Searching for Polish

Berardis Family Restaurant
218 Cleveland Road
Huron, OH
(419) 433-4123

The sign says it all. This is a traditional Ohio lake town restaurant with a lot of fried Lake Perch being served. The fare here includes fried cheese, fried saurkraut balls, onion rings, fried calamari, to start; for lunch there are soups, salads, and burgers with fries; for dinner there are some Polish dishes like piroghis with kielbasa, or cabbage and noodles with kielbasa, and there are Italian dishes like spaghetti with meatballs, raviolis, or chicken parmesan. This place is cheap, and seems like a throw-back to the 1970s.
How do you start this dinner off right? You guess it, with an app combo platter with fried cheese, mini eggrolls, fried saurkraut balls, and onion rings. That is exactly what you are supposed to do at this restaurant. I got the piroghis with kielbasa off the Polish menu. The dinner was huge, and I could not finish it.

My dinner mate got something off the Italian menu which was the lasagna. It was cheesy. The amount on the plate was huge and my friend could not finish it either.

This place, the waitresses, the room dividers, the old plastic cups, all look like they came out of a 1970s Denny's. Some of the recipes tastes like they could have come from the 70s too. I had just gotten my haircut to look a bit more like That 70s show, so I seemed to fit right into the decor of Berardis. Many of the patrons look like the retired set, and they seem to enjoy this dining experience, and perhaps it may seem familiar to them. For the retired folks eating at the restaurant, it must remind them of the style of dining they had when they were in their 30s and 40s at the prime of their life. Perhaps the sites, sounds, smells and tastes remind them of the good ol' days, or they way things should be.