Lion's Choice in St. Louis

For lunch, I had a cheddar roast beef sandwich, fries, and a root beer.

I've been wanting to check out Lion's Choice since we moved to town months ago. It's a local chain, started in the late 1960s, with kitschy signs and intriguing menu items.

It wasn't bad. I'm not much for fast food, and rarely order a "meal" somewhere because I hate most fast food fries and don't really drink soft drinks (Chick-Fil-A's fries and lemonade being the exception).

In any case, I ordered their #8, which is a roast beef sandwich with "cheddar". To my glee, "cheddar"= nacho cheese sauce; unfortunately, it obscured the flavors. I wish I'd ordered it plain to actually taste the beef (which, impressively, is sliced to order and cooked to a default medium rare). There was also a slightly absurd amount of salt sprinkled on the beef, so some bites were wildly salty and others merely over-salty. Underneath all the crap, the beef itself seemed to taste good.

The fries were okay. They were in the vein of McDonald's fries, which I do not like, but, it being a roast beef restaurant, there was glorious creamed horseradish sauce everywhere, which makes everything delicious. Especially fries.

To drink, I had a Barq's Root Beer. I usually just get iced tea when I eat fast food, but every once in awhile I figure it's good to throw up my hands and embrace the HFCS monster. It was likewise okay. I've seen sassafras drink mix at Schnuck's that I'm curious to try, and I like root beer as those things go, but I just can't handle drinking this much sugar at once, even after my prophylactic filling-the-cup-95%-full-of-ice trick.