soccer teams are not doing...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's time again.

It started in 2004 when we moved to our condo off Downer in Milwaukee. Then we mover to the Westside of Milwaukee when we rented from Ken Karr, the former landlord, now a current friend on Highland and 29th St. Then we moved to Mandeville Louisiana for a little less than a year. Returning to The Fox River Valley, we rented a home in Fox Crossing, formerly The Town of Menasha. When the tree fell on the roof, and the landlord felt no urgency to fix it, we moved to W. Commercial in Appleton. Here is a shocker. Are you sitting down? We are moving. No, I don't mean off the couch and out to the patio. There are too many damn mosquitoes for that to happen. No, we are packing our stuff, or at least the stuff we unpacked from the last move and moving to a home Maria purchased on Mason and Glendale in Appleton. Let me unpack that last sentence (pun planned for). We are moving at approximately the end of September to a house. The house has been in t...
1 comment
Read more