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Good eats for 40 years

The Hiway Café of Hendricks has been in the same hands for nearly 4 decades

Photo by Jody Isaackson Arlene Kanz poses for a photo by the till in her 35-person capacity diner, the Hiway Café, on Division Street in Hendricks. Roast beef or ham dinners are the specials, with a third choice, such as spaghetti with garlic toast.

HENDRICKS — One myth that has been perpetuated is “bigger is better.” There’s a different one that says, “Good things come in small packages.” The latter is true for a tiny luncheonette at 303 Division Street/Minnesota Highway 271 in Hendricks known as the Hiway Café.

Arlene Kanz of Hendricks has been the owner and sole operator since 1989.

“I rented it quite a few years — from 1977 to 1989, then I bought it,” Kanz said. She will be celebrating 40 years in the café business in February 2017.

According to Kanz, Kermit Kirkvold first owned it as a gas station. He added on, including a small café. After that, it was a just a café for over 75 years. After Kirkvold owned it, three other women took turns owning it for varying numbers of years before Kanz rented it. It even stood empty for a while before she took over.

“I worked at Larsen’s (grocery store) as a meat cutter,” Kanz said. “The café set empty awhile. I would have people come to my house to eat. I was fast and could serve them over my lunch hour.”

If she could do that, why couldn’t she run a café, her husband, Robert Kanz, asked her. So she did and has found a niche in the Hendricks food chain ever since.

There is a sign out front that says, “Seating for 35.” Kanz said the story behind that began with summer lake visitors. They would take one look at the small building sitting next to an equally tiny grocery store, and think the place would be full; they would drive on by.

That’s when the joke began, Kanz said. She made a sign that said, “Seats 350, but not all at one time.” Eventually, she took that down and put up the correct seating capacity. Between the stools at the counter, the cozy two-chair tables along two walls and the booths in the back dining room, there really is seating for 35 diners.

“I have always cooked full dinners,” Kanz said.

Guests come in for the home-cooked meals that you sometimes can’t actually get at “home.” Farmers come in from the field when their spouse is working. Construction workers who can’t get home frequent the café. And many more who just want a homemade piece of pie at coffee time.

Breakfast is served at 8 a.m. as café hours are 8 a.m.-4 p.m. now. They are shortened from the 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. which she first started with.

“I was even open late on Friday nights, but that didn’t work out,” Kanz said.

Daily specials include roast beef and/or ham dinners and a rotating third choice of some hot dish or spaghetti with garlic toast. The meat dinners include real mashed potatoes and gravy, a vegetable — like green beans — and a salad — like macaroni and pea, and a slice of bread.

If you still have room after all that, Kanz will serve up some of her famous pie, banana bread or bars.

“I still take pies to the Hendricks Hospital Assisted Living,” she said. “They really like my pies. I usually only make two kinds, apple and sour cream rhubarb, because they sell the best.”

Kanz is often told that her pie crusts are tender and flaky. That is because she tastes the recipes and if it doesn’t taste quite right, she’ll keep adding things until it does.

The same goes for her homemade gravy.

“If you don’t get good gravy, you might as well throw out the roast. If it tastes bad, there’s got to be a way to make it taste good,” she said, adding, “It isn’t homemade unless it’s from scratch.”

The roast beef dinners and chili cheeseburgers are at the top of the best-seller menu.

“The kids really like my chili cheeseburgers,” Kanz said.

All this from someone who hadn’t cooked at all until she got married 50 years ago. Since then, she has gone from carving meat at the grocery store to carving roast and ham at the café and passing on her cooking skills to her two grown children and her grown granddaughter. The granddaughter cooks for the Hendricks Community Hospital, and the staff has told Kanz that they have never had a better cook.

Hiway Café does a little catering, but since Kanz usually works alone, she doesn’t normally take large events.

Kanz has no plans to retire. She loves what she does and may slow down a bit in the future, maybe closing an hour earlier, especially if she has errands to run. Kanz said she would continue to run the café for as long as she can.

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