Growing up, I spent summer vacations with a pack of cousins, running around a small town in North Dakota, and while the walleye was plentiful, as were the pan-baked dessert bars, the area was not known for its culinary treats. Meals, whether served in a restaurant or the basement of the Lutheran church or a private home, consisted not so much of food groups as they did of colors: brown, yellow and white. Shortcuts like cornstarch thickener and boxed meals were abundant. And the only vegetables I'd see during my stay were pickles.
For a kid, that heavy-starch, high-salt, high-fat, artificially flavored diet was the stuff of glorious, glittering dreams. My mother couldn't insist that I eat my boneless, skinless chicken breast and salad because boneless, skinless chicken breasts and salads didn't seem to exist in North Dakota. She couldn't tell me to finish my milk, because the only liquid available was Coke (pronounced with a round O, obviously). She could only insist that I pull my chair up to the table — because dinner time was family time — and eat until everyone was done. Which could be hours later.
Over the years, my trips to North Dakota became shorter and more infrequent, and I almost lost my taste for the cuisine (if you can call it that) entirely. But it came back in an intense and immediate flashback the second I first set foot in the Butcher Block Cafe in north Denver, one of a trio of restaurants opened 32 years ago by the trio of Michel brothers, who are bona fide North Dakotans. The boxy room features an old-school lunch counter and a few rows of diner tables, which were filled with a chatty crowd of shift workers, solo diners reading the paper and drinking coffee, and families wearing polo shirts that bore the names of farms and industrial products. A couple of middle-aged waitresses weaved between the tables, taking orders and chatting up guests in a genuinely friendly style that can only be described as Midwestern. The whole scene could have been imported straight from my youth.
My food arrived a predictable white and brown: a slop of cornstarch-thickened beef bouillon gravy heaped over a gray gristly burger on a couple of slices of white bread, sided with a scoop of mashed potatoes that could very well have come from a box (though it was hard to tell under all that gravy). North Dakota is a state where employees at Mexican restaurants call salsa "tack-o sauce," so I'd also asked for a cup ofgreen chile, just to see what this kitchen would come up with. Apparently it was inspired by another Midwestern delicacy, Jell-O, because this green chile was gelatinous, like a green chile pudding, complete with lumpy bits where the cornstarch hadn't been mixed in completely.
The food at the Butcher Block is the opposite of haute cuisine. It's heavy, oppressive, likely to inspire a heart attack as soon as you've consumed it — as low as you can go. Still, I enjoyed every minute of my time at this place, because it reminded me of a time when food was important largely because it gave a big, extended family an excuse to get together.
