My mother still laughs about the times she tricked my siblings and me into eating something we didn’t know we were eating. With glee, she remembers how she told my dad that we were eating “Bambi’s mother” for dinner one night. Another night, she horrified my sister and me when she told us that what we had been eating was liver.

As it turns out, I’m not above that type of behavior. We ordered the fried fish meal ($11.99) during one of our recent trips to Hank’s Cuisines, and my son grabbed a big piece of lightly battered fish and started taking huge bites. My husband and I locked eyes as we waited for a “why does this chicken taste weird?” that never came. He ate the entire piece of fish for the first time in his life, and I told him what it was. He was indifferent.

Hank’s Cuisines is on the northwest side of the city, located in a former Quality Dairy. There are a few booths available if you want to eat there, but they were running a nonstop-busy takeout service one evening while I waited for my order. We had a smash burger and fries ($11.99), and while the fries were nothing to write home about, the burger was something special. I can’t get enough of the texture of a smash burger — the way the edges of the burger get crispy and caramelized from the griddle and the flavor becomes concentrated in the thin patty. This was an excellent version.

The steak and shrimp dinner ($29.99) boasted hearty portions of protein, seasoned generously and served atop white rice with some thinly sliced, sauteed peppers and onions. The rice was cooked to death, and the steak, while having an excellent flavor, was an unidentifiable cut and texture that I didn’t love. The shrimp were large, juicy and flavorful, and I focused my attention on that part of the dish.

On a return visit, I had to try the French toast fried chicken sandwich ($13.29), which sounded like the perfect interplay between savory and sweet. While all I could manage was a few bites, it was indeed a uniquely genius sandwich. The thickly sliced Texas toast hugged the juicy fried chicken, and I think this would be an excellent bite-sized party food if the size of it were scaled down since I couldn’t imagine eating the entire sandwich myself.

After several years of following the pop-culture obsession with protein and insisting on cottage cheese, eggs and smoothies filled with protein powder for breakfast, I’ve recently remembered how delicious French toast is. When I was in high school, there were many nights when I would come home from swim practice and inhale a stack of French toast. My children fall further toward the pancake side of the breakfast starch spectrum, and when I make French toast for a weekend breakfast, sometimes Mr. She Ate and I end up eating all of it. That’s perfectly fine with me because it’s an elite, decadent breakfast, and Hank’s has a stuffed cheesecake French toast that I’m dying to try. If you really want to prime your taste buds, check out the video of this dish being made on the restaurant's Facebook page.

The fried chicken wing meal ($11.99) included half a dozen extra-large chicken wings, but the breading was much too thick for my preferences, and the fries, like the ones from our previous visit, were unseasoned and unspecial. The fried fish, however, was some of the best I’ve ever had. It was breaded with a light coating of cornmeal, which is key for me. I’ve spent so many years attending mediocre fish fries during Lent that when I find a delicately fried fish that still has tons of flavor, it makes an impression. The fish at Hank’s checked all of these boxes and even convinced a discerning 7-year-old to chow down.