I went back to my hometown of Newton, IA on a Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago to attend a fund raiser for a friend of mine. I got into town around 3:30 and I was going to head over to the Newton Maid-Rite (also known as Mr. Dan's Sandwich Shop) to have a couple Maid-Rite's before heading out to the fund-raiser. However, a food truck sitting in a parking lot at the corner of W. 2nd St. S. and S. 2nd Ave. W. (see map) caught my attention because friends of mine in Newton had been raving about the Italian grinder sandwiches the truck has been serving for the past couple of years. I did a quick turn into the parking lot so I could get one of Mema's Italian Grinders.
Growing up in Newton, IA, our pizza choices were pretty limited. There were three or four places - including a Pizza Hut - that had pizza. One of those places was a small pizzeria called the Pizza House. It was located on W. 2nd St. N. in a stretch that was once home to pool halls and seedy bars called "Skid Row". I used to work in a store that was the pool hall at one time and it was four doors away from the Pizza House. Sometimes when I was working late, I would just call down to the Pizza House and order a pizza.
Helen Cline started what may have been the first pizzeria in Newton in 1959. I remember her as a kindly lady who had a quick laugh. She made her own sauce and that was said to be the key to the overall taste of her pizza. I never really got into pizza until I was in high school - yeah, believe it or not, I was a picky eater for the first 15 years of my life. And I never had a Pizza House pizza until I was 18 or 19 years old.
The one cardinal sin that the Pizza House could be accused of is that they used pre-packaged pizza dough - already rolled out and sitting in a plastic bag on a shelf above the prep station - rather than making their own dough. It wasn't the greatest pizza, it wasn't the worst pizza. For someone like me who didn't know better years ago, it was fine for what it was.
Years after divorcing her first husband, Helen had remarried Don Christensen in 1989 and ran the Pizza House for another 10 years before retiring due to health problems. The half-block that Pizza House was part of was demolished and a bank was put up in place of the buildings that were there for years. A year after Helen closed down Pizza House, she passed away at the age of 66.
Helen and her first husband, Al, had four children and the youngest, Randy, had a son by the name of Chad. Chad Cline was interested in some of the recipes that his grandma Helen - known as "Mema" to her grandchildren - had kept over the years. He dabbled with the pizza sauce recipe and added crumbled Graziano Brothers Italian sausage and ground beef along with the sauce to make one of his grandmother's delicious "grinder" sandwiches served on a hoagie bun.
Realizing there wasn't a food truck in the greater Des Moines area that served what he called "gourmet grinders" featuring a mixture of beef and Italian sausage, he then had a food trailer built for him in early 2019. Cline then teamed with a Des Moines-area family-owned bakery to make buns for his grinders that would be slightly crispy on the outside, but have a warm and soft inside when the meat was added. It was in April of 2019 that Chad Cline and his wife, Heather, brought out the 30-foot trailer and began to sell the first Mema's Italian grinder.
Cline went around to events and parking lots primarily in the Des Moines area for the first few months, but it was when he first went to Newton in 2020 that I started to hear about Mema's Italian Grinders from friends who gave it a try. He would set his food wagon up in Legacy Plaza where the former headquarters of Maytag once were and serve his grinders - with a bit of local history behind them - to people who were at Gezellig Brewery and at the Cellar Peanut Pub having craft beers. On some days, Cline would sell out of the grinders because he'd go through the 500 buns he brought to make the sandwiches.
From just doing grinders at first, Chad Cline branched out with more sandwiches including a three-cheese meatball sandwich, a ham & cheese sandwich with Italian dressing, a spicy Italian sandwich with capicollo, Genoa salami, pepperoni, and smoked ham; a ground Italian sausage sandwich, and a pizza burger with seasoned ground beef and ground pork topped with a red sauce, cheddar cheese, smoked provolone cheese, and pepperoni slices.
Last year during the height of the pandemic when restaurants were either closed or had restrictions on inside dining, the Mema's Italian Grinders food trailer would set up at a garden center in Grimes three days a week. With a semi-permanent location, Mema's found an even greater following and on good days they would sell up to 700 sandwiches. At one point, Cline was buying more Graziano Italian sausage than local Hy-Vee stores. And the small bakery couldn't keep up with his orders for more hoagie buns.
Through all of this, Chad Cline continued his position as an information technology technician. He would get up around 4 a.m. and get the food trailer ready for that day for his crew, take it to the parking lot of the garden center, then he would head off to work. At the end of the day, he'd come back to clean up and pull the food trailer back home. He found that to be extremely taxing at times and started to think about opening a brick and mortar location.
