CANTON — McCarthy's Restaurant has been a familiar sight on the main highway just south of Canton for a long time — since 1950, it says on the back of the menu.
They serve breakfast, lunch and dinner. Breakfasts include their famous cinnamon rolls from their own ovens and maple syrup from local producers.
There's a great selection of soups, salads and sandwiches for lunch, and a more-than-adequate amount of conservative dinner choices.
We stopped by for dinner on a weekday night recently. There are two dining rooms, but only one was open. So we dined in the smaller, slightly cramped Colonial-decorated room facing the road.
We began with two appetizers from the half dozen offered and tried two of the made-from-scratch soups.
The quesadilla ($5.98) was delightful. An herbed flour tortilla was perfectly grilled, encasing the customary oozing cheese, chiles and diced tomato along with pieces of bacon. Sour cream and salsa were served on the side. Guacamole is available on request; we forgot to request it.
Two Maryland crab cakes ($6.87) were presented on a leaf of romaine. They were good, a roughly 50/50 mixture of finely processed crabmeat and bread crumbs, served with a zippy "Texas petal sauce" (mayo, horseradish, ketchup, cayenne).
A full-fledged crock of French onion soup seemed like a great value at $3.98.
The menu said it's "so cheesy, we serve it with a pair of scissors."
Sure enough, a pair of orange-handled scissors arrived with the soup. Great gimmick!
And there certainly was enough cheese to warrant the scissors. The light soup stock was a little weak and short on onions, but who cared? We had our cheese and scissors to play with.
McCarthy's tries to offer one vegetarian soup daily. A cup of tomato-based vegetarian Creole soup ($2.48) was quite tasty with the customary diced celery and green peppers and herbs and spices.
Salads don't come with all the dinners on the menu. That's probably one of the reasons McCarthy's can price most of its evening entrées between $10 and $15.
However, a basket of warm, homemade dinner rolls that surprisingly lacked in flavor were served with soft — almost runny — butter that was in packets on the table with other condiments.
The salads we did have — a basic bagged-looking mix of iceberg and some dark green romaine — were fortified with shredded carrot and grape tomatoes and served on glass plates.
The dressings are made in-house. We really liked the basil dressing, made with lots of fresh basil. And the "crumbly" blue cheese is really "grated" blue cheese, a ritual popular in restaurants in Gouverneur, just south of here, over the years.
Except for a New York strip, the steaks are lesser cuts of sirloin. Even sirloin flank, commonly called London broil.
We tried the blue cheese sirloin ($15.19), a modest portion of meat with light Cajun seasoning, according to the menu (actually, we couldn't taste any seasoning). It was cooked to our request of medium-rare, surrounded by previously frozen vegetables.
The unappetizing melted cheese on top looked more like the melted cheese on the French onion soup. It appeared to be provolone with maybe just a touch of blue underneath and it looked as if it had sat under a heat lamp too long. And we didn't get any scissors to play with, either.
There was a long delay between the salads and the entrées. Our waitress apologized and explained that it was because they had to cook more rice for the stir-fries. "We sold a lot of them tonight."
Our shrimp stir-fry ($9.57) was a little apologetic. While it arrived audibly sizzling on a sizzle platter, that's about where the excitement ended. The fresh white rice was covered with the same previously frozen vegetables that came with our steak entrée (the menu tantalized us with "crispy Oriental vegetables"). There was a faint taste of soy sauce. The shrimp were pretty shrimpy — small, I'd call them. Medium at best.
I didn't read the menu description carefully, so my "crispy orange chicken" ($9.56) also turned out to be a stir-fry. Yep, same white rice (menu said rice pilaf) and more disappointing previously frozen veggies. The "crispy chicken" was breaded, dried-out frozen chicken (more breading than chicken) gummed up with a "warm orange glaze and Eastern spices."
Eastern Canton?
Lasagna ($11.48) wasn't bad. Now that I think about it, it wasn't that good either. The cooked-down sauce was good, but the lasagna noodles and cheeses were fused together, almost like the pasta dish had been warmed once or twice before. Seasoned ground beef helped it a little.
Pies are a specialty at McCarthy's. We asked our waitress what were available, and she rattled off a dozen-plus kinds in less than 30 seconds. All with her back to us while cleaning the next table.
I asked which were fresh that day. Coconut cream came up No. 1, and got my vote.
It was fabulous — flaky crust, tall, luscious filling, nice meringue topping studded with coconut.
Cheesecake looked funny (like it might have fallen over in the walk-in and was propped back up on the plate), but it sure tasted good, lots of cream cheese and a hint of lemon.
Raspberry pie was our least favorite. The filling was from a can and a little too jellylike. And the crust wasn't nearly as good as the made-fresh-today coconut cream's.
Pies and cheesecake sell for $3.88 each. There's also rice pudding for a little less and strawberry shortcake for a little more, although we passed when we found out the strawberries weren't fresh.
Our waitress generally did a good job, but we were a bit distracted by the "yiz" and "youse" and "dear" and "hon" that she frequently interjected.
Dinner for four, before tip, came to $86.
You can contact Walter E. Siebel via e-mail: wsiebel@wdt.net.
McCarthy's Restaurant
5821 U.S. Highway 11
Canton
386-2564
Serving breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week plus brunch on Sunday.
HOURS: 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily
Sunday brunch starts at 8:30 a.m. and ends about 1 p.m.
(regular breakfast and lunch menu also available)
Rating: 2 and one-half forks
