Vagneur: Restaurant life

It’s a small-town restaurant, perfect for a good lunch after coming from the cattle auction or hauling some to market. Stopped there a couple times transporting bulls to the other side of Gunnison. It’s one of those places one doesn’t seem to see much anymore, a reasonably small, almost hidden spot along the main drag through town, easy to miss if not for the big sign, with a parking lot big enough for two or three horse trailers and/or some pickups and cars.

You know the kind: Most entrees come with a garden salad, a couple of sides, and when you enter, there’s the glass-enclosed counter with eight or so different homemade pies on display that you have to walk past to get to your table, whetting your imagination for a slice for dessert. 

The memory rolls through my mind every day about this time of year, when we’d go check out the livestock market for some summer steers, and I can’t seem to shake it. Maybe it’s kind of like thinking about home after you’ve been gone a while, and you’re looking forward to finally getting back.

My friend, Ed Pfab, and I would always stop there for lunch, taking the same table to the left as we walked in. The big dining room was in back, but we liked to be close to the front, with a long view of the place, maybe in case we needed to make a fast escape or mostly because we could see folks coming and going. In the years we stopped there, it’s entirely possible we never saw what might have been called a “gaper” or “out-of-towner.” 

It’s a place for locals, and not just townfolks or stockmen, but local working men and their ladies. To a man or woman, it’s clear they are on break from one job or other, most of them with grit in some form arranged on their clothes or shoes. Cowboy hats, ball caps, hurriedly combed hair, scarves (babushkas), and an occasional big bandage on a hand or leg, crutches. Some of those jobs play rough, I reckon. As some guy used to say in the old bar at the Red Onion, “You ain’t real ‘less you got shit on yer boots.” Like he would know. 

It should be noted that when my friend Margaret was traveling with us, we always ate in the big dining room in back, and one time, we met up there with Willie and Francesca Fender, who had a ranch in the area. Maybe we slid up to the table back there out of deference to the women. It has a little more quiet and ambiance than the front, maybe.  

Ed Pfab, long-time Aspen Mountain ski patrolman and partner in the Sopris Creek Land and Cattle Company (He and Dick Bird raised grass-fed beef), died from a tragic accident a couple of years ago, and I’ve been making the trip on my own ever since, a couple times a year.

We’d sit at one of those wooden, checkered cloth-covered tables in the far corner and read the weekly paper published by Julie Melville, the one with the fun quizzes and off-the-wall stories one generally couldn’t hear anywhere else. Haven’t seen one of those lately.

“You boys don’t come in here very often, do you?” came the usual greeting from a different waitress every time, always with a smile but with a penetrating look focused just enough to let us know that she knew we weren’t from around there. “Yes, m’am, we eat here when we’re in town.”

Last trip through, last fall, trailer pulled in tight along the edge of the lot and claiming our usual table on the left as you walk in, a chicken fried steak caught my eye, something out of my past. That was like treat of the week although it was more than needed. Coke back. Scarfed that down and went to the cashier to pay, the same woman who had brought the steak. 

She wanted to talk a bit, and somehow got me telling the story you’ve just read, above, and then she threw out, “I’m sorry about your friend,” as a consoling thought. Then, something struck a deeper chord with her, and she asked, with a little more energy and a friendly, quizzical smile, “Are you in a hurry to leave?” Not really. “Honey, go sit back down, and I’ll bring you a fresh slice of apple pie, straight out of the oven. It’s the least I can do.”

Sometimes there’s just something about a place and the stories it holds. Stockyards Restaurant in Delta.  

Tony Vagneur writes here on Saturdays and welcomes your comments at ajv@sopris.net.