The Coffee Grinder Restaurant
526 Main Street
Honesdale, PA 18431
570/253-2285

Honesdale has several quaint coffee shops, seemingly strategically placed at regular intervals, serving and sharing the trade on its handsome and busy Main Street. The Coffee Grinder, a time honored presence at the southern end of the street, was my most recent destination for a Saturday lunch.

My friend Maureen and I had a reasonable wait for service, given the volume of noontime weekend traffic, but it was more than compensated for by the friendliness of the waitress, once she arrived at our booth. She steered Maureen to one of the specialty sandwiches, roast pork served on garlic bread with duck sauce, which Maureen found to be hearty and tasty. Equally hearty and tasty was my hot meat loaf sandwich with mashed potatoes and a generous slathering of rich brown gravy, a special of the day. As an afterthought, we intended to order and share a side of cole slaw, since it looked good en route to another table and would have complemented both of our choices well, but the busyness of the waitress and the speed with which we were motivated to polish off the food in front of us made the slaw a lost cause. Maybe next time.

A homemade pie menu, which can vary daily, takes center stage at The Coffee Grinder. We had a choice of apple crumb, cherry, blueberry, peach, raspberry, or cream in chocolate, coconut, banana and butterscotch versions. In keeping with a comfort food lunch, Maureen ordered the coconut cream and I, the chocolate cream, and we swapped them into a choconut smoosh pie, which proved to be at least as good as either of its parents, which were very good indeed.

The menu here has the most variety among the restaurants of its type on Main Street which I’ve visited so far. Breakfast eggs can be accompanied by kielbasa, fresh fish or taylor pork roll, as well as the expected sausage, ham, bacon, steak or corned beef hash. The pancake menu is modest, but creamed chipped beef and sausage gravy and biscuits are regular items. Worth mentioning is the Polish omelette, made with a dozen eggs, ham, peppers, onions, mushrooms, kielbasa, tomatoes, bacon, sausage and potatoes for $7.50, or, for those feeling only a wee bit peckish, a half-order at $5.

The lunch menu is offered as separate listings of sandwiches, specialty sandwiches, hoagies and burgers and dogs. Other than the roast pork, specialty sandwiches include a Rrench dip, a reuben, a hot beef, turkey or pork, and a grinder jawbreaker combo of corned beef, ham, turkey, thousand island dressing and cole slaw on rye. It is aptly prefaced on the menu with “Got the Time?” A salad bar and a good-sized side order listing, from which a combination platter can be ordered, greatly increase the possibilities.

Dinners, which include a trip to the salad bar, range from spaghetti at $4.50 to a 10-ounce Del Monico steak at $10.95. A nice touch is the availability of five popular entrees (liver with bacon and onion, roast turkey or pork with stuffing, chopped steak with onions and mushrooms, and fish and chips) at a senior citizen rate of $5.95. Other enticements, not consistently seen elsewhere, regularly on the beverage menu here, are draft root beer, cappuccino and a specialty coffee of the day.

The bill for our comfort lunch, with two teas, was $15.

Hungry in Honesdale? Head for The Coffee Grinder.

Hours:
Monday to Thursday, 5:00 am to 9:00 p.m.
Friday and Saturday, until 10:00 p.m.
Sunday, 6:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.

Parking: street (metered) and municipal lot