Chili-and-Switch."
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Lehigh Valley House
801 West Buffalo St. (across from the Station restaurant)
Prices: Average $6-$15
Posted on: 10/3/99
The Lehigh Valley House doesn't look like the sort of place we'd be drawn to. At a high traffic street corner, from the outside it exudes a certain "townie bar" quality, the sort of place where guys go at 5pm instead of home.
Our draw to Lehigh is something of a circuitous story, essentially the result of the Downtown Ithaca Chili-Cookoff, the inaugural version of which was held last winter. We love chili, and any opportunity to sample it is welcomed with open mouth. The Ithaca Farmer's Market also holds a chili cookoff, but with a fatal flaw. The secret ballot voting (otherwise fine in a democracy) means that when the winner is announced, you have no idea who made the chili you personally liked, or loathed. In any case, the moral of this story is that Lehigh served some wondrous chili at the downtown cookoff last year, far surpassing the competition. Thus our wick was lit.
Going into Lehigh Valley House doesn't do much to assuage the earlier concerns. Nor does the menu which, imagine that, does not offer any chili! Having been swindled at the cookoff (it's super that Mr. Valley House knows how to make a mean chili, but it seems misleading to represent it under the Valley House name if it is not served on the menu) (still, we hope he serves it again at the cookoff this year so we can taste it again!), we were left to select from the rest of their TV dinner fare.
This story goes nowhere fast. The waitress, the kind of lady who is married to the kind of guy who goes to a place like Lehigh at 5, was about as neutral as the food. Speaking of the food, typical middle-of-the-road "continental" fare, longwinded for average fried stuff.
Unless they start
serving chili, we wouldn't worry about braving the Buffalo St. traffic.
