Lana's Family Restaurant

We love little hole in the wall, neighborhood restaurants. They are usually oozing with atmosphere and more often then not they serve up some pretty tasty food. What makes one of these places even better is when hardly anyone but the locals know about it.

That seems to be the case with Lana's Family Restaurant located at 819 Monmouth St. in Newport. There is very little about this place on line. Even Urbanspoon doesn't seem to acknowledge their existence. One of the few comments we discovered about it on Yelp seemed to sum it up best, stating that the reason for this dearth of on-line coverage is probably because no one under 60 goes there.

The day we went there were plenty of people under 60 but it seemed as though just about everybody knew each other. Sometimes that can be a problem (we've experienced it in similar places) because the non-regulars can be treated as "second-class citizens" by the servers while they attend to the folks they know.

That wasn't the case for us at Lana's. We were greeted with smiling "hellos" and our server gave us menus and got our drink orders before out butts had time to warm the booth cushion. Ordering for us wasn't difficult. Their standard fare is a quarter pound burger but since we were both very hungry we opted for the double with two patties of meat.

Right up front it must be said that when you order a burger you get just that, the burger. For us our doubles came with a slice of American cheese. If we wanted it through the garden it cost an extra fifty cents. Now that may seem like a pretty crappy way to do business but consider this, our burgers, made with fresh, never frozen pure beef patties on buns that were bakes daily that were run through the garden cost us each $4.25. Yeah, you read that correctly.

And the flavor was delicious. There was that tell tale flat top char around the edges that's a mark of a really well cooked burger (not a well done burger). It was juicy and packed with true, 100% burger flavor. And the garden was worth the fifty cents. The lettuce and tomato tasted as though it had been bought from a farmer's market that morning.

While the sandwich comes with chips you could order fries for an additional buck and a quarter. Mark stuck with the chips, which pretty much tasted like fresh Husman's while Josh got the fries which were your basic restaurant service variety but they were nicely cooked, crisp on the outside and soft and tender in the middle.

Like most great hole in the wall joints Lana's isn't known for their burgers. They advertise serving breakfast all day and even at lunch time when we went there were a lot of people finishing up and ordering from the breakfast portion of the menu. Everything that we saw looked and smelled delicious. It was to the point that we almost didn't order burgers at all. But we made a mental not to head back and try some of their breakfast items.

All the while we were there we were soaking up the quaint charm of this Newport joint. People were all saying hello and talking about things that happened to them earlier that week. This is one of the precious commodities that everyone needs to check out at some time or another, the local neighborhood restaurant. You owe it to yourself to head toward Newport and hit up Lana's.