"Midwestern cuisine--it's an oxymoron, isn't it?" says Jay Wergin, the Green Bay, Wisconsin–bred half of the partnership behind West Seattle's Heartland Cafe. "In the Midwest, people just eat differently. I feel like I need to explain that a little more. Like, to the audience, you know?"
Peter Mumford
The Benbow Room is as close
as these guys will get to drinking in a ship—on land, anyway.
Location Info
Details
Heartland Cafe and the Benbow Room 4210 S.W. Admiral Way, 922-3313, heartlandcafeseattle.com. 8 a.m.–10 p.m. Tues.–Thurs.; 8 a.m.–3 a.m. Fri.–Sat.; 8 a.m.–9 p.m. Sun. Benbow Room: 3 p.m.–2 a.m.; 10 a.m.–2 a.m. on weekends. Both closed Monday.
Related Content
More About
What there is in the American Midwest is food—mountains of food, piled high to make up, perhaps, for the flatness of the geography and to lend a kind of artificial, edible horizon to views that can sometimes stretch forever. The Midwest is where the world's notions of how Americans eat were formed, and where Americans' ideas of who we are as an omnivorous people grew out of.
The dearest images of Midwestern food are straight out of Norman Rockwell: hazy summer days with picnic tables groaning under the weight of bowls of potato salad, grilled brats, molded Jell-O desserts, and jugs of lemonade sweating in the heat; warm family gatherings for holiday meals of gleaming golden turkeys with all the trimmings and Dad standing by ready to carve; Betty Draper blondes in frilled aprons pulling tuna noodle casseroles from gleaming Maytag ovens; smiling, benevolent grandmothers laying out fresh pies to cool on windowsills beyond which stretch nothing but acres of corn and a million Lassie reruns.
The Midwest is where many of America's less-than-cosmopolitan culinary influences call home—from Scandinavian housewives creaming herrings and German Mennonite farmers eating their bratwurst to the places where the strangest old fads still linger—ham with pineapple rings and savory gelatins and things made with cans of cream-of-mushroom soup. But it is also a place where cheese is its own food group and the notion of local cafes serving nothing but seasonal foods obtained from the farmer down the road is reality. It is the heartland of America. It is our soul and our belly, and occasionally our ignored conscience. American food was born in the long reaches of the Great Plains. But there is no "cuisine."
It's just good food, solid food, food that somehow got lost with the sudden rush to "New American cuisine" and "American comfort food" and all the various jumped-up, Continental, fusiony interpretations of things that Americans have known and eaten for years. All of these "cuisines" serve to bury the actual foods they are meant to honor.
But the Heartland Cafe exists to put that right.
In the beginning, there was the Admiral Benbow Inn—a place so beloved by the people of West Seattle (and Seattle at large) that when it closed, pirates showed up to mourn its passing, the mayor made an appearance, and the fixtures were sold right off the walls.
Since the Admiral Benbow shut its doors for good in 2002, the space has remained primarily dark. It was briefly occupied by a blues-and-Cajun joint, but, according to Wergin, all that place did in its eight-month existence was manage to ruin the space even further than the Benbow's closing-night party, estate sale, and final abandonment ever did.
"They did more damage than good," he says, referring to the way they painted the whole place in shades of black, white, and gray and marginalized the Spanish galleon–themed bar that was like a grown-up's version of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland—complete with rum and blood and smoke, real wenches, true debauchery, and a vibe that surpassed camp and made straight for that rare inner territory of honest love for the weird.
When Wergin (the brains) and his partner, Jeff Loren (a veteran chef with 25 years in the whites), first picked up the space, they weren't necessarily thinking of doing a restaurant.
"We thought about making it into a place to sell sausage," Wergin explains. But with Wergin having spent 20 years in the printing business and Loren just being a white jacket with a nice resume, he admitted that there was just too much they didn't know about running a retail operation. A restaurant, though? They thought they could make that work.
And then they saw what was left of the Admiral Benbow.
What happened next either proves the existence of fate and providence or simply means that the food gods have a soft spot for pirates. Wergin explains that they'd started refurbishing the bar—cleaning it up, stripping the paint, returning the woods to their natural glory, and installing little shadow boxes full of piratey knickknacks that would speak to the joint's Treasure Island roots. But one of the big things missing were the four stained-glass panels that made up the ship's transom—showing either a sunrise, a sunset, or a guttering fire on the high seas, depending on your particular outlook. The panels were Italian, Wergin says, and they were beautiful. But they were gone, sold during the last-days bacchanalia when the Admiral Benbow closed up shop.
Now here's the weird part. While Wergin and Loren were working, word got out to the guys drinking at the Shipwreck next door that they were looking for those original stained-glass panels. One of the drinkers was a contractor who'd been very fond of the Admiral Benbow during its heyday. So fond, in fact, that he'd bought all four pieces of glass and had been carrying them around for five years, just waiting to find something to do with them. When he heard about the two guys trying to remake the bar next door, he dropped by. And lo and behold, he and Wergin knew each other from some work the contractor had done in the past. In the end, he sold the four panels, still in perfect shape, to Wergin and Loren for less than he'd paid during the Benbow's estate sale.
