DAILY
SPECIALS
One of the busiest places at lunchtime during the week in Odebolt is
Caroll's Kitchen, where people may choose between menu items or a
daily noon special, with or without the salad bar. The Daily Special
can be a "large dinner" or a "small dinner", but the small dinners
aren't really all that small! The salad bar consists of about eight
homemade salads plus lettuce, and the dinners come with a homemade
dinner roll, which you can ask to have warmed up.
EVERYTHING HOMEMADE
Caroll prides herself in making most everything from scratch and using
top-quality ingredients. She "doesn’t follow recipes too well" and
changes them to suit her tastes. Caroll says she didn't get along
well in home economics food preparation classes in school, because she
was always trying to "make it better, and the teacher didn’t always
like that". She’s been playing with recipes for a long time.
Caroll
forms her own hamburger patties rather than using pre-shaped ones.
Her casseroles, lasagna, swiss steak, meatloaf and meatballs are from
scratch – she doesn’t use mixes. Her ham balls and barbequed ribs
usually sell out. She also makes broasted chicken, creamed chicken on
biscuits (homemade biscuits, of course!) and the list goes on. Fish
is offered seasonally and Caroll came up with her own fish batter.
Harvey Keller's son-in-law (a chef) told her to keep the batter as
thin as possible, and it worked!
DELICIOUS DESSERT
For dessert you may choose from two or three kinds of pie, warmed up,
with hand-scooped ice cream melting on top if you wish, and with about
the flakiest crust you will ever taste. Caroll's secret for her pie
crust is that she "uses enough shortening to really make it flaky".
Or you can have ice cream, or an old-fashioned malt, something you
don't find much anymore!
Caroll
said her mom taught her to make pies when she was 14, and she has come
a long way since then. Some of the pies she offers are apple – a
variety of "real fruit" pies – chocolate refrigerator pie – meringue
pies – sour cream raisin pie – and bumbleberry pie (which she found in
a magazine and decided to try).
SHORT
NIGHTS AND LONG DAYS
All this good cooking doesn't come without a price, and Caroll says
she has "a lot of short nights". Her day usually starts about 3:30
a.m. when she arrives to turn on the ovens, makes and bakes cinnamon
rolls, pies and dinner rolls, and does prep-work for the day.
The
cafe opens at 6:00 a.m. to catch the very early risers. Most of the
breakfast and coffee crowd start arriving about 7:00, and a coffee
group comes in about 8:00. The busy lunch time starts about 11:00
during which the waitresses are kept hopping . At 2:00 p.m. the cafe
closes.
However, Caroll's work day doesn't end there. There is clean-up to do
as well as prep for the next day. She usually gets home anywhere from
6:30 to 8:00 p.m. On Saturdays she does bookwork and Sundays she
preps salads for the salad bar. Her annual vacation is between
Christmas and New Year, which is partly spent cleaning the
restaurant! Caroll says she enjoys the restaurant and especially the
contact with Odebolt people. But it is getting harder as she gets
older. "It's a small place. If you don’t do it yourself, nobody else
does it either."
ROOM
FOR RENT
A large back room is available for reservation. It is there that the
Odebolt Rotary meets every Tuesday at noon. The local American Legion
has meetings in the cafe at night for which Caroll provides coffee and
homemade bars.
BACKGROUND
The Main Street Cafe building was originally built by the Odebolt
Development Corporation. Caroll thinks it was about 1968. Since then
the cafe has had many operators. Caroll took over from John Upton in
1997. She had worked at the Kiron Cafe for some time and wanted to
open a bakery, but this was the next best thing. At the time the
bowling alley cafe was open at noon, so she had competition. She
worked hard to build up business and people started coming.
Congregate meals met in the back room at the time, and they told
others about her good food. The people of Odebolt have been supportive
of the cafe and Caroll appreciates their patronage.
Caroll
grew up in Iowa and lived in many towns, spending the longest time in
Mason City. Her father was a teacher working in college vocational
extension, so he moved around to various vocational schools. Caroll
attended Iowa State University at Ames, Iowa, with the aim of being a
fashion designer. It was there that she met her husband, Roger Kies.
She wanted to go to Chicago to design school, but she couldn't
convince Roger to move there. Instead, the couple moved to a farm
near Odebolt and Caroll became a farm wife. Caroll says her main
cooking experience is from "cooking at home."
