850 Perry StreetLate night on the other side of the state.
I got sent to work one night last week in the Pontiac area. It was me and a colleague and I had to pick her up in Grand Rapids. The company offered us hotel rooms instead of having to drive back after midnight.
Usually, I wouldn’t take the room because it’s hardship on J to get everyone out of the house in the morning but adding the extra hour plus to go back to Grand Rapids then to Kalamazoo seemed like a lot.
B is at a day camp that J can drop him off at 7:00 AM so she can actually get to work on time unlike during the school year when she has to work from home for a couple of hours to get him on the bus when I’m out of town.
Our jobsite was in Lake Orion and our hotel was in Auburn Hills. We got back to that hotel just before midnight. I desperately needed a shower and I hadn’t had much to eat all day. I took care of the shower first then worried about the food.
I put in a search for 24 hour restaurants nearby and a couple of Coney Island places came up.
The one I picked was Universal Coney Island in Pontiac. The small restaurant is on the corner of Perry Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard on the northeast side of Pontiac. The restaurant is a standalone building in an odd corner lot in a small commercial area surrounded by houses.
Universal Coney Island has some online ordering options and I probably should have done that to save some time but I wasn’t 100% sure if I was going to dine-in or take it back to the hotel with me.
I didn’t really know what to expect when I set on to grab food. What I found was a counter service restaurant with a small dining area.
The counter is behind glass and there were two ladies working. One was on drive thru and the other was manning the counter. One of them asked if was just picking up or if I needed to place an order. As I mentioned, I should have ordered ahead but I didn’t so I was there to place an order.
There was a guy in front of me ordering so I took a minute to look over the menu. There was a menu hanging from the top of the glass divider but it was hard to read. I noticed another menu taped to the window that was much easier to read so I looked at that one while waiting for my turn.
The menu was huge and had several different kinds of food. I had a hard time narrowing it down but “Famous Corned Beef” was what stuck out to me. I got the Corned Beef Sandwich Deluxe which just means it came with fries and a drink. The cost was a little over $13.
It took about ten minutes for the order to be passed through the Lazy Susan type opening in the window. I could have grabbed a table and just ate in but by that point, I was ready to grab a couple of Pepsi’s, get back to the hotel and try to get some sleep.
I started eating the fries as soon as I got back just to uncover the sandwich so I could get to it. The fries were nothing special. They’re frozen restaurant fries. There was a lot of them though. They could have used a little more salt and maybe some mustard to dip them in. I was hungry enough I didn’t care about either of those things though. Fries are fries.
The “Famous” Corned Beef sandwich came with mustard and Swiss cheese on buttered Texas toast. The meat was juicy, messy, and delicious. I don’t know why they call it “famous” but it was pretty damn tasty. The buttered toasted bread tried it’s best to hold everything together but it was really just there to soak up all the juiciness from the meat. This was a solid 12:30 AM meal.
Universal Coney Island was exactly what I was hoping for a midnight on a Tuesday. It was a quick, delicious, and cheap meal. I wanted something so that I could get a full belly and get to bed as that 8:30 AM alarm was going to come super early. Universal Coney Island accomplished all of those goals.