Memorable | One of the Best
Don & Millie’s
Review by: Bruce Bilmes and Susan Boyle
The cheese frenchee (on some menus, frenchie) might be the quintessential bar food: a salty, fatty, gooey, thirst-inducing snack. Invented at a now-defunct regional chain named King’s Food Host, it shows up on the fast-food menus of a few eastern Nebraska restaurants, including Don & Millie’s, a mini-chain with about half a dozen locations between Omaha and Lincoln.
Don & Millie’s looks like many other fast-food outlets: bright and accessible and chirpy, with nostalgic mid-20th century rock & roll for background music. It serves mighty handsome hamburgers, known as Dons, Double Dons and Triple Dons when outfitted with cheese and bacon; And there are chili cheese dogs and beautiful salty-crusted sweet onion rings. To quench thirst induced by all these drive-in delights, you can buy a margarita — lime or strawberry flavored — for all of 99 cents! No, they’re not craft cocktails, and you’d have to drink a gallon to get a buzz, but they are refreshing, served in icy mugs with salt around the rim if you wish.
The cheese frenchee? This is like a grilled cheese sandwich, sort of, except instead of getting the grill treatment, it gets a spread of mayo, it’s cut into triangles, dipped in batter, rolled in cornflake crumbs, and deep fried. The result is a sandwich that tastes richer than it really is, exuding buttery, cheesy flavor with every messy bite. A deep-fried cheese sandwich, for Pete’s sake! It is about as naughty a food as humankind can create — a genuine Eastern Nebraska regional culinary thrill for the adventurous of palate and iron of gut.
Directions & Hours
Information
| Price | $ |
| Seasons | All |
| Meals Served | Lunch, Dinner |
| Credit Cards Accepted | No |
| Alcohol Served | Yes |
| Outdoor Seating | No |
What To Eat
Don & Millie’s Recipes
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What do you think of Don & Millie’s?
One Response to “Don & Millie’s”
Vince Leonardo
February 13th, 2008
As avid readers of Roadfood.com, we have come to organize all of our roadtrip eating around this site’s recommendations. As a result, we’ve had some of the best meals ever. Don & Millie’s, however, was by far our biggest disappointment to date. Perhaps we were there on an off night.
We ordered the Cheese Frenchees and onion rings. Both tasted like they had been fried in a vat of grease that was way overdue for a change. For drinks we ordered the 99-cent margarita and a 99-cent bottle of Bud. The Margarita was by far the worst we’ve ever had. One drink and it was quickly moved off to the side, leaving the 99-cent bottle of Bud as the highlight of our meal. Perhaps if the grease had not been so stale, and used to fry everything on their menu, we would have had a better experience.