photo:Shannon DeCelle

Coming Home
By Laura Leon

Jacks Grill

Main Street, Housatonic, Mass., (413) 274-1000. Serving dinner Sun-Mon and Wed-Thu 5-9, Fri-Sat 5-10; brunch Sun 11-2. AE, MC, V.

Cuisine: American comfort food

Entrée price range: $10 (spaghetti with meatballs & sausage or soy meatballs) to $21 (New York strip steak)

Ambiance: more grandma’s than Grandma’s

Full Disclosure No. 1: Several years ago, my nephew worked in the kitchen of Jacks Grill. Full Disclosure No. 2: Several years before that, this reviewer worked for the owners of Jacks Grill, at the Red Lion Inn. Full Disclosure No. 3: My siblings and their families visit Jacks fairly often, no doubt plowing through the reasonably priced, heaping platters and leaving nary a crumb behind.

When I went to Jacks Grill recently, using my married name and making no reference to any of the preceding, I was immediately struck by how things have changed in the dusty old mill town of Housatonic. The restaurant itself used to be a hardware store; the town, once the home of several wool mills, now has seemingly dozens of art galleries and studios, including a paint-your-own-pottery place just around the corner from Jacks. I’m not sure if All Saints Church, which we used to refer to as “the Polish church,” still conducts mass in that language, but on a recent Saturday afternoon, cars of parishioners ribboned the neighboring streets. A decided mix of old-time working class and gentrified transplants, but still, a quiet place to be on a Saturday night.

That said, Jacks itself was hopping. The restaurant is a high-ceilinged, airy space flanked on its side and back walls by kitsch from preceding generations: kitchen ware; fans; typewriters; board games and boxes of paper dolls; lunch boxes; stills of famous Jacks [the restaurant is named for its family owner’s patriarch, former Massachusetts Sen. Jack Fitzpatrick]; lots of china and, occasionally, an item that even my 81-year-old mother couldn’t identify. Unlike similar-minded décor at chains like T.G.I. Fridays, Bugaboo Creek, et al., the goods here are the real thing, collected by the owners, on hand more for conversation value than for anybody’s ideal of retro chic. Wooden tables and chairs are set at comfortable distances from each other, making for easy maneuvering for both wait staff and patrons just dying to figure out what exactly is that gizmo on yonder wall. A small, almost unnoticeable bar banks the back center of the room.

Our party of eight included four children ranging in age from about 3 to 14, and while the arrival of such a party often makes restaurant hostesses purse their lips and look pained, no such attitude was offered at Jacks. Indeed, there were other tykes about; but don’t get the impression that Jacks Grill is akin to Friendly’s or Chuck E. Cheese’s. The menus, printed on plain brown paper, let diners know that “we at Jacks have taken to referring to ourselves as a ‘Footloose Subsidiary of the Red Lion Inn,’ but that they’re “really all the same people acting out our food fantasies under more casual circumstances.” Riding on the waning crest of the “home cooking” phenomenon that saw pricey Manhattan eateries offering $25 mac and cheese and meat loaf garnished with truffles, Jacks keeps it real—as in real simple. And for the most part, that’s a good thing.

Although I couldn’t interest anybody in my party into trying the pigs in blankets—described as “1/2 dozen bun pups, wrapped in dough, with two mustards”—I was more successful in getting everybody to agree on several other selections from the starter list. The Berkshire bruscetta [sic] were five or six rounds of sturdy bread topped with a dicing of lusciously ripe homegrown tomatoes, fresh peppery basil, and creamy, tangy Rawson Brook goat cheese. Overall, a nice combination of flavors and textures, and—compared to the half loaf that is often presented when ordering bruschetta—a really nice portion. My worries over the crispy popcorn shrimp were completely unfounded. The typical treatment of such dish is usually nine-tenths greasy breading to one-tenth tough, fibrous shrimp. Not so here, where small yet plump and succulent shrimp were encased in a nicely golden, crisp, greaseless breading. My only gripe with the fried calamari, itself deliciously crisp and, like the shrimp, not at all greasy, was that the promised accompanying cherry peppers amounted to a mere tablespoonful of what appeared to be one, at most two, minced peppers.

