It has been a yearly family ritual, since I was about ten years old, to escape the city for one summer Saturday evening to attend a play at Saint Vincent's College in Latrobe. Saint Vincent's puts on a professional (i.e. working adult actors, not students) theatre series every summer, showcasing three plays that run for about a month each.

Entering the Mountain View Inn

It's a great excuse for a summer evening's escape, and so for the seventeenth-odd year, Saundra, Neilbert and I made the excursion to Latrobe to meet up with my Aunt Eleanor and her S.O., John, for an evening at Saint Vincent's theatre.

After a few years of driving to and from Saint Vincent's in one evening, the Kane sisters and their fellas came to the conclusion that staying at a hotel room in town makes the evening more enjoyable. For the last few years (i.e. now that my college is paid off and I've moved out of Neilbert's and Saundra's house), we've cultivated the tradition of staying at the rather upscale Mountain View Inn. At its core is a historic country inn and restaurant, but over the years they have added several new, but colonially-decorated wings to the original 1924 structure. They also have a quaintly atmospheric restaurant, and we had dinner reservations for five thirty... Neilbert, however, has always suffered from the compulsion—as do all the "bert" brothers, and even Smooth—to leave on trips at the crack of dawn. In the alternative, when he cannot leave at the crack of dawn (say... when check-in is at 3:00 and the hotel is only an hour's drive, like Latrobe), he still attempts to arrive as early as possible.

The Gazebo Porch at the Mountain View Inn

Unfortunately, there is no known treatment for this condition as it is extremely under-funded in the medical research community. After Neilbert originally set a departure time of noon, Saundra talked him up to a 1:00 and then 1:30 departure, giving Neilbert the satisfaction of squeezing in under check-in time. And so, we got to our room, unpacked the car, looked around at each other and shrugged. It was 3:00. No sweat for Neilbert. He unfolded the Saturday paper, cracked open a can of Augustiner and proceeded to read the paper while munching on Tostitos. Saundra and I, however, were suffering hunger pangs, being after all two women on a diet, specifically a low-carb diet. The last thing we needed was to be bored and trapped in a hotel room with beer and corn chips. I scoured the corridors of the Mountain View for vending machines but found only soda machines and the requisite ice machines. Saundra attempted to quell her cravings with a Diet Pepsi, but I had a different solution. I suggested we kill time down at the pool.

The pool at the Mountain View Inn (I'm there, too)

It should be noted at this time that Saundra and I are fitness swimmers. We took up lap-swimming last summer and have made it our regular exercise routine. We go to the Highland Park pool three times a week to swim laps (more often than not accompanied by our dear friend Sabrina), and so exercise instead of food sounded like a wonderfully healthy idea—though pool conversation was dominated by predictions of what we'd order for dinner that night. As hotel pools go, the Mountain View isn't bad. It's a rectangular pool, which is always a step above the kidney-shaped variety, and the shallow end isn't so ludicrously shallow that we scrape our feet as we come in at the end of a lap.

Saundra and I, attempting laps at the Mountain View pool

Its length, however, is under half of the width of the Highland Park pool. As a result, lap swimming isn't especially challenging. The other downside of most hotel pools—it was no less the case at Mountain View—is that little kids and their parents staying at the hotel come to the pool to engage in typical little-kid play. We deal with dodging little kids during our laps at the Highland Park pool all the time, but given the smaller size of a hotel pool, it just doesn't seem worth it. And so, while Neilbert napped in a white plastic chaise lounger poolside, we did a lot of stationary kicking and aerobic water-treading, and just breezy floating around. But it kept our minds off food for a while. At least until such time as we returned to the room to get dressed for dinner.

At long last, we headed down to dinner at the Mountain View Inn restaurant. The restaurant is, all in all, an upscale sort of place. It's not up to Laforêt standards, certainly (what is?), but the food is for the most part served á la carte. Entrées run between $13 and $25 dollars and they come with the starch and vegetable of the day.

