The Best Bad Decision We Ever Ate

There are certain moments in your life when you realize you have completely lost control. For Jim and me, one of those moments happened in 1987 while sitting in a booth at the Elite Diner (Formerly the Chuck Wagon Diner) in Urbana after already eating an entire open-faced turkey sandwich covered in gravy and seriously considering ordering another one.

Now THIS was a diner. Not one of these fake places today where somebody hangs an old license plate on the wall and suddenly calls it “retro.” The Elite had real age on it. Silver siding outside. Red cracked chairs inside. Coffee smell permanently baked into the air. The booths were so tight that at 21 years old Jim and I barely fit into them anymore. You sort of slid in sideways and hoped your belt loop didn’t catch the ripped vinyl on the way in.

I honestly don’t remember why we ended up there that night. I had probably stopped by Jim’s apartment and eventually one of us said we should go grab something to eat. That’s how college worked back then. You drifted around all night from apartment to apartment and eventually food became the main event. What I do remember is how hungry we were. Real college hunger. The kind where your stomach starts making decisions before your brain gets involved.

We picked up those giant plastic menus and almost immediately both landed on the exact same thing: the open-faced turkey sandwich. My father-in-law who had a wonderful name for everything called it a “brown plate,” which honestly is one of the greatest food descriptions ever created because visually there wasn’t much happening. Go to Norske Nook in Osseo Wisconsin to see where he received the naming rights. White bread buried under sliced turkey, mashed potatoes piled on top, and then the entire thing drowned in thick brown gravy until the plate looked like some kind of delicious landslide.

I always felt weird ordering the same thing as another person when there were only two people at the table. It felt like we lacked imagination or something. But this thing looked too good to care. We both ordered it immediately and then sat there drinking Cokes while watching every waitress that walked by carrying plates. Every turkey sandwich in that diner suddenly became emotionally important to us. One would come out from the kitchen and both of us would stop talking mid-sentence and track it with our eyes like hunting dogs before watching the waitress walk right past our booth and deliver it to some old guy by the window in a seed corn hat.

Then ours finally arrived.

I still remember the sound of those heavy plates hitting the table. The mashed potatoes looked like they had been slapped on with a snow shovel. The gravy had completely soaked through the white bread underneath until the whole thing barely held together structurally. Steam rolled off the turkey while the gravy slowly spread across the plate like lava. It looked sloppy, heavy, dangerous, and absolutely perfect.

Jim and I basically inhaled those things. There was almost no talking once we started eating. Just forks cutting through gravy-soaked bread and turkey while both of us leaned over our plates like we were protecting them from thieves.

Halfway through I remember realizing this might legitimately be one of the best things I had ever eaten in my life. The bread underneath had transformed into this soft gravy sponge while the turkey somehow still held its texture. Every bite tasted like Thanksgiving if Thanksgiving had been designed specifically for college guys with no money.

When we finished, we both leaned back in the booth and stared down at the empty plates for a second. I could tell Jim was thinking the exact same thing I was thinking, but neither one of us wanted to say it first because once you say it out loud you officially become a glutton.

Then Jim looked over at me and quietly said, “I feel like another one.”

I immediately started laughing because I had been trying NOT to say those exact words for the last ten minutes.

The problem was we had no money. This was before ATMs were everywhere. We called them Cash Stations back then, and you couldn’t just magically pull money out whenever you wanted. If you didn’t physically HAVE cash, your evening changed immediately. So Jim and I emptied our pockets onto the table. Crushed dollar bills. Quarters. Nickels. Pennies. We pushed everything around trying to finance the dumbest and greatest decision of our lives.

Then we realized if we reduced the tip slightly, we could afford two more brown plates. Being selfish college students, this required absolutely no moral debate whatsoever.

When the waitress came back over, there was something deeply embarrassing about ordering the exact same meal again. There was no pretending it was “for later.” No fake story about roommates back at the apartment. She knew exactly what was happening. These two idiots had already eaten entire open-faced turkey sandwiches covered in gravy and somehow wanted another full round. Honestly, I think even she respected it.

The wait for the second plates somehow felt longer than the first. Jim and I sat there like little kids waiting for Christmas morning. People always say you should wait awhile before ordering more food because your body needs time to realize it’s full. Complete nonsense when you’re 21 years old. If anything, watching those plates leave the kitchen again made us hungrier.

Then the second brown plates arrived, and somehow they looked EVEN BETTER.

The mashed potatoes were smoother this time with butter melting down into them underneath the gravy. The bread had completely surrendered structurally and turned into this soft turkey-and-gravy sponge that barely held together when your fork cut through it. The thick slices of turkey steamed under those fluorescent diner lights while gravy pooled into every inch of the plate. Every bite was salty, buttery, soft, hot, and ridiculous in the best possible way.

The second one honestly tasted even better than the first, which is something nobody tells you about being young. Sometimes the sequel wins.

By the end of the meal Jim and I had exactly zero dollars left between us. We pushed every crumpled bill and handful of coins onto the table, slid ourselves out of that tiny booth, and walked out into the Urbana night with gravy probably still on our shirts and absolutely nothing left in our pockets. But somehow life felt enormous back then. Just two broke friends climbing into an old car, completely full, laughing about absolutely nothing, feeling like absolute kings rolling off into the night with a stomach full of brown gravy and nowhere else in the world we needed to be.

About Greenland Sharks

Greenland Sharks is a Chicago men's group who value friendship, experiences, and the long swim. Just a crew that shows up. No speeches. No name tags. No nonsense.

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