Beer and bloating in Cleveland
Meat! Booze! Football! Gambling! Heavy-duty military machinery! It's a banner weekend for heteronormativity as we head south of the border for the first time.
I finally made it to Cleveland this past weekend. I know, I know, you’re probably thinking how could anyone—least of all a diehard greater Great Lakes megaregion enthusiast such as myself—have taken a full 39 years of his life to finally carve out the time for a beer-sodden weekend in the Paris of northeastern Ohio? The Forest City? The Cleve?
I make no excuses for myself. Thankfully, the schedulers of the NFL gave me one in the form of a Packers road game against the Browns at the beautiful Huntington Bank Field in downtown Cleveland. And when you have three friends, an air mattress, a willingness to circumvent hotel accommodation rules and a cursory knowledge of the culinary contributions of Lake Erie’s south shore, it turns out that even an all-time shitty Packers game can be the basis for a good ol’ fashioned fellas’ weekend.
We rolled into Cleveland around 2 pm with our stomachs empty and ready to gorge on lunch. Like many of the other cities in the Midwest, Cleveland’s culinary identity is a byproduct of Black migration from the southern US and assorted immigrant groups from eastern and southern Europe—Italy, Germany, the Balkans and especially Poland. As a half-Polish boy myself, there was no way I was about to pass up the opportunity to try Cleveland’s signature sandwich: The Polish Boy, which takes a grilled kielbasa, slathers it in barbecue sauce, fries and coleslaw, and drops the whole mess into a sausage bun.
Timing considerations didn’t really afford us the opportunity to explore too much beyond downtown Cleveland, so we settled for a feast at Mabel’s, owned by Food Network guy Michael Symon. (At least two separate Clevelanders were very happy to tell me all about Michael Symon. One made sure to spell his last name out for me just so I could find it online. Consider me informed!) Their “Polish Girl” trades french fries for pulled pork, so there may be some authenticity concerns worth wrestling with here. Either way, the innovation of adding barbecue sauce to kielbasa is one I can get behind. Great work, Cleveland!
***Cardiologists & concerned family members, please stop reading here***
Complementing the kielbasa were some pierogi—filled with brisket in this instance, another lovely cross-pollination of Southern US/Eastern Euro cuisines—spicy pig crackling, distressingly tender ribs seasoned with a celery salt/coriander seasoning mix, more brisket, and beer.
***Cardiologists & concerned family members, resume reading here***
After Mabel’s, we tried to explore the Arcade, the oldest indoor shopping centre in the United States, but it was closed for a private wedding reception. Dismayed at the failure of our one sincere attempt to partake in high-minded culture, we went to bar. And then a casino. And then the bar at the casino, where we sat in recliners and watched college football while contemplating the incongruence of a casino being appended to the iconic, skyline-defining Terminal Tower, one of the finest examples of Beaux-Arts architecture in the Midwest. Needless to say, we didn’t let this particularly questionable instance of Rust Belt Revitalization™ interfere with our enjoyment of the gambling, drinking and sports-watching.
Somehow, we managed to recover our appetites in time for a reservation at Cordelia, the darling of the Cleveland restaurant scene whose head chef, Vinnie Cimino, was just named one of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs of 2025. Cordelia’s website calls their cuisine “Modern Grandma,” a term that brings to mind mid-century American comfort food filtered through a vaguely ethnic prism. There were hints of Balkan (ajvar on a jammy egg, delicious), Italian (butter popcorn gnocchi, texturally stunning but too one-note in terms of flavour) and Middle Eastern (earthy carrot muhammara; delicata squash with toum and labneh), along with a straightforward but deeply satisfying “burger box” (pull-apart sliders) and a fall-off-the-bone corned lamb shank served with a mustard sauce, a delightful riff on a staple of Great Lakes gastronomy, corned beef. I washed it all down with fantastic Peter Piper Picked cocktail (jalapeño pisco x passionfruit liqueur; somewhat like a spicy margarita) and, my stomach greatly in need of a digestive aid at this point, a glass of Rabarbaro amaro.
