So, Newton, Kansas, is a pretty small little place and right down on old main street is a tiny little restaurant called The Breadbasket. They’re a full service bakery of course, but they also offer some different buffets. There’s a traditional lunch menu a couple of days a week; a lunch buffet on Sundays, and a breakfast buffet on the weekend. And then on a couple of evenings, there’s the German Buffet. It seems a large number of German immigrants hit the Kansas plains back in the olden days. This place opened in 1984, over thirty years ago and has been providing what I’m assuming is fairly traditional German food to people with a hankering for it ever since. Zwieback, verenika, yoder sausage, bohne beroggi . . . I have no idea what these things are. Probably there’s a slight Midwestern twist to the German originals, but either way, the place got good mentions on Roadfood, so here I am in Newton.
I suppose the moral is that German food is bready and the typical Midwestern American likes bread too, so you have a kind of convergence of bread. Honestly, I think everything had bread in it. Of course, the place is called the Breadbasket. Anyway, I didn’t find much of real enjoyment here. I like bread, but this is ridiculous. I found the food mostly bland and without any real strong flavors or textures. Roadfood recommended a few things specifically, so I should mention them briefly. I’ve lumped them all here under German Buffet because that’s how it is on the menu. Anyway, the Green Bean & Ham soup is thin, watery, heavy salt flavor. Nothing special. The Chicken Noodle soup is even saltier and even less of a good dish. The bierock, a sort of meat pie with onions and such, was weirdly disgusting; the meat inside the bierock was really tough and tasteless and the bread didn’t seem entirely done. I’ll close with the best thing I had, the chicken borscht, which was actually quite delicious. It wasn’t too salty and the both the chicken and the cabbage were super tender and flavorful. I’m not a big cabbage fan, really, but this was super good.
Well, anyway, there you go. Were I you, I’d bypass Newton on the map; plenty of other better places in Kansas to eat, some of which I’ll get to shortly.
1 star. Warned against.
tl;dr – German buffet provides watery, salty soups, tasteless, tough meats and more bread than you’d ever believe. 1 star.