The Clines found a spot in the Des Moines suburb of Grimes, IA in June of this year and after Chad quit his full-time IT position, they began the build-out this summer. In early September, they had a soft opening of their carry-out only restaurant located at 2250 E. 1st St. in Grimes. (see map) In addition to the small restaurant - which is open Wednesday thru Sunday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. - Cline will continue to run the Mema's Italian Grinders food wagon at different places in and around the Des Moines area.
Growing up in Newton, there was an annual "Ridiculous Day" where merchants around downtown Newton would set up tables outside their businesses and sell stuff for "ridiculously" low prices. It's fun for bargain hunters - many of whom would start shopping when stores would open at 6 a.m. - and it was fun for kids as there was a parade and many activities. But it was a pain in the ass for retailers. I had to work Ridiculous Day a few times and it was a lot of hard work. It turned out the day I was in Newton, it was Ridiculous Days - now a two-day event. That's why the Mema's food trailer was set up in the parking lot just south and west of the square in Newton. (Quite honestly, I didn't know they still had Ridiculous Days in Newton - nor did many of my friends who still lived there!)
I was sort of taken aback that there was no line at the trailer that was mostly red and green with white and yellow accents. I had heard that Mema's was known to sell out during the middle of the afternoon when they would come to Newton, so I was sort of apprehensive when I went up to the window to place an order. "Do you still have any grinders left," I asked the young lady in the trailer.
"We sure do," she replied in a cheery voice. I addition to the grinders, Mema's was also selling their three-cheese meatball sandwich, their ham & cheese sandwich, and their ground hot sausage sandwich that day. They also had toasted cheese ravioli, mozzarella cheese sticks, garlic cheese breads and Mema's Meatballs - 3 hand-rolled meatballs made with a Cline family recipe seasoning and served with some of Mema's red sauce.
I ordered up a grinder and another younger girl took my money - $10 bucks. OK, that's fine, I thought. Every raves about these grinders, so I'm guessing they'd be worth 10 dollars.
As the first young lady I talked to made up the grinder, then put it in a convection oven to melt the Italian cheese over the top of the meat, I asked if any of the people in the trailer was related to Helen Cline. "No," the young lady making my sandwich said. "Chad isn't here today. He's off working somewhere else." (He was probably working on the build-out of his restaurant location.) It wasn't long before she handed me a long styrofoam container with my grinder inside.
After I got my grinder, I thought about just eating it on my car's trunk lid. But it was hot and I didn't want to be standing there in the sun in the parking lot. So, I went out to Maytag Park, the large tree-lined park on the south side of Newton. I found a parking spot along one of the roadways in the park and pulled over to check out the sandwich.
First of all, it wasn't all that big of a sandwich - about 7" in length. The hoagie bun with the ground sausage/ground beef mixture was sort of small. It barely covered 3/4's of the container. And I made a rookie mistake - I didn't catch that I could have ordered the grinder with either jalapeños or banana pepper rings (or both) for a 50 cent upcharge. Jalapeños would have been a nice addition to the sandwich.
But the grinder on its own was, well, good. The hoagie roll was crusty on the outside, but soft and chewy inside. The combination of the Graziano Brothers ground sausage with ground beef in the tangy red sauce had a nice flavor. The provolone cheese on top of the meats had a nice caramelized texture and kept its stringy consistency. Of course, I dropped a big glob of meat with the sauce on my tan shorts that I was wearing that evening. But I knew that if anyone would point out the stain on my shorts, I could easily point to it and say, "Mema's grinder", and they'd probably know. (I was able to get most of the stain out when I stopped off at a buddy's house to have a couple three beers with him before the benefit started.)
OK - I've tried the Mema's Italian Grinder that everyone around Central Iowa has been clamoring about over the past couple of years. And it was, well, it was good, but not worth waiting more than 8 people deep in line for. And I thought it was a bit pricey. Chad Cline has done a good job emulating his grandma's sauce recipe and he's teamed up with Graziano Brothers for his ground Italian sausage and beef mixture, as well as a Des Moines-area bakery for some good hoagie buns. Next time, I will get either jalapeños or banana peppers (or both!) on my Mema's grinder to help zip up the taste of the sandwich. I think it's also great that they've made the investment in opening a brick and mortar location as I like to see that natural progression from food truck - or trailer, in this case - to a restaurant. The spirit of Helen Cline lives on in her grandson!
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