Yoder's Has a Weekly Food Schedule. Tuesday Is Pot Pie.

Most restaurants have specials. Yoder's has a schedule.

It's right there on the daily specials page: every day of the week gets its own lineup, Monday through Saturday, the same way your elementary school cafeteria told you Thursday was pizza day in a photocopied calendar your mom stuck on the fridge. Except at Yoder's, Thursday is chicken livers. Adulthood is wild.

I love this. I don't have to decide what I want. I just have to know what day it is, which, admittedly, some weeks is the harder question.

The week, according to Yoder's

Per the restaurant's own page, specials come with your choice of two sides (one side on a small order):

• Monday: smoked BBQ chicken ($16.95 dark, $18.95 white), beef and noodles, and pulled smoked pork that the menu itself calls "outrageously delicious." Not me. The menu. They're confident, and they should be.
• Tuesday: chicken pot pie ($16.95), plus BBQ pulled pork over mac and cheese ($17.95).
• Wednesday: goulash, and pot roast braised with carrots, celery, onion and potatoes ($21.95).
• Thursday: smoked BBQ chicken again, and chicken livers with stuffing.
• Friday: cabbage rolls stuffed with ground beef, sausage and rice in a light tomato sauce, the BBQ pork mac returns, and spaghetti.
• Saturday: chicken livers and stuffing, the pork mac one more time, and the smoked chicken.

Notice the pulled pork over mac and cheese shows up Tuesday, Friday and Saturday. That's not a special anymore. That's a recurring character. That's the guy on the sitcom who doesn't knock.

Sunday is not on the calendar

Yoder's lists hours Monday through Saturday only, and its PieCraft coffee shop next door says it flat out: closed Sundays. So if your Sunday-brunch brain says "let's do Yoder's," your Sunday-brunch brain needs to wait until Monday and accept BBQ chicken as the consolation prize. Rough.

Breakfast runs 7 to 10:30 a.m. weekdays and until 11:15 on Saturday, and lunch and dinner go until 8 p.m., per the restaurant.

The off-calendar stuff

If you don't feel like following the schedule, the regular menu is right there, and it has two things I need you to know about:

Manhattans. Not the cocktail. Roast beef, turkey or meatloaf on homemade bread with real mashed potatoes, all smothered in their made-from-stock beef gravy. An open-faced sandwich that gave up on being a sandwich halfway through and became a nap.

Wavy Gravy. French fries covered in beef gravy and melted cheddar, $8.95. Florida's poutine, if poutine moved down here, bought a golf cart and stopped answering emails.

Then there's pie

Yoder's says the pies are baked from scratch every morning, and the dessert menu lists eight cream pies and fourteen baked ones, from banana cream and peanut butter cream to shoofly, rhubarb and Mom's egg custard. A slice is $7.95, $2 more à la mode.

The move is the pie flight: three cream pie flavors for $10.50. With eight cream pies to pick from, that's 56 possible flights. I did the math. If you ordered a different flight every day Yoder's is open, it would take you more than nine weeks to get through them all, and you would be a person with a very specific reputation at the register. I think that's a beautiful goal.

The family behind it has had practice. Levi and Amanda Yoder sold their farm in Nappanee, Indiana, opened a small restaurant on Main Street in 1975 and landed on Bahia Vista in 1984, according to Yoder's history page, which also says the place started "over a million pies ago." Their daughter, son-in-law and grandson help run the place now. The pie count has presumably gone up since that sentence was written.

Go

• Where: Yoder's Amish Village, 3434 Bahia Vista St., Sarasota. 941-955-7771.
• When: Monday to Saturday. Breakfast 7 to 10:30 a.m. (11:15 Saturday), lunch and dinner until 8 p.m. Closed Sundays.
• Order: whatever today's square on the calendar says. Then the pie flight.
• Pro tip: the specials page is the restaurant's own, but menus move. If your whole Tuesday hinges on pot pie, call first.
• Mini pies and coffee: PieCraft Coffee & Market at 3404 Bahia Vista, Monday to Saturday, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Planning the week around more than gravy? Brooke has the outdoors, and Sandy has the meetups and the week.

— Marina