Melt Makes a Big Cleveland Statement With Grilled Cheese

A grilled cheese can be a quick lunch, but Melt treats it more like a full-scale dinner project. The sandwiches arrive large, deeply filled and built around the sort of visibly molten cheese that requires a few careful first bites before the whole construction settles into your hands.

The menu is a long, playful roll call of named melts: The Graduate, Wake and Bacon, Monte Cristo, Cleveland Cheese Steak, Big Fat Gyro, Parmageddonator and Mighty Macaroni Grilled Cheese among them. This is a place where deciding can take a minute, especially when one person wants breakfast flavors, another wants a fish sandwich, and someone else has their eye on a gyro folded into toasted bread.

Melt has become a repeat stop on Cleveland-area drives, including trips connected with Cedar Point. That makes sense. The food is memorable enough to plan around, but the setting remains informal: a bar-and-grill room where a big sandwich and a cold craft beer are perfectly reasonable reasons to linger.

The Lake Erie Monster is one of the menu's most satisfying examples of the Melt approach. A fried cod fillet goes into the sandwich with slaw, toasted bread, fries and jalapeño ranch, creating something closer to a fish dinner compressed into a grilled cheese.

The cod brings useful contrast to all that richness. Its coating is crisp while the fish inside stays juicy, and the slaw and jalapeño ranch keep the sandwich from becoming a single-note pile of fried food and cheese. It is still a serious meal, of course. Nothing here is pretending to be dainty.

The Monte Cristo goes in another direction, filling toasted bread with ham and serving the sandwich with powdered sugar and strawberry dipping sauce. It is the familiar sweet-and-savory idea of a Monte Cristo, only made even more emphatic by the cheese at its center.

For breakfast-minded diners, the Wake and Bacon brings pronounced breakfast flavor to the melt format. The Chicken and Waffles Grilled Cheese follows the same broad impulse, combining cheese, chicken-and-waffles flavors and Sriracha butter.

Then there are the sandwiches that sound as if they were named during a late-night brainstorming session: the Cleveland Cheese Steak, the Big Fat Gyro and the Cuban War Pig. The Cleveland Cheese Steak has been a popular first order alongside French onion soup, while the gyro and cheese steak are among the melts known for arriving generously stuffed.

A sandwich of this size needs a side that does not disappear beside it. Melt's fresh-cut or hand-cut fries have developed a following of their own, and they are the natural companion for working through one of the bigger melts.

The fried pickles make a good opening move if the table wants something to share. They arrive crisp with a dipping sauce, offering a salty, tangy counterpoint before the cheese-heavy main event lands.

Some meals come with fries already built into the equation. The Parmageddonator, for instance, is served with them. With portions this substantial, leftovers are not a sign of defeat; even macaroni and cheese has proven capable of becoming tomorrow's lunch.

The broadness of the menu matters when a group has different appetites or dietary needs. Vegan and vegetarian choices have been available alongside the restaurant's signature melts, with vegan dishes clearly marked on the menu.

Plant-based possibilities have included an eggplant Parmesan sandwich, a honey tofu sandwich and vegan pasta with meatballs. French onion soup, vegan Caesar salad and vegan macaroni and cheese give the menu some range beyond simply swapping an ingredient in a sandwich.

Gluten-free options have also been available. Menu offerings can change, but Melt is notably better equipped than a typical grilled-cheese stop for a table where not everyone is ordering the same way.

The named sandwiches are half the fun, since a title such as Parmageddonator gives you a fair idea that restraint is not the house style. But build-your-own sandwiches have also been available for diners who know exactly what they want between their slices of bread.

That choice makes an easy division at the table. One person can order a familiar favorite after years of return visits, while someone else can take a chance on a sandwich involving cod, waffles, powdered sugar or gyro filling. There is no shortage of material for the traditionalists and the curious.

The dining room has a lively, casual look, with walls decorated in photographs of music albums. The visual theme gives the place more character than a standard sports-bar dining room without taking attention away from the food.

A section of the dining area has garage-style doors that can open on pleasant days. They let in the day while providing shade from direct sun, a useful feature when the weather cooperates.

There is also a small arcade, an extra diversion for diners who have finished their fries but are not quite ready to call it a night. Craft beer is part of the mix at the bar, and bar seating can be a welcome alternative when the dining room is busy.

Melt offers both table seating and bar seating, so the visit can be a sit-down meal or a more casual stop at the bar. The staff are known for being friendly, attentive and well acquainted with a menu that can take some browsing.

A free parking lot is available, although its location has not always been immediately obvious. Once inside, the main challenge is less about logistics than choosing between the sandwich you came in planning to order and the one that suddenly sounds better halfway through the menu.