North High Brewing’s Grilled Cheese Comes With a Memory
A Grilled Cheese Worth Remembering
The Blue Plate Special Special Kitchen
Restaurant Review by Gary Gardiner
One in a series from The Taste of Westerville Restaurants
I’ve eaten a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches.
An early memory: American cheese on plain white bread, buttered and toasted in a cast-iron skillet on a gas stove. Sometimes a slice of processed ham slipped inside. Bread-and-butter pickles sat beside it on a Melamine plate, with plain potato chips as the usual side. If I had time for an indulgence — time stolen from playing in the creek or searching the swamp for Venus flytraps — I dipped each bite into a puddle of mustard. Sweet iced tea was the drink.
That sandwich was simple, fast, and perfect for what it was.
On the top shelf of the maple Ethan Allen hutch I inherited from my mother is a photo of Grandma Arnie standing beside her small four-burner gas stove. To her left, a pot steams with green beans and red potatoes cooked with bacon grease. She stirs something in a Tupperware container, probably flour and cornmeal for catfish pulled from the cattle pond across the road that morning. Behind the stove hang copper gelatin molds, decoration more than dessert, by the time I knew them.
When I think of Grandma Arnie, I’m sorry she never did get to make me a grilled cheese sandwich.
That would have been too plain a meal for her favored grandson, and I knew I was. There were probably hand-rolled cinnamon rolls in the oven and iced tea in the refrigerator.
A grilled cheese would have been beneath the occasion, at least in her kitchen. Not because she wouldn’t make something simple, but because feeding people was how she showed rank and affection. For her favored grandson, there would have been more: more food, more butter, another cinnamon roll pressed into my hand.
So I wonder what her grilled cheese would have tasted like.
I thought about that at North High Brewing, when a grilled cheese arrived that seemed to understand both the childhood version and the one she might have made.
The grilled cheese at North High Brewing does not copy my childhood sandwich. It is what happens when the childhood version grows up, gets a little richer, and learns how to sit comfortably beside a cold beer.
This one stacked American, cheddar, and Monterey Jack inside thick-sliced Texas toast brushed with garlic aioli. The American cheese performed its one great trick, melting into the smooth, creamy layer that held everything together. The cheddar cut through with a sharper, saltier bite. The Monterey Jack rounded the edges with a mellow stretch. Together, they made a sandwich that was less about nostalgia alone and more about balance.
The kitchen grilled the bread hard enough to matter. Crisp at the edges, browned across the face, and sturdy enough to hold the cheese without turning limp. That matters with grilled cheese. Too pale and it feels unfinished. Too dark, and all you taste is the skillet. This one hit the right mark, with enough crunch to make each bite satisfying before the melted cheese took over.
The garlic aioli pushed it beyond the lunch-counter standard. It did not overwhelm the sandwich. It added a savory, almost buttery depth that lingered after the cheddar’s bite. It made the sandwich feel fuller and more intentional, the kind of small kitchen trick that makes a simple thing taste as if someone thought about you before making it.
That may be why it sent me back to Grandma Arnie.
A good grilled cheese is not complicated, but it is personal. It depends on heat, patience, and knowing when the bread is ready before the cheese has gone too far. It is a sandwich that can be made carelessly in five minutes or lovingly in 10, and the difference is obvious.
North High Brewing made the 10-minute version.
The fries were standard fare, one of the side choices along with sweet potato fries and a half side salad. They were fine, but they made the plate feel more like a brewery lunch than the sandwich memory it had stirred up. What this grilled cheese really needed was plainer and better: a handful of unsalted potato chips and a few bread-and-butter pickles, something sharp and sweet to cut through the cheese and bring the whole thing back home.
There is something comforting about a grilled cheese that does not try too hard. North High Brewing’s version adds enough to make it interesting without losing the reason people order grilled cheese in the first place. It is warm, crisp, melty, and familiar. It reminds you of the sandwich you knew as a kid, then gives you a better one.
I never had Grandma Arnie’s grilled cheese. I never watched her turn one in that little kitchen, with copper molds on the wall and tea getting cold in the refrigerator.
But sitting there with this sandwich, I could imagine it.
It would have been crisp on the outside, soft in the center, and too full of cheese because she would have thought I needed extra. It would have come with something on the side, because a sandwich alone would not have been enough. And she would have watched me take the first bite, waiting to see whether I understood what she had made.
At North High Brewing, I did.
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