Rick Nichols: From Meritage chef Ann Coll, 'Nana's Lancaster kitchen favorites'

An unfunny thing happens when the hearty home-cookery of Lancaster County goes on the road. It seizes up, morphs into a cartoon of itself. The chicken gravy on the chicken and waffles develops a scary Las Vegas tan.

Pull off Route 30 near Strasburg and you see it at the tourist smorgasbords. Lunch counters botch chicken pot pie (botboi, in local dialect), the noodles glumly heavy, dense, and sluggish.

Even more-ambitious takes don't seem to fly: At Normandy Farm in Blue Bell several years ago, the ballyhooed Dutch country menu - which somehow boiled the flavor out of the scrapple, even - lasted a matter of months.

And the promising launch of Pennsylvania Dutch-inspired specialties (crab scrapple!) at MidAtlantic, the Daniel Stern eatery at 38th and Market, foundered as kitchen staff turned over, and the food lost its consistency.

All of which is to say I approached chef Ann Coll's new weekly ($39 on Thursdays) special menu - "Nana's Lancaster kitchen favorites" - with a degree of hope tempered by a lot of really bad experience.

Coll has gained notice at Meritage, the restaurant and wine bar at 20th and Lombard, for her Asian-fusion stylings, picked up during her tenure as the sous chef for the French-Asian pioneer Susanna Foo.

That her own roots were in Lancaster County, in the gentle farm country near Millersville, hasn't been particularly evident, though recent menus have been offering crispy braised pig trotter and Eberly Farm chicken liver pate with fig chutney, signals that Meritage is about more than (totally awesome!) Korean tacos.

Why the Lancaster County cooking? I asked her. Why now?

She didn't want to be pigeonholed, she said, as an Asian-fusion chef, No. 1. She wanted to showcase the stellar produce and pastured meats she gets from Green Meadow Farm, the tidy six-acre spread in Gap, Lancaster County.

But mostly, Coll said, this is the sort of food she grew up on at her Nana's knee - "Nana" being her grandmother, June Bortzfield, who is still living in Willow Street, a town of about 7,000 souls south of Lancaster: "She's the reason I love food so much. She tells me I was always the first one to set the table."

I blanched when I saw the amuse-bouche on the menu - pinwheel of sweet bologna, with chive crème fraîche. In the vernacular this is typically a salty, tangy strip of crude bologna wrapped around nondescript cream cheese, and not in a good way.