Gentrifying the Cornfields
Road Trip, THE FINALE
Pictures from Wyoming! Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo
All farm diners look the same. An ‘L’ shaped counter with light brown, low-backed swivel chairs, comfortable and sturdy. Six to eight tables, pre-loaded with condiments and all within visual range of the counter for easy table management. Americana and sassy woodcuts on the walls, but somehow not ironically. Two waitresses who appear ready to hug or slap you without a moment of hesitation. An open cut to a kitchen seemingly too small for the restaurant or the two cooks inside. Somewhere there is a sign reading ‘Cash Only’.
The dining area is always full, though every time you look up from your plate, another table has turned. If a farm diner exists, it is because the food is good and cheap, and its size and location have self-optimized within the community. The community might be self-regulating as well.
A farm diner does not have a website, but does maintain a healthy web presence on Facebook, surprisingly relevant given their primary audience. Middle aged men with clean, soft hands wearing flip-flops and t-rex skull print polos are not their primary audience.
If you arrive in flip-flops, the waitress asks ‘Do you want a menu?’ You are welcome in the space, even as a clear interloper. Only one other party that arrives asks for a menu, but only after greeting the waitress by name. They need to think about things. People chat between tables. The waitresses carry on at the bar. Outsiders might get a single opportunity to engage: ‘What brings you here?’ The complex honest answer would likely earn some silent side-eyes from the overalls to either side. The simple honest answer concludes the dialogue...visiting family.
‘Sit anywhere’ is the welcoming instruction. One waitress knows everyone and their preferred beverage, which is produced and delivered immediately. ‘The regular’, despite not appearing on the menu, is a popular order. From order to arrival, food production takes less than five minutes. Portion size is pegged somewhere between healthy and unhealthy, caloric intake for fuel first, satisfaction second. Though the food is delicious. Your breakfast in a tight 30. A reasonable dwell time, as most look like they have something to do.
Allen’s Corner Diner, Hampshire, Illinois, serves a dwindling farm population. It stands out amongst agriculture, adjacent to a similarly eponymous garage. Previously, it might have been described as an island in an ocean of corn. Still surrounded by mid-summer stalks, it is now on a receding shoreline. Real estate signs advertising multiple-hundred acres of available land mark every field. Five minutes east is Stark’s Corner, home to a gas station, Dunkin Donuts, and commercial strip with restaurants, including the soon-to-open Maple & Hash – Breakfast and Lunch. This is what it looks like when your corner is on the state highway and you sell out first. I trust the Starks are enjoying Florida.
Beyond Stark’s Corner to the east are pleasant mega-tract developments, great homes at eminently reasonable prices built around parks and schools. To the north, the I-90, a Del Webb community, and sufficient population to justify a standalone Starbucks. Once entirely agrarian, the area is past the tipping point for suburbanization. Huntley, Pingree Grove, Hampshire and many others will be full bedroom communities soon (albeit a long drive from Chicago).
Allen’s Corner Diner might survive. Good food and good people often do. Cowgirl Café, in Norco, California, is an example of how survival occurs (usually with a website and credit card machine, alas). It is unclear what will happen to Allen’s current clientele. Eventually the farmers will be gone, a function of age and/or selling out. They may very well be replaced (potentially already) by Del Webb denizens, who fit the demographic. Or there will be enough cash-carrying-flip-flops in search of a $10 breakfast (total, seriously it is an amazing deal) for it to continue for another hundred years.
Once upon a time, Gesina and Matt both lived in Naperville, Illinois. We were children, kind of, benefiting from residency in the #1 place to raise a family (then, and apparently, now). Gesina lived in a well-established neighborhood, conveniently located between the interstate, town-center, and the Fox Valley retail hub. Matt lived in a new neighborhood, far to the south, built on recently converted cornfields, still surrounded in three directions by said fields. In the 1990s, there was little to the south or west. Somewhere there was a town called Plainfield. When we could drive, we’d take farm roads wherever possible to increase the speed.
That corn is gone. Much of it disappeared while we were in high school, the rest absent when we returned in 2007. Naperville is now connected to Plainfield by an uninterrupted flow of neighborhoods and retail. Chicago, as a metropolis, is busy filling in the gaps between the I-88 and I-55, a continued westward march of the suburbs. You can still drive west to the corn, it’s only 20 minutes away, maybe less. It occupies the rest of the state, then Iowa, then much of Nebraska. We won’t run out; you need not worry. But there might be some minor casualties as it relocates.
We like visiting local restaurants as we travel. Gesina’s brother and his wife introduced us to Allen’s Corner years ago and it was nice to return to it during the week we were visiting family. Pingree Grove has one of the better ice cream shops we’ve visited and you can get fresh veg (and corn!) from farm stands. We also hit up Portillos, which is local in its own way.
The return trip to the west coast was less sentimental, accomplished in 30 hours of focused driving. In relief of Gesina and Anders, we did make two overnight stops, the first in North Platte, Nebraska, and the second in Brigham City, Utah.
North Platte has a fascinating history, I presume. The local guidebook was thick with activities – birding, a very large rail yard, things related to Buffalo Bill Cody (the number of communities across the country that claim ownership of and celebrate Cody is pretty impressive, as is his Wiki), Cabela’s...we experienced none of this. We did look for a local restaurant and nearly went upscale at the Cedar Room based entirely on their website write-up: ‘The Cedar Room is the most unparalleled restaurant experience you have ever visited this far west of the Missouri River. With its unique atmosphere of modern meets rustic, you will feel cozy yet elegant all while eating from our delicious American Fusion Cuisine menu. You will also want to enjoy one of our many high-end alcoholic beverages from a master Mixologist available in our dining room or in our comfortable Cocktail Lounge.’ Our Mexican food was more than satisfactory.
Brigham City has a fascinating history, I presume. The Hampton Inn did not have a local guidebook in obvious view, though it did have a clean pool and convenient location on Main Street. Main Street, when it is the main street, indicates the town that has stayed connected to its roots, appropriate in Box Elder County. City Hall, County Buildings, an LDS Temple, and plenty of retail are clustered at the center of the grid pattern community. Brigham City is a place designed, built and inhabited by people who 1) have a lot of rules and 2) follow them. It is clean and feels very much in control of itself. An author on Wikipedia suggests its glory days were in the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps. It is an hour from downtown Salt Lake City, it will be fine.
Dinner was at the estranged twin of the farm diner: the small-town diner. Advertising itself as the longest continuing restaurant operation in Utah, Idle Isle Café is the same age as Allen’s Corner Diner. Wood paneled with high ceilings, the shotgun space (now expanded into the adjacent storefront) is comfortable and classic, with a long countertop and banks of booths sized for a thinner generation of patrons. The staff, entirely high school and college age (including, it appeared, the cooks), took cues from an affable gentleman with a cane. Thursday’s special is meatloaf, offered with a note that they “sell out quick" Gesina took a flyer and was enjoying it, when the gentleman with a cane came by to check on our meals. He noted they had sold out of the meatloaf earlier in the day (‘1 pm,’ he said proudly). ‘Then what am I eating?’ she asked. The second batch, hopefully.
Good food and good people survive.
Our cross-much-of-the-country round trip terminated where it began, just outside of Portland, Oregon. The driving was safe and fast, though unhurried. Our return provided a narrow window of preparation for our international departure and the beginning of the next adventure.