Jacks offers three simple salads, including a spring vegetable house salad and a wedge of iceberg with Russian dressing, but I opted to try the Caesar salad, which proved to be a cooling, crunchy mass of romaine with a small dusting of diced tomatoes, crispy, flavorful croutons and a creamy, slightly zesty homemade dressing.

One of the neat things about the dinner menu is the Jacks Family Style option, described as “like at home—except, we do the dishes.” Any of three family-style meals—spaghetti with meatballs and sausage, pot roast, or meat loaf, each with all the fixings—feeds four people, and, priced at $32 to $34, is an exceptional value. In our party, however, we each went our own way. Entrees are simple without being simplistic: There’s Jacks Infamous Mom’s Meatloaf, which I ordered in spite of my concern as to whether it was Jack’s mother or her meatloaf that was infamous, and what that boded for my meal. Pot roast, chicken pot pie, strip steak and spaghetti and meat balls are the other comfort offerings, but to accommodate those more urban transplants, the restaurant also offers soy balls in lieu of meat, as well as grilled marinated chicken breast, an entrée-sized Caesar salad, grilled salmon, and a catch of the day, which on this visit was mahi mahi.

Excepting only the strip steak that was still mooing (medium rare had been the indicated choice) and necessitated a trip back to the kitchen, the meals were exceptionally good. My mother and husband each savored the “famous” pot roast, a nicely textured meat that was cooked slowly to the point of easy-shredding tenderness, and whose accumulated juices helped flavor the accompanying mashed potatoes, as did the simple brown gravy. My oldest son’s chicken pot pie was, in a word, homey, a large stew with chunks of white meat, carrots, celery and onions, flecked with black pepper and herbs, and topped with a flaky biscuit.

My meat loaf was a tidy little square of well-seasoned ground beef, slightly dry, but enjoyable with brown gravy. Instead of mashed on the side, I was treated to golden tater tots, which I unashamedly lapped up; less so the undercooked asparagus. My sister raved about the grilled salmon, which came with a black-bean-charred corn salsa. “The corn is freshly shucked!” she exclaimed. “Look, you can see the fresh juice from the cob,” and indeed, one could observe the milky juices of fresh local corn within the colorful mix that was her salsa.

Less satisfactory were the meals ordered from the kids’ menu (kids under 12 eat free from this menu on Wednesdays). My middle son had the chicken fingers and french fries, the latter of which he claimed were the best he ever had, but overall, the platter looked and tasted exactly the same as what the chains typically serve. The toddler had the mac and cheese, which turned out to look suspiciously like Kraft, and while I’m not averse to the occasional giving in to such a craving, I could have easily made the dish for less than a dollar at home.

The wine list offers a decent selection at modest prices, and oenophiles are advised to look to “Lincoln’s List” for a broader selection.

Desserts carry on the “just like home” theme, with Toll House cookies, chocolate pudding, ice cream, hot fudge sundae, and red Jell-o (“nervous pudding just like you remember”); slightly more sophisticated options like New York-style cheesecake, carrot cake, and pound cake with berries and whipped cream provide more balance and flavor. There are also dessert-type drinks, but for my money, the best bet is the rich, fulfilling cup of joe.

Smack-dab in the middle of a sleepy hollow, Jacks is an oasis of good cooking and homey ambiance. The service is friendly and unaffected, although the staff really should make an attempt to regularly bus the tables and avoid, say, the awkwardness of serving ice cream amid a tabletop laden with uneaten vittles, dirty dishes and empty cocktail glasses. Also, it doesn’t really matter that the waitress is cheery about fulfilling your exasperated request to refill the water glasses, when the point is that she should have noticed it earlier. Then again, if the oft-described point is to be “just like home,” then I guess it’s natural to expect some unevenness and a pile of dishes along with food you’ll really crave come colder weather, or whenever you require the spiritual warmth that, somehow, a plate of savory meat loaf and steaming mashed potatoes always seems to provide.

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