Sandwich Sunday – Corky’s Kitchen & Bakery, Ladera Ranch CA

One of the disadvantages of living in South Orange County, CA is that most things tend to be closed by 11pm. Between that, and working the dinner shifts at a restaurant, I don’t get to try as many places as I’d like to. There are a handful of 24 hour places around here, but there aren’t many. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere is a place called Ladera Ranch, where many new families settle to raise their young children and try to live a quiet life. I lived here with my family when I first started college, and it was immensely boring, but incredibly safe. Having the fucked up schedule that I do, I tend not to go to bed until 4 or 5 A.M. leaving a couple of hours to lolligag after work. I went to the gym nearby after dropping off a friend a couple years ago only to find that a 24 hour restaurant had opened up in sleepy ass Ladera Ranch called Corky’s Kitchen & Bakery. It soon became a somewhat regular place for my friends & I to go, because the only other places nearby was a Denny’s (and that gets boring). First and foremost, I want to draw attention to how creepy Grandma Corky is:

Nothing against Grandma Corky, but that imagine haunts my nightmares. But I enjoy the pie here enough to suffer through my fears of the logo, a jonesing for a slice of pumpkin pie is my sword & shield against this demon faced grandma logo. Hell, even the kid’s logo scares the shit out of me:

That Doily neck thing is off putting too, I don’t know what it’s called and I don’t care to know. It’s scary.

Now I’ve never tried their food at normal “human hours” (11a.m. to 10p.m.) so I can’t say much about that, but I found that I only really crave this place after midnight while carting around my friends who are sober enough to speak & act somewhat normally. It was 2a.m. and I had just gotten out of the gym, and I decided that I wanted to ruin my workout by having a meatloaf sandwich (with a salad and a diet coke, I need to maintain my girlish figure) .

I’ll be the first to say that when I hear the word “meatloaf” I usually don’t think “appetizing” I usually think:

I’ve never been one to crave meatloaf nor have I ever been one to refuse it. I think the term “loaf” is one of the most unappetizing words in food, I’m sure there are plenty of others, but I care not to find them at this moment. I went for an open-faced meatloaf sandwich because I haven’t had meatloaf in probably 5 or 6 years and I wanted to remember what it was like. It came on some buttered & toasted french roll and was drenched in gravy, with a side of cranberry sauce (the canned kind, a classic Thanksgiving side dish & my safety net for those annoying Friendsgiving celebrations; I’m pretty sure those lines made from the sides of the can are flavor ridges) and some mashed potatoes that were also swimming in gravy.

When it came out, I thought someone brought me a complimentary chocolate donut (imagine my surprise when I dipped it in milk and ate it). I wasn’t expecting much to be honest, it’s a simple dish that I ordered at 2a.m. while watching a drunk couple trying not to doze off in their pancakes. It didn’t disappoint, the meatloaf was what I expected from an easy comfort dish smothered in gravy. The potatoes were nice, and the flavor ridges in the canned cranberry sauce reminded me of waking up at 3p.m. realizing that I forgot to make something for Jeff’s Thanksgiving Potluck & Super Smash Bros extravaganza.

-Vy