Lil Red’s Shack
Essay Posted June 20, 2006 by James E. Nelson
There’s a restaurant that I’ve been intending to go to out by Waterbury, NE for over three years. But when we decide to go out to eat, it’s usually almost dinner time already, so the idea of putting off dinner another half hour just so we can drive to Waterbury isn’t particularly attractive. Besides, restaurants that far out of town suffer from an “out of sight, out of mind” disadvantage. When we consider where to go eat, we generally don’t think of places outside of Sioux City.
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| Lil Red's Shack, Waterbury, NE |
Although driving for our dinner is certainly not unknown for us. We are relatively regular at the Longbranch in Hinton, IA, which is almost as far as Waterbury. It’s a wonderful family owned saloon/restaurant that usually has a “buffet” offering every night. I use the term buffet with reservations. It’s more of a serve-yourself option for the nightly special. The food is fresh and some of their vegetable sides are especially excellent. For those who want to cut down on meat and increase their vegetable intake, the Longbranch is generally a good option. (Although, truth be told, since it’s a serve yourself operation, I generally eat more meat than I should.)
There are distinct similarities between Hinton’s Longbranch Saloon and Waterbury’s Lil’ Red’s Shack. To start with, they’re both family owned and operated and serve real homemade food. Second, they are both saloons that serve food. This gives both of them a certain gritty and down-home feel that I enjoy as part of my dining experience.
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| The Route of old Hwy 20 into the Bottoms |
We went to Waterbury on a Friday night, which means the feature was the inevitable Friday Night Fish Fry. We arrived about 5:30 and they hadn’t even fired up the fryer yet, so we had to wait a bit for our meal. While we were waiting the owner gave us a history of the place. It’s located prominently on top of a hill, although this was not the building’s original location. It’s known history goes back to the 20s when it was a moonshine shack located down in “the bottoms.” After the end of prohibition it became a bar and restaurant and sometime whorehouse (depending on the owners). In the late 30s, when U.S. 20 was straightened, the building was moved to its present location, so that it could attract traffic from the highway. Whorehouses, being illegal in Nebraska, were generally tucked out of sight, but the current owner claims that it was the only whorehouse in the region that was located prominently on top of a hill. It was during this period that it became a popular stop for over the road trucks, U.S. 20 being a major truck route of the period. (They must have served good coffee. What else would explain its popularity with the truckers?)
It eventually closed and was abandoned for quite some time before the current owner bought it. The thing that attracted me to this story is the current owner’s willingness to work hard simply in order to keep a bit of history alive. Financially he would have been much farther ahead if he would have razed the building and started from scratch. Instead, he refurbished a piece of history.
The wood floor was covered with linoleum which was glued to the floor with a very thick layer of tar. After finally getting the linoleum removed, he discovered that he was unable to remove the tar using traditional means. He couldn’t sand it, either, because the tar would plug up the sandpaper. He spent every night scraping tar by hand. He said that if he worked for several hours, he could scrape four boards a night (about 4" by 16'). After several weeks he got the tar removed and was able to bring in a sander to finish the job.
There was also a big hole in the hardwood floor where the still used to sit. It had been filled in with plywood. He was able to find a local woodworker who could reproduce the wood flooring, because it’s no longer possible to find commercially made wood flooring as narrow as the original (only about an inch wide). The woodworker used the top off an old oak teachers desk to make the needed pieces to fill in the hole.
The original “shack” was very small and there now three different additions to the building. The first was the original kitchen, which he has turned into additional seating. The second is the new kitchen and the third holds the new, up-to-code bathrooms and additional dining space. When the old building was abandoned, the water was not turned off for quite some time and as a result that part of the floor, including the supporting structure underneath, had rotted out, and a lot of the dirt underneath that part of the building had washed away. Before that area could be turned into a dining nook, it had to be torn out, down to the dirt, fill dirt brought in, and the floor and foundation rebuilt.
While the owner was showing us his workmanship as well has historical pictures, I was able to see into the kitchen. There two young women (I’m guessing his daughters) were busy making the egg wash and breading fresh fish for the fish fry.
When we first walked in I noticed the kitchen was extremely small. I was therefore expecting pre-made meals straight from the freezer to the deep-fat fryer. It didn’t seem like there was enough room to do much else. But after hearing the story of how much work was required to take this place from abandoned whore-house and trucker’s lunch joint to modern saloon and restaurant, it didn’t surprise me one bit to see his employees crowded into the kitchen, working elbow to elbow breading fresh fish for the fish fry. I’m sure an owner like this would demand nothing less.
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| Lil Red's is underneath the trees on the distant hill. |
I’ve noticed an unfortunate trend in Chinese restaurants. (Keep reading, I’m not straying off topic, in spite of what appearances might be at this juncture.) In Sioux City, as in almost every other town I know of, there are about as many Chinese restaurants as all the rest of the restaurants combined. There are a few chains, but most of them are independent places run by immigrant families. They’re nearly all buffets, and increasingly the food from restaurant to restaurant looks and tastes exactly the same. A single item made me aware of this trend. It’s a casserole-style dish made with linguini-sized noodles, fake crab (or Krab, as it is typically called), cheese, and sour cream. I only know one or two places that don’t serve the stuff. I’m pretty sure it comes straight from the truck in a cryo-wrapped in a block designed to fit right into one of those buffet warming plates. Once I caught on to the krab casserole, I began to realize that three-quarters of the other dishes were also precisely the same. I may be wrong, but I am pretty sure that most of the Chinese food consumed is made in some massive kitchen in some far-away city, where it is cryo-wrapped and shipped to Chinese restaurants across the country.
This is precisely what I expected out in Waterbury. The food wasn’t great, but most of it was clearly home made. (The “hash browns” were an exception. They may have been hi-jacked off a McDonalds truck.) The soup, was probably a big can of Veg-All, a pound of hamburger, and a can of tomato paste, with spices to taste. But, the point is, that the soup was clearly created right there in the kitchen of Lil’ Red’s Shack. There was even fresh Romaine lettuce on the salad bar that was almost certainly grown in the garden and bacon bits that were clearly freshly chopped from a pound of bacon. We didn’t have dessert, but they also serve home-made pies and delectables. I’m guessing they’re not only home-baked, but as home-made as most everything else.
In other words, it wasn’t four-star dining by any stretch of the imagination, but it had all the loving marks of being cooked right there by someone who cared. The food matched the restaurant perfectly.
There are a lot easier ways to run a restaurant in this day and age. But pride of ownership is clearly more important to these people than doing anything the easy way. So if you’re traveling U.S. 20 through Nebraska, plan on making a stop just west of Waterbury at the top of the hill. If you do, you’re in for a unique and enjoyable dining experience.
Copyright © 2006 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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