The Hub centers on comfort food

The Hub is one of those restaurants that rewards the diner who figures out "the good stuff" and gears the dining experience in that direction.

Luckily, the menu at this Heber City eatery pointed me in the right direction this past week when a group of 11 of us had dinner.

In some cases, it was written right out: "Our mashed potatoes are the 'real' thing!" In others, it was merely mentioned: homemade gravy, homemade rolls — if you're getting an image of comfort food, you're picturing the same thing I did.

The menu at The Hub covers what I'd call American basics: burgers and sandwiches, classic salads, homestyle entrees such as chicken-fried steak and a few Utah favorites, like the Navajo taco, a scone smothered in chili, tomatoes and other fixings.

Breakfast is available all day long. There's a better-than-average kids' menu that includes breakfast and dinner choices. And there's homemade pie for dessert!

The kids in our group had a corn dog and fries and breakfast: one nice, crisp-crusted and practically plate-size pancake, one egg cooked to order (in her case, over hard) and two bacon strips. For under $5, this was a great deal and very satisfying.

My bacon-loving 10-year-old ordered from the adult menu a bacon-and-egg breakfast that included two eggs, a mound of crisp-cooked hash browns and, to her delight, four strips of bacon.

The teenagers in our group had a standard but fresh turkey sandwich, meat, lettuce and tomatoes on French bread; and the chicken-strip meal with choice of potatoes (she had mashed), veggies, soup and salad. No one was complaining, and there was some to take home.

We grownups, converging on Heber from Wyoming, Texas and, of course, the Salt Lake Valley, criss-crossed the menu.

A couple had burgers, all of them nicely size with fresh fixings and soft, tasty buns; and a couple had salads.

The chef's salad featured a mound of fresh, mostly iceberg lettuce buried under an avalanche of sliced deli meat, with hard-boiled egg, tomatoes and dressing. The shrimp salad was similar, except the meat was replaced with a generous mound of juicy pink little shrimp, and some lemon wedges were added around the side.

As for me, I went with the pork chops, two thin-cut, bone-in chops lightly breaded and fried an appealing crisped brown. Because they were thin, the chops were on the chewy side, but they had great flavor and sear, especially near the bone.