Saundra and Neilbert, dressed for dinner

Soup and salad is extra, but a house salad can be had for $2.95, which is not-too-shabby. It's a good salad, too, with quality greens and no iceberg lettuce. To start out our supper, Eleanor, John and I ordered wines by the glass. The house wines were, perhaps predictably, $6 apiece, but they offered a surprisingly good selection of varietals for that price, including pinot noir and pinot grigio. Wait, scratch that. They don't offer a house pinot noir anymore, which we discovered only when my aunt's bill came with an $8.50 charge for her wine. The waiter politely explained that they used to offer a house pinot noir, but no longer do and so my aunt received the other pinot noir they offer by the glass. I then politely told the waiter that the menu still purports to offer a house pinot noir for $6 a glass and that was precisely what my aunt ordered. He then politely corrected the bill. On the upside, they apparently still offer a house cabernet, and I ordered that without later incident. John got a somewhat better-than-house chardonnay.

Mountain View Common Area Feel the history

And as it turned out, I was mighty glad to have that glass of cabernet. For dinner, I ordered the Flatiron Steak Salad (billed as an "Entrée Salad"), with the steak done medium rare and blackened with blue cheese. I decided on the steak salad and not the Flatiron Steak entrée because of the "starch and vegetable" that comes on the side. The vegetable would of course be no sweat, but I knew I couldn't resist the starch if it were staring up at me from the plate. Add to that the fact that the steak entrée would not come with a salad, and I would have to add a $2.50 salad to a $14.50 entrée, while the steak salad would be simply $13.50 (and only $11.50 if I hadn't gotten the blackened and blue cheese combo). Doesn't seem to make a lot of sense—does the "starch and vegetable" really cost so much more as to warrant the difference in price? I doubt. I was curious, though, if the cut of steak would be smaller in the salad, and I luckily got a chance to find out because Saundra ordered the steak entrée. She, however, has been at this low-carb thing longer than me, and consequently has a few tricks up her sleeve. It used to be that she would pawn her potatoes off on Neilbert, but now when she orders at a restaurant she tells the waiter not to give her potatoes because she can't eat them. Lo and behold, she gets a compensatory second order of vegetables. Crafty, crafty Saundra. Though, when you think about it, it's only fair. Saundra also ordered the $2.50 house salad, as did Neilbert to complement his pasta primavera. John got the Smoked Salmon Entrée Salad and my Aunt Eleanor got the Smoked Mozzarella and Basil Ravioli—she's a vegetarian, by the by. Getting back to that cabernet... when the waiter set a basket of steaming fresh bread on the table, I was ravenous. If it hadn't been for the occasional sip of wine to placate my tongue, I swear I would have caved. Aunt El, Neilbert and John all reached for a slice, but Saundra and I stood (er, sat) united in low-carb solidarity. But then the waiter brought out Saundra's and Neilbert's salads. And I had nothing but the cabernet—and I could only drink it sparingly because I was holding out to drink it with dinner, and I was staring a basket of fluffy, soft bread in the face, and Saundra was slathering creamy blue cheese all over her salad.... Oh the humanity!