The one glaring issue, other than my minor quibbles with the gnocchi, was that everything was served to us far too quickly: we were in and out in under an hour. Maybe this was an aberration, as the service was otherwise great; maybe “Sit-Down Drive Thru” would be a more accurate sobriquet than “Modern Grandma”. Ultimately, it’s the food that matters, and on that account, Cordelia crushed it. Another bar and between two and seven rounds later, we called it a night.
Day 1 Stats
US$20 wagered
3 bars
2 restaurants
3 beef dishes
1 egg (jammy)
4 varieties of pork product
2 BBQ sauces
1 Pepcid (prophylactic), 1 Tums
1 lamb dish
Min. 10 standard drinks
15,414 steps
The next morning, I headed to the café on the ground floor of our cafe to go full 2014 by shoving a smoothie, avocado toast w/ egg and a cappuccino down for an eye-watering C$55, thinking a relatively healthy meal would be advisable given the night before and the alcohol and meat consumption that lay ahead of us. We sipped some sensible morning seltzers as we walked through the tailgate scene outside the stadium—the best I’ve seen outside of Buffalo, filled with friendly, raucous Midwesterners and plenty of music, banter, grilling and drinking. I scooped up a free hot dog from a veterans’ group, we checked out the USS Cod (a WWII-era sub; not a fish sandwich), we traded friendly barbs with all manners of Browns fans, ate some cheese courtesy of a Packers fan, and got into the stadium just in time for the flyover.
The less said about the actual game the better—although I can now say I’ve seen the Browns win a regular season game on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon, which is about as rare a sporting event as can be witnessed in North America. At least we had great seats for a reasonable-ish price and, just as importantly, I had the chance to try Cleveland’s famous Stadium Mustard, a slightly spicy brown mustard that goes perfectly on a US$6 all-beef hot dog. The stuffed pretzel bites were decidedly gross.
After the game, we head back to the car to trek back to Toronto, albeit with one essential stop along the way: Wegman’s in Erie, Pennsylvania. Based in Rochester, NY, and found throughout the Northeastern US, Wegman’s is one of the finer regional grocery store chains, well-known for the quality of their bakeries, their white-label goods, the above-average treatment of their employees, and their subs. Man, the subs. US$8 and change for an American-sized (read: substantial) medium “Danny’s Favorite”: capicola, salami, ham and provalone on a fluffy white sub roll, drowning in Italian dressing. Certainly better than any Canadian grocery store sandwich I’ve ever had and better than pretty much any sub I’ve had in Toronto.
As is my custom on these sorts of American adventures, I scooped up some regional condiments (Weber’s horseradish mustard and hot green tomato piccalilli relish from Buffalo), a bottle of Crystal hot sauce (superior to Tabasco in every way but largely unavailable in Canada), a couple bags of Zapp’s chips, a small case of Wegman’s famous chocolate chip cookies (exceptional) and a jar of pickles. All that for ~US$25. They may be in a self-inflicted death spiral brought on by imperial hubris, techno-fascism and feckless elites, but you cannot deny the Yanks know how to do a grocery store.
Day 2 Stats
US$20 lost
2 hot dogs
3 varieties of pork product
4 varieties of mustard
1 egg (fried)
3 cookies
1 Krispy Kreme donut (original)
1 Pepcid (prophylactic), 3 Tums
Min. 10 standard alcoholic drinks
15 mg cannabis edibles (blue raspberry flavour)
16,632 steps
Stay tuned…
In upcoming posts, we’ll be taking a look at some of my favourite Mexican spots in Toronto and debuting Mikey Dislikey, a semi-regular feature of things I’ve been disliking lately.
Cheers of the fellas’ weekend
A Cold Beer Here! lager courtesy of The Jolly Scholar brewery. Is this really necessary? I have my doubts. Cheers!
I work in public health and the statistics coming out of the Midwest are the stuff of Lovecraftian horror.
Hope you took lots of Tums with you