Cornell cafe stacks up tasty breakfast platters
Main Stacker comes on two massive dishes

April 22, 2007

The Stacker Cafe is named for Cornell’s most famous
landmark: the 175-foot long steel conveyer-crane — possibly the world’s only remaining pulpwood stacker — that was used from about 1913 to around 1972 to lift and stack pulpwood log pieces destined for the town’s papermill.

When a cafe customer orders the huge breakfast combo called the Main Stacker, we imagine the servers wish they had use of that crane.

Our Main Stacker arrived on two — two! — massive oval platters of differing dimensions. The large platter, about 8 by 12 inches, came completely covered by a ¾-inch-thick buttermilk pancake that the cook had crowned with a slab of inch-thick French toast. The even larger platter bore our choice of two eggs (scrambled, moist), our choice of breakfast meat (two mildly spiced sausage patties, well browned), our choice of toast from the various good
breads (excellent sourdough made in-house with the cafe’s
own starter), plus an 8-inch wide potato pancake with a
little dish of applesauce. For all this, we paid $6.95.

Advice: Eat your potato pancake first. It should still be hot and a little crisp without, warm and gently oniony within.

Other noteworthy breakfast items we sampled included expertly crisped bacon, $1.69 a la carte; carefully browned spicy sausage links, $1.69 a la carte; two slices of good raisin toast, 75 cents; and some old fashioned homemade baked goods: OK cinnamon rolls thickly daubed with white
frosting, $1.50, and very good caramel rolls with gooey brown sugar-butter syrup and the pleasant crunch of occasional rough-chopped walnuts, $1.50.

The Stacker Cafe is a small, clean, neighborly place with simple, satisfying food
— much of it house-made — at modest prices. Service during our visits was friendly
and attentive.

If you go for lunch or dinner, follow these guidelines: Opt for any soup; any potato except french fries and mashed; any deep- or pan-fried meat or fish. When we tried them, the french fries were pale and soft and the mashed potatoes, despite generous dollops of good beef gravy, were both watery tasting and — paradoxically — too dry and dense.

One slow-cooked meat — pork ribs — was as desiccated and tough as jerky; the decent bottled barbecue sauce helped but couldn’t perform the needed rehydration
miracle, $8.95. Another, the beef in the large hot beef sandwich (with that good
gravy), was moist enough but less tender than it could have been, $4.50.

But the soups! The classic split pea, with ham and carrot bits, had fine taste and
the best texture — medium thin and only semi-puréed — of any green-pea soup
we’ve eaten. The chili, thick enough to stand a spoon in, was creamy-rich and assertive, with tender meat and kidney beans ready to burst. Chicken Barley Soup featured tasty, tomato-enhanced broth with impressive chunks of outstandingly succulent meat hand-torn from a house-roasted bird. Chicken Spätzle had shredded
meat and superb little dumplings — no bigger than your baby fingertip — that melted away in the mouth. A Stuffed Green Pepper Soup offered rice bits suspended in
tomatoey creaminess, but it lacked zip.

Curly fries came lightly seasoned, deep-fried until enticingly crusty, and served
in a huge, happy tangle of rings, springs, commas and question marks. Both hash
brown and lyonnaise potatoes arrived in flat, fragile haystacks nicely browned on
top and bottom. And the American fries, our favorite Stacker potatoes, had been rough-cut into wedges, wafers, chunks, nuggets and chips, then slow-sautéed until crisp and golden on at least one side. With a sprinkle of salt, flavors blossomed.

The 1/3-pound hamburgers are griddled to order and served on fresh, shiny, highdomed
buns; ours had melted American cheese and two pieces of that great bacon, $3.75. The tasty pan-fried pork chops — utterly plain, still moist, slightly browned — made us nostalgic for our mothers’ good cooking, $6.75 for two. Sliced too thin and cooked a bit too long, the calves’ liver, $5.75, arrived a little chewy and a little dry. But we ate every bite.

The Stacker also makes excellent deep-fried chicken in a thin, crackly batter sheath that keeps the meat juicy — half a chicken, $6.95. Equally good is the deepfried
haddock. A beer batter with understated maltiness enrobes thick, moist filets in dark-caramelized crunch — $6.95 with house-made slaw, perky house-made tartar sauce and choice of potato.

Choose between pie and cookies for dessert. If any pie has fresh fruit — ask! — get
it. We loved the subtly spiced Dutch apple with its inch and a half of thick-sliced, tender, bright-flavored fruit. Otherwise, go for the house-made cookies. These are kept frozen but can be defrosted and warmed to order in the microwave. Next time we’ll skip the oatmeal raisin cookies; they’re like spongy cakes. But we revered the peanut butter and the gingery molasses cookies.

After your meal, stroll or drive down the Bridge Street hill to the Stacker Cafe’s
namesake. The Chippewa Valley’s history still towers over Mill Yard Park.

Main Course, the Leader-Telegram's restaurant review column, runs the second Tuesday and the fourth Sunday of the month.

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