When Dan Deines first met his future wife, he could only handle so much in the kitchen--Totino's Pizza Rolls and coffee, to be precise.

Now every day he slaps burgers on the grill, pounds cuts of pork until delicate and creamy before rolling them in an herbal batter for schnitzels, sears thick portions of Black Angus steak and serves up rich molten chocolate cupcakes for dessert. That's quite a transformation for the truck driver turned chef and restaurateur.

Dan and his wife, Patricia, opened Two Crazy Cooks Bar and Grill in Mitchell just one month ago, taking over the old Dad's space. The restaurant is, as he puts it, "all about home cooking"--except for the daily specials, sometimes intricate sweets and their commitment to buy local, as much as possible.

True, the bar food selection is a mundane series of fried things: mushrooms, onions, cheese and so on. Order the schnitzel sandwich, however, and you soon hear the sharp staccato cracks of a mallet echoing from the kitchen.

In other words, the Dienes prepare as many items as possible by hand. Mashed potatoes are dense and almost buttery as a result. Fish and chips--a sometimes special--turn out firm and flakey under a sharp crust. The aforementioned cupcakes are labor intensive, culminating in the rapid insertion of chilled ganache balls into half-baked batter, and a precisely timed shove back into the oven. Even the ice cream is made in house.

"We're trying to do something you can't find anywhere else around here," Dan explains.

Yet there's no pretense about the place. One room features a pool table and big screen television. Another leads to an outdoor beer garden. And the main dining area sports the usual barroom decor: beer signs and keno.

"I love eating spaghetti out of a can," Patricia says, asserting her everyday tastes. "I'm really a gravy and sauce person."

But Two Crazy Cooks aims for something a little bit more. When they prepare biscuits and gravy, it's all by hand. And the burger menu includes a 'build your own' option.

"My wife has cooked since she was knee high to a grasshopper," Dan says. "She turned me into a foodie."

Well, her and Emeril. One day she clicked on the TV chef's program. Dan tried to ignore the show, but ended up rushing into the kitchen to duplicate Emeril's Parmesan potato chips.

And that was the start of a very good little bar and grill in Mitchell.