Your Guide to Authentic Regional Eats
The Sand Creek Café is an off-the-beaten-path destination in the Chippewa Valley with something for everyone. It is a convenience store, a diner, a soda fountain, a reading room, a turkey-hunter registration station, a gathering place of the local “Liars Club” of old-timers who live along the Red Cedar River, and a display area for chef Alice Motzer’s taxidermy. The building goes back to the 1920s; and today, with its wood-slat ceiling and barnboard walls, it has a genuine vintage aura, amazingly abetted the morning we visited by a conversation at a nearby table among senior citizens about the faults and virtues of the Model A Ford! (“The weakness of the Model A was its steering wheel,” one old gent in overalls proclaimed. “The steering wheel would fall off when you least expected it.”) Those who don't come to converse with friends and neighbors read old issues of Bird Watchers Digest or Popular Mechanics that are hung on a central post in the dining room as communal reading material.
