Bosco’s Grill adds menu items for carb counters

By Ann Heller, Restaurant Critic

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KETTERING (Ohio) - Mary Tupper was listening when the customers at Bosco’s Grill in Kettering kept asking her about carbohydrate counts in the featured items at the family tavern.

Three weeks ago she responded by offering low- and no-carb options to the regular features.

Not that she has turned her back on making the best sweet-potato fries in town. Nor has she given up the Saturday-night pasta specials that always include rigatoni and meat sauce and spaghetti and meatballs.

But when some of her customers persisted in ordering the hamburger and the steak sandwich without the bun — staples for people living the low-carb diet — she thought she could come up with some choices that aren’t, inevitably, so boring.

She did the research so she wouldn’t be putting any hidden carbs on the plate. So she uses just a little red pepper sauce on the grilled chicken breast.

“Every vegetable that is red or orange has carbs,” she says.

And to round out that plate she came up with a spinach roll, layered with provolone cheese and a mushroom stuffing flavored with herbs and just a touch of onion.

Sweet onions, too, she notes, have to be used in moderation because that’s another vegetable with a higher carb count. Those constraints can make innovation difficult for a cook.

“It’s not easy,” she says, “but I think it can be done.” The hard part is coming up with color on the plate, she says, without the red and orange vegetables.

The chicken breast with the spinach roll was the feature last week. The week before, she offered grilled steak with asparagus and “one carb’s worth of hollandaise sauce.” She also offered a smoked salmon mousse made with whipped cream and sliced cucumbers. Using cucumbers instead of the forbidden crackers provides a crunchy texture.

This week a low-carb salad special features spears of steamed asparagus wrapped in smoked turkey and ham on mixed greens with a house-made bleu cheese dressing. Her nutritional analysis reports that the feature has less than 10 carbs.

Tupper is used to a challenge. She essentially inherited the kitchen when her son, Al Schaaf, a trained chef, helped her open the tavern and then headed to the other side of the world for a working sabbatical that has lasted three years. He is a chef in a restaurant in Cambodia now.

By the time he left, Bosco’s had established itself as a quirky place that served much more than bar food. A self-taught cook, his mother had listened and watched him and now is inclined to talk about food in terms of “color and texture and dimension on the plate.”

She continued the tavern’s approach to food. So on any given night the specials might be steamed mussels with garlic and fennel, or maybe pork tenderloin sandwiches with an apple horseradish sauce. Maybe an artichoke torta or grilled halibut with chermoula sauce. Or Greek Moussaka. On Friday nights, Tupper focuses on specials that might put a puff pastry head on a smoked-salmon swan. In contrast, on Sundays she features $1 quarter-pound cheeseburgers and 50-cent fries.

For her low-carb customers, she also came up with an adaptation of the restaurant’s chicken wings, which are usually breaded. She grills skewers of cubed chicken breast rubbed with Cajun spices and serves them with the usual celery and blue cheese dressing. Now those chicken skewers are always available, and they’re popular with both customers who count carbs and those who ignore them.

“And because we make all our dressings, I know there aren’t any hidden carbs in there,” she says.

The low-carb feature will change every week. She is playing with the idea of a mushroom casserole as a side dish for the usual potatoes or rice. Other options catering to the carb counters are the steak sandwich or bleu cheese bacon burger, on mesclun greens instead of the bun.

Another change is the small addition to the menu that says that cigars, pipes and clove cigarettes are no longer allowed.

So much of the tavern’s business is now food-oriented, Tupper says, and she’s not going to have those customers run off by “a guy sitting at the bar with a beer and a $1 stogie.”

Bosco’s Grill & Tavern is at 5900 Bigger Road, Kettering. 436-1128.


[From the Dayton Daily News: 04.25.2003]

How great to see that a restaurant is responding to a customer request...and even better to see that it is one relatively close to me. I hope to check it out soon.

Thanks for the update.

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