The Greatest Breakfast Restaurant Ever

When we lived in Grass Valley, I worked for a foodservice company called Ralph’s and Farber’s.  They were a distributor of Nugget products.  My territory included Auburn, Grass Valley, Nevada City, Colfax and all the surrounding areas.  I loved my job, my territory, my customers, and the raw beauty of the foothills.  I looked forward to each day.  One of my customers in Nevada City was a restaurant called The Apple Fare.  This is the place that I want to highlight in this article.  I don’t know if this restaurant is still in business but at the time it was located on the main street of Nevada City.  The store front wasn’t anything special.  The owner was a woman named Joyce and she was, in many ways, a tyrant.  Most people didn’t like her because I don’t think she liked many people.  She really knew how to cook and was extremely hard working and ran a very tight ship…so to speak.  In addition to cooking, she was a baker.  She baked cakes, pies, cookies to die for.  These were always available and I don’t think there were any kinds that she didn’t have the ability to make perfectly.  I cannot remember if the menu said Eggs “The way you like them”, but the food is not the focus of my article.  The thing that made this place so special was the ambiance.  When you walked in there was a huge round table in the middle of the room.  I would guess that the table was at least 12 feet across.  There were fresh flowers in the middle.  Magazines and the morning paper in quantity.  Again, I will guess but I believe that there was seating for at least 15 people around this table.  When you sat down and started reading the newspaper, or thumb through a magazine and smelled the aroma of the fresh flowers and the scent of coffee and bake goods it was magical.  There, of course, were other tables around the edges of the room and one nice table up by the front window but the centerpiece of the restaurant was this huge table.  You could enjoy your coffee and breakfast and sit alongside a friend that you went with or talk to other people that you didn’t know.  Because of the arrangement it actually encouraged interaction with other people.  Joyce was a difficult customer and the people in my company were sure that I would join the other representatives, who had made her mad, and were replaced because she refused to work with them.  Keeping her as a customer became a big challenge for me.  I believed that as a sales representative I needed to love all my customers, especially the ones who were difficult.  I got to know Joyce and actually ended up liking her.  We became friends and it reached the point that she trusted me to take her inventory each week and write my own food order for her.  I will never forget Joyce or The Apple Fare.  As far as I am concerned that huge round table in the middle of the restaurant made this place the Greatest Breakfast Restaurant Ever.  Unlike Mister Charley’s in Grass Valley there was rarely burnt toast.