Cheap eats: Lebo's

Lebo's serves the Lebo Boy, a ham and Swiss with tomato, lettuce and tartar sauce on a hoagie bun, with fries and their signature pasta salad. (Credit: Malinda Hartong | Metromix)

A friend and I stumbled upon Lebo's a few years ago, on one of those afternoon drives where we'd keep going until something - in this case, our growling bellies - made us stop. We ordered BLTs to go and threw back a few beers while our sandwiches were stacked and packed and tucked into Styrofoam boxes back in the kitchen.

We had no idea.

A few miles down the road, we popped open the package and angels cried. Sunshine burst forth from the Styrofoam. Bacon had risen. Piled between pieces of toast were layers and layers of chewy-crisp porky goodness, an amount of bacon that would be obscene were we not so - wait, let's not even try to justify it. It was obscene. And we loved it. For years to come we'd talk about those bacon sandwiches as though they were a mere figment of our imagination, so juicy and tasty that they couldn't actually exist, much less at a quiet little place way down Kellogg that we never should have found.

It was time to go back.

The mood: Lebo's is the kind of place that would slap you if you walked in with your nose turned up. Inside is a huge, no-frills dining room with a palm-tree-framed karaoke stage at the back. (Karaoke's a big deal here at night.) An L-shaped bar runs along the side. Dave and I sat on the big back deck. We had a nice view of a man appearing to move all of his belongings onto his front porch across the street. A stray cat stopped by to watch us eat. No pretensions here. Our waitress was friendly and vivacious and laughed at all my jokes, most of which were at Dave's expense.

The food: Plenty of sandwiches on the menu, from burgers to patty melts to steak hoagies, but I was on a mission. To test my bacon theory, I made Dave - a Lebo's newbie - order the BLT Double Decker ($6.75), and he added french fries ($1.75). I got the Teriyaki Chicken sandwich ($6.25). Our waitress said the BLT is the best-selling sandwich on the menu, but my pick was her favorite: a perfectly grilled chicken breast topped with sautéed onions and mushrooms and a big slice of provolone cheese. The sandwich could use a heartier bun, but who cares. I ate it all before it got soggy. Dave, meanwhile, tackled his behemoth of bacon, which wasn't the mythical beast I recalled but still mighty and tasty. He tore through his BLT but couldn't quite get the job done. "OK," he said, looking at the scraps on his plate. "I've had enough bacon for, like, a week."

The drinks: A Diet Pepsi ($1.69) and an iced tea ($1.69). If we'd had beer, no doubt the BLT would loom larger in my mind.

The damage - $19.08: Cheap, quick, big portions and more bacon than a person should consume in one sitting. Why wouldn't you go here?

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