Dinner At The Museum

Evansville cafe preserves pieces of the past

Connie Patterson opened the Country Kitchen Cafe in Evansville to offer the community homecooked food. Along the way, it’s become the repository for the town’s history, too.
Connie Patterson opened the Country Kitchen Cafe in Evansville to offer the community homecooked food. Along the way, it’s become the repository for the town’s history, too.

Connie Patterson describes her Country Kitchen Cafe as an “old-fashioned diner,” complete with coconut cream pie made from scratch and the daily coffee klatsch where the business of Evansville is conducted.

“Museum that serves food” might not be far off the mark either.

“The community of Evansville is awash with early Washington County history,” Glenn Jones, a member of the Benton County Historical Preservation Commission, writes in an email. “And Connie Patterson is performing an outstanding job researching the history, gathering early documents, interviewing elderly residents, etc.”

When Patterson opened the cafe in November of 2009, she intended simply to decorate the walls with old photos of Evansville.

“People kept telling me it used to be a big, booming town back at the turn of the (20th) century,” she says. “When I dug into it, I found out it was the hub” of the area.

At the time, Patterson says, the town boasted 150 people, five general stores and three cotton gins, each powered by steam or horse. The Bethlehem Cemetery just down the road turned out to be among the first public cemeteries in Washington County, dating back to 1827.

“It just fascinated me,” she says, “and the more I learned, the more I caught the fever.”

Locals started bringing pieces of their families’ past to go on the walls.

“People come around all the time telling us something we didn’t know or giving us a newavenue to explore,” Patterson says.

Of course, they also stop to eat while they’re there - and everything about the Country Kitchen Cafe’s menu is oldfashioned, too.

Patterson says it’s “95 percent done from scratch,” from home-cut fries to handbreaded chicken fried steaks, chicken pot pie, stew, potato soup and platters featuring roast beef or tunastuffed tomatoes.

Particularly popular are the daily specials - which run around $8; catfish - served every Friday with a choice of one, two or three 5- to 7-ounce filets; and burgers that start at $3.25 with fries $1 extra.

Pies are homemade, too, and include coconut cream, chocolate peanut butter, apple with English walnuts, pecan, custard, oatmeal, rhubarb, raisin, sweet potato - “I’ll make almost any kind people ask for,” Patterson says. The price is $2.50 for a slice of cream pie or $2.75 a slice for nut or fruit pies.

Unique to the restaurant is the monster burger meal, designed to feed a family of four to six. For $19.95, the cheeseburger is 1 1 /2 pounds of meat, with all the fixin’s, served with two orders of fries and two orders of onion rings.

It’s the carryout of choice for folks who are at least 10 miles from a drive-through.

“We put it together so people can come by and grab it and take it home for a movie night or whatever,” Patterson says.

Diners do drive to Evansville just to eat, she adds.

“We have a very diverse group of customers, from all over,” she says. “It’s a nice drive, and people can relax and eat with us. If you walk away hungry from our place, it’s your own fault.”

Whats Up, Pages 16 on 01/25/2013

Upcoming Events