Inside the Mountain View Restaurant

At long last our dinners came. My entrée salad was perfect, a large plate of fresh field greens and romaine lettuce, and not a scrap of iceberg in sight. And the steak was precisely the same size as Saundra's entrée steak. Hah, hah! And mine had blue cheese. The salad was also purported to come with a lemon chipotle dressing. Whatever dressing I had was good, but it tasted more like any old vinaigrette, nothing especially lemony or chipotle-y about it. My steak was perfectly done (remember, the order was for medium rare). Saundra and I had just been talking in the pool that day about the variances from restaurant to restaurant in what you get when you order certain levels of steak doneness. Ordering anything from medium rare to medium well is a crap-shoot, unless you go to a certain restaurant regularly. Saundra has come to prefer her steak done so that it's red and warm in the middle, but not so bloody red as to look like it's just come from the butcher block. As it turned out, an order of "medium rare" is the way to go at the Mountain View Inn restaurant; Saundra found her order of "medium" to be a bit too well done despite some lingering redness in the middle. Everyone else enjoyed their entrées, and I was impressed to see that Neilbert's pasta primavera included roughly half-and-half pasta and vegetables, rather than the pile of pasta and five vegetables you'd get at most restaurants. After dinner, John was the only one who got dessert, even though Saundra and I ordered it. Being ever the aficionado of fine confections, John opted for the raspberry mousse chocolate cake which came impressively plated—dessert-wise they seem to be big on presentation. Saundra and I decided to order and split a scoop of chocolate ice cream. As desserts go, ice cream is better on carbs because—think about it—the only carbs it has are sugars. Not great, but not terrible, especially if you only have a little bit, hence the decision to split one scoop. However, despite the fact that, when asked, the waiter read off chocolate as one of the three available ice cream flavors, when he returned to the table with the raspberry cake, he informed us that they were out of chocolate, and asked if we would like another flavor. We sighed and declined. If it's not chocolate, it's not worth the carbs.

From there we went to Saint Vincent's for our date with the theatre. As we do every year, we picked a play in the genre of "zany farce"—our self-decided title for that type of theatrical comedy full of accidental innuendo and mixed-up identity. Even if you're not a theatre-goer, you can find the "zany farce" on many an episode of Frasier, say... when they go to intellectually heroic lengths to keep a secret, when everybody knows part of what's going on, but nobody has the whole story, or when everybody is lusting after someone else, but no two people after each other. Anyway, the production at Saint Vincent's was a fairly typical men-dress-up-as-women-to-pull-a-con comedy, but everyone agreed that it was one of the most amusing we'd seen in recent years. After the play it was on to the after show cabaret where they serve complimentary beer, lemonade, iced tea, popcorn and hot dogs. I decided to allow myself to cheat on my diet and have a beer, but upon drinking it, I decided that I'm not missing so much after all.

The Park Classic Diner

The next morning we checked out of the hotel and proceeded a ways down Route 30 to get some breakfast at a souped-up Eat N' Park in Jeanette, called The Park Classic, that's been remodeled to look like a retro diner. Many of the offerings are different, as well, because it's a small place, so no room for salad bars and such. Also no room for tables; there were only booths, and despite getting a large booth, I felt a little squished between Neilbert and Saundra. It was standard, no frills breakfast fare, of course, but that's what we'd been expecting and for the low-carb among us, bacon and eggs abounded. Saundra and I allowed ourselves one slice of rye and whole wheat bread, respectively, which was only fair considering that we had over-easy and sunnyside-up eggs, respectively. A good breakfast, sure, but an uninteresting one. That's not the fault of Eat N' Park, of course. I'm generally not a big breakfast person, and when I do eat breakfast foods, I tend to gravitate toward awful naughty things like biscuits and gravy. In fact, my very favorite breakfast (a definite low-carb no-no) is my own knock-off of a Bob Evans biscuit extravaganza, a dish which fits with no diet that purports to be at all healthy. Recipe below.


Sarah's Knock-off Bob Evans Biscuit Extravaganza

• buttermilk biscuits
• crumbled sausage or bacon
• McCormick sausage flavor country gravy mix
• eggs
• cheddar cheese, shredded

Get some biscuits, however you deem fit. I generally use Bisquick, but you can get frozen ones from Pilsbury or, I imagine, you can buy them fresh at a bakery. Prepare sausage and/or bacon if not already prepared. Prepare the gravy according to package directions. If biscuits are small, put a couple in a bowl, if they're big, slice in half and place open-faced on a small plate. Layer bacon or sausage on top of the biscuit. Prepare eggs to taste, but really, they should be sunnyside-up or over-easy—this dish just isn't as good if the eggs aren't at least a little bit runny. Layer eggs on top of the meat. Cover with gravy. Sprinkle cheddar shreds on top while gravy is still piping hot so they melt. Eat, and try not to gain weight.