Red Apple Restaurant

It is a dive-​y breakfast joint. My friends and I would always stop off here when trying to nurse a hangover. You can get a 2 egg breakfast for under $ 3.00. The servers are always nice, and it is just a greasy spoon perfect for a cheap breakfast or lunch.

Red Apple is a small town inexpensive family run home style food restaurant. It is popular with local folk. The menu is broad ranging for a small restaurant. A high percentage of the regulars are seniors. The lunch & dinner menu includes several specials. The stuffed cabbage is surprisingly inexpensive, given the labor involved and the ample amount you get.
Meals range from meatloaf to beef & noodles. All sit down restaurants in the under $ 30 a meal range use mostly, if not all, prepared food items. That began as far back as the late 1960s. By the 1970s, most «home style» food restaurants used boxed potatoes and frozen French Fries & frozen burger patties, steaks, shrimp, & fish. The reason is simple.
Labor cost. By the 1970s, minimum wage law was extended to small, local businesses as well as workman’s comp, social security, & unemployment insurance. Lawyers were freed to chase ambulances and law school diploma mills were mass producing lawyers. The USA has more law students than all the practicing lawyers in the 27 EU nations, Russia, China, India, & Japan COMBINED. Result? Restaurants have to shell out serious bucks for liability insurance. The insurance companies kicked 15 to 17 year-​olds out of the kitchens & all the real jobs.
My uncle had a hand operated french fry potato cutter attached to a walk-​in cooler, but he had to stop using it when it suddenly cost 15 times more to pay someone to peal and cut potatoes than to buy frozen french fries & sliced potatoes in bags.
I am positive Red Apple uses some prepared food but they actually prepare and cook most of the main fare. They certainly prepare a much higher percentage of the food than any Denny’s, Applebees, and most of the other $ 9 to $ 20 a meal flashy, tacky décor chain restaurants.
some people today confuse bulk prepared steam table food for lower quality factory prepared frozen, boxed, and canned food. Red Apple offers several specials a day. Those have to be served up from a kitchen steam table. If a person wants each meal prepared freshly on order, he must lay down $ 100 or more at a gourmet restaurant and be ready to wear a stuffed shirt & enjoy that sort of eating companions, or patronize a Chinese restaurant.
Everything but fried eggs and bacon come from a processing center for meals you get at Big Boy, Chillies, Applebees, and etc. And the stuff is filled with empty calories, salt and animal fat for that strong flavor people under 35 have been corporate processed to expect from food.
Sometimes it can pay to look into what the seniors do. Most of our senior women can cook meals from scratch and a lot of senior men & women are watching their fats, salt, refined carbohydrates. On average, they weigh much less than those under 35 do. How did the under 35 Americans get so obese and unhealthy? Prepared foods (few can cook) & flashy in-​style, eat the décor and low quality food with strong flavor from deep frying, over salting, too much butter, coconut oil, corn syrup, highly refined flour, egg yolks, transfat filled hydrogenated vegetable oils and chemicals to make it look fresh & appealing.
People who grew up in a home with a mother who made home cooked meals from scratch may recognize many Red Apple meals as similar to mom’s left overs. At home. our seniors usually ate just after mom finished cooking and preparing. That isn’t possible at a small affordable restaurant like Mike’s Apple. It never was feasible. They must prepare food in bulk & store it on a steam table until someone wants it. So, its like mom’s home made from scratch left overs.
Side Note: Do you see anyone you recognize when you revisit a Red Lobster, an Outback Steak or a Logan’s Roadhouse? Given the menu prices tips must be good, eh?
These chain places are rarely run by business people. They are often owned by local investor groups and run by low paid management staff who barely know what they are doing. Chain stores are paint– by– the-​numbers affairs, managed on-​the-​fly, by a one shoe fits all mentality. Each unit is inefficient. A individual store profit margin is accepted that would not support a small business family. Corporate and the franchise owners see the workers as faceless fodder, not as human resources to develop. (Wendy’s is an exception. It took high school dropout Dave Thomas & Walmart small town Sam Walton to see the wisdom in management training and a real employee incentive program, when corporate franchize MBAs dehumanize employees.)
That’s why coorporate demands high school diplomas. Its proof applicants have 12 years of programming for cannon fodder level jobs. Business owners seek skilled service staff and give staff enough tables to earn some money.

My dad likes it here so I will occasionally meet him for breakfast.
The breakfasts are the best things on the menu. Solid eggs and bacon, the hash browns are pretty decent. Nice rye toast always. Come before eleven and a basic combo is under the three buck mark. The breakfast bowls smothered in tasty sausage gravy, particularly the porky pig, are ginormous and plenty for two.
Everything else has either not impressed me at all or actually made me a bit nauseous. Lunch and dinner alike. The service is passable but not always friendly, depends on who you get. The dinner gravies are canned and yep those veggies are gray baby.
The atmosphere is not much to speak of, run down a bit. Tables are a bit crowded. The ones at the back on a crowded morning will not permit sitting on both sides even.
They will cook your eggs as requested (no hard yolks on an over easy order is important) and the bacon comes crisp or floppy if you ask. Breakfast is the way to go here.

I wouldn’t necessarily drive out of my way to eat at Mike’s Red Apple, but if you’re a fan of diners and are ever in Belleville, check it out!
I used to work practically across the street from the Red Apple and would have carry-​out lunch fairly often, or sometimes dinner if I was working late. I even had an old boss order takeout pancakes for brunch from Mike’s.
Takeout is cheap and filling from Mike’s but you really don’t get the whole Red Apple experience unless you dine in. The side with booths is pretty smoky, and you can also eat on stools at the counter in the middle. The other end has tables and chairs and is non-​smoking, though you do get a bit drifting in from the other side.
Service has always been attentive at Mike’s Red Apple. I think many of the waitresses are related to one another and have been working there for years. The décor is diner standard, except that the paper place mats have pictures of praying hands and a couple of different denominational prayers printed on them.
The food is generally pretty good for diner fare and American home-​cooking style. They offer classics like meatloaf and fried fish and they’re usually running some pretty good deals. They also offer some Greek and Mediterranean foods, and I like the variety of pita sandwiches they offer, including the grilled cheese pita, which they serve with dill pickle slices. The tuna melt and the vegetarian pita wrap are also good here, as is anything for breakfast.
One thing I’d avoid is their side of seasonal vegetables that comes with many of the entrees. They’re either from a can or overcooked, because they’re usually kind of on the gray and mushy side.