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Vote for Busia
The fried chicken meal at Busia’s Narozny keeps many Toledo Police officers ready for action.
Home cooking for TPD real as it gets
published November 29th 2006
There is a rep-lacement available for your grandma in the kitchen.
You may need a grandmother for the whole inner warmth, unconditional love stuff, but Busia’s Narozny can cover you for the hot, gravied, stick to your ribs home cooking part.
And, "It’s al-ways been a cop hang out, blue collar, working persons type of diner," says owner Bob Ammerman, "We offer 50 percent discounts to uniformed officers and firefighters."
Busia’s Narozny — Polish for "Grandma’s Corner" — modest on décor and price, is a giant on flavor, Polish American classics and getting your belly full.
I brought my 100 percent Polish girlfriend Kaetlyn to the North Toledo locale for expert analysis. Arriving at 7:50 p.m., we discovered the old school hours: 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Cops eat early. But we were served and allowed to enjoy the meal in our own time.
Tables are clean and covered in check-ered cloths. Bright fluorescents supply lighting and add to the miniature VFW dining hall ambiance. The building has always housed a restaurant of some kind since the ‘40s. Busias’s moved to the location in ’04, but has been the only Polish restaurant in town since they first opened nearby on LaGrange in 1999.
We started with appetizers, picking the pigs in a blanket, in homage to Toledo’s best in blue. We also chose Mozzarella sticks to be cheesy.
Mozz sticks are hard to screw up, but they’re also hard to make memorable. Busia’s four sticks ($2.95) have a great seasoning and were fried just light enough.
The pig ($3.50 for one) is a wonderfully spiced union of meat and rice wrapped in cabbage and served in a tomato sauce.
The taste was authentic. "My partner Irene Knattins, who’s of Polish descent — a lot of her recipes are from her mom and her grandmother," said Ammerman. The cops mainly eat our breakfast, but most customers come for our Polish food, like the ‘golabki’ — Polish for pig in blanket — or our duck’s blood soup."
It’s $2.50 a bowl, but we didn’t try it. Actually, Ammerman admits that even he isn’t brave enough. The recipe contains beef blood, raisins and prunes, "The USDA I guess won’t let you use duck’s blood," he said.
Sounds… dark.
"But people who like it say it’s just like their Busia made, no Americanizing, all Old World recipe," Ammerman added.
With our apps polished, Kaetlyn felt her Polish index rising, so for an entrée ordered the potato perogi dinner ($5.95) with a side salad and sweet & sour cabbage, which she said is what "many Polish children recognize as their first taste ever."
She loved every bit and further claimed the golden brown, crispy but delicate perogis to be "a solid 9.5 out of 10…" her grandma’s being the only kind better.
Impressive. My meal was the more American four piece fried chicken dinner ($5.95), served with peas, mashed potatoes with gravy.
The chicken was perfectly fried, the mashed potatoes lumpy in that just-made way and the peas were the off-gray/green kind found in cafeterias. I seriously felt five years old. It was fantastic.
Our desserts were just like Grammy’s, too: weird but satisfying and sweet. Kaetlyn had a shockingly pink piece of strawberry Jell-O cake ($1.50), and I had a raspberry cobbler ($1.95) that was neither raspberry nor cobbler, but rather cake and whipped cream with a little bit of preserves in the middle. But both desserts were pleasingly simple and assured me that Busia’s real pies — blueberry, apple, etc. — are something to take home… as a to-go from your grandmother.
Busia’s Narozny
5140 Chapel Drive,
302 Laskey Road (intersection of Laskey and Tractor Road)
419-476-7880
fax: 419-476-7883
Hours: 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., 7 days
