Audio By Carbonatix
Have we got a meal for you! If you’re looking for the best deal on a 1999 entree, fully loaded with sides and sporting a guarantee that you won’t leave hungry, we have the restaurant you’re looking for! Choice steaks! Deep-fried chicken! And here’s a real honey: a 28-ounce porterhouse that costs half of what the big boys charge. Throw your peanut shells on the floor and all caution to the wind! Come on down today and test-eat a real meal.
No, Dealin’ Doug isn’t the pitchman for the North Woods Inn–but he could be. Like Doug, this 38-year-old restaurant is a local institution. But the value and tradition you find at North Woods don’t need a hard sell.
The restaurant has had a few recent tuneups. In 1997 it moved to a new location near C-470 and added lunch; and yes, the prices have crept up over the years. But otherwise, nothing much has changed since Fred Maten and his partners threw open their doors back in 1961. The meals still start with a pot of homemade soup that’s brought to the table, diners are still encouraged to toss their peanut detritus onto the hardwood floors, and the decor still focuses on the work of local taxidermists.
Some of those animals were shot by Maten himself, back when he was working as a bartender at the Alpine Village Inn in 1960. That’s when Alpine owner Ray Dambaugh, who also owned the Old Heidelberg on Highway 70, asked Maten to help him open the North Woods down on South Santa Fe Drive, in the old home of Evelyn King’s original Country Kitchen buffet eatery (see Mouthing Off for more details). In that building, plopped down on a thirty-acre property full of open space and gardens, North Woods spent 36 years establishing a reputation for its fun, rustic atmosphere and well-priced steaks.
But in 1997, the Hudson Foundation, which owned the property and was in the process of turning it into public gardens, refused to renew the restaurant’s lease. “They wanted us to change the menu and add certain items,” says Pat Maten, Fred’s wife of fifteen years. “And they wanted us to add lunch, which in that location just was not feasible.” So the Matens decided to move and build a new North Woods on the edge of Chatfield Reservoir, staying faithful to the original’s decor, woodsy feel and value-priced food.
While that food isn’t going to earn the North Woods a visit from the Michelin guide anytime soon, it’s well-prepared and straightforward: What you order is what you get. Mark Allen, the kitchen manager for nearly a decade, even refuses to be called a chef, Pat says: “We like to have someone who’s not from CIA or some fancy cooking school.” Besides, the most important person in a steakhouse kitchen isn’t the chef at all–it’s the grillman. Allen also has that title at North Woods, and he obviously lives up to it, because our steaks were well-cut and expertly broiled. (Although North Woods cuts its own steaks, it doesn’t age them there; Pat says they prefer to have their local purveyor, who deals with Monfort, take care of that.)
Before we got to the steaks, though, we did some serious preliminary noshing, starting with the basket of peanuts that sits on every table. As the main person responsible for keeping my house clean, I have to admit that at first I found it hard to just toss the shells on the floor; I started out making a tidy little pile on the corner of the table. But then some evil desire to see what it was like to be one of my kids took over, and I swept it off in one fell swoop. My husband, of course, had been callously tossing the shells on the floor from the get-go. (This casual approach goes only so far. Pat, who runs the front of the house, has a strict rule that young diners stay at their tables. “They don’t clean up after themselves,” she notes.)
For a starter, we preferred the peanuts to the cottage-cheese dip and crackers that arrived soon after we sat down. Although the dip was tasty in a church-picnic way, it wasn’t as good as I thought it would be, considering all the raves I’ve received urging me to try it. When I asked our server about the legendary seasoning in the cottage cheese, he sold me a jar of it for $2.50; celery salt seems to be the key ingredient.
Next up in the feed-fest was the pot of soup, which rotates every night in a strict manner that can be added to the two things in life you can count on: death and taxes. Since North Woods is closed on Mondays, the lineup starts with Tuesday, which is chicken noodle; Wednesday is vegetable; Thursday, split-pea; Friday, clam chowder; Saturday, navy bean and ham; and on Sunday, chicken with rice. The soup is made up each day, in a huge stockpot from which each table’s little black kettle is filled. I’ve tried Wednesday and Sunday, both solid, flavorful versions of vegetable and chicken with rice. Even though these two soups started with a commercial base, the kitchen doctored that up enough to make it a moot point. Accompanying the soup was a warm little loaf of white bread to slice ourselves and spread with butter–real butter, not some oleo substitute. Then came the salad, your usual washed-out-iceberg-and-pale-tomato-wedge combo, although the blue-cheese dressing was cheesier than most and the honey-mustard vinaigrette was quite good.
The meal shifted into high gear with the entrees. The 28-ounce porterhouse ($23.25) was a beautiful piece of flesh surrounded by a thin layer of fat that had gone all crispy-edged over the flame. I don’t care what those hoity-toity meat eaters who plunk down $40 for an eight-ounce fat-free filet say–you just can’t beat bone-in, fat-marbled, choice beef. (“But it’s like buttah!” they moan, to which I reply: If you really don’t want something that tastes like meat, then get yourself four sticks for $3.89.) Upping the cholesterol ante was our other entree, the deep-fried chicken ($9.50): a breast, a leg and a thigh that had been lightly floured and fried until the outside was crispy and dark gold and the meat inside soft and juicy. Both entrees came with football-sized baked potatoes (what do they feed those things?) that had been filled with big balls of a buttery substance that had its own special seasoning, this one even saltier.
Halfway through, we pushed the entrees aside so that we’d have room for dessert–our choice of wine sundae, chocolate sundae and strawberry sundae, except that North Woods was out of the wine. We went with chocolate ($2.50), which was plenty big enough to split and exactly what we expected: vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce and whipped cream with a cherry on top.
But then, no surprises is a major part of North Woods’ appeal. By our second visit, we had the routine down: We ate the peanuts, threw the shells on the floor, spread some cottage-cheese dip on some crackers, ate our soup and salad, sliced some warm bread. And while our entree selection was new, both delivered the expected value. The breaded shrimp ($16.50) had a fairly light coating of breadcrumbs that was just greasy enough to keep the interior moist; the shrimp came with another one of those genetically altered potatoes. The excellent chicken-fried steak ($10.50), a tender piece of meat with a crunchy crust drowning in peppery gravy, was paired with a mound of skin-on mashed potatoes drenched in more of that thick, thick white gravy.
The bottom line: Good food, great prices. Dinner for two–including a couple of beers and the tip–clocked in at $50; if we’d stopped by for lunch, we could have gotten that porterhouse with a side of fries for $17 or a Rockybilt burger made from the original Micky Manor recipe. As it was, we had more than enough left over from our dinners to fuel our engines for the next day.
Hey, if we’re lyin’, we’re dyin’. So do we have a deal or what?
North Woods Inn, 8109 Blakeland Drive, Littleton, 303-791-0500. Hours: 11 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Monday; 11 a.m.-2:30 p.m. and 5-10 p.m. Tuesday-Friday; 5-10 p.m. Saturday; 4-9 p.m. Sunday.
