[msb-alumni] Re: LSJ Article on Golden Harvest
- From: "Marcia Moses" <mgmoses@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2014 17:05:51 -0500
BlankIs this the same Golden Harvest we hung out at back in the day?
If so, glad it’s still going.
Marcia and Rob
From: Steve
Sent: Monday, February 03, 2014 4:53 PM
To: msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [msb-alumni] LSJ Article on Golden Harvest
With a skull, fork and knife, a community built around breakfast . The sign on
the front door of Golden Harvest says the line starts on the outside "unless
balls of fire are falling from the sky," and so it does, in wind-whipped snow,
blazing heat and every other sort of weather every weekend of the year. More
proof of the city's affection for the bite-sized north Lansing diner and its
plate-smothering breakfasts is hardly necessary. But there are the stickers to
consider. You have almost certainly seen them: a skull with a crossed fork and
knife underneath, a jentacular Jolly Roger, no words to explain what it means.
In Lansing, of course, a lot of people know. Thousands of those stickers have
gone out the door of Golden Harvest over the past eight years, and they mark a
loosely constructed community in a town where it's not odd to wear your
breakfast loyalties on your sleeve or, at least, on your rear windshield. "It
doesn't say our name, so it's not even like advertising," said Vanessa
Vicknair. "It's more like a secret handshake or something. She and her husband,
Zane, have owned Golden Harvest since 2004, near the start of its sixth decade.
They've given the place a particular character, multiplying the tchotchkes,
playing music at barroom volumes, pushing greasy breakfast fare in ambitious
and toothsome directions. She calls the restaurant "a pretty strong
unintentional community," built around long waits, a policy of sharing tables
and sense that the clientele cuts across categories. People who display the
stickers are "almost more letting their freak flag fly," she said, than merely
giving a thumbs-up to the food. Emily Dievendorf sports one of the stickers on
the back of her gray Saturn Ion, not least because "once you've had biscuits
and gravy at Golden Harvest the dish is ruined for you, as anywhere else it
won't compare. When she runs into someone else sporting the same, her most
basic reaction is to "assume that I might actually enjoy talking to them," she
said, which she considers a curious reaction. "When you go in, there are
Democrats and Republicans and there are people who are a little punk rock and
there are people who are kind of granola and there are people who are tatted up
and people who look pretty preppy," said Dievendorf, who is the managing
director of Equality Michigan, a lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender rights
advocacy group. If the clientele has something in common, it's that "they seem
to be independent thinkers," she said. But the stickers can also function as "a
badge of honor," said Cody Hinze, "a way of saying, 'Hey, I'm willing to stand
in line for two hours to have a 'cup' of coffee and some hash browns.' Hinze, a
former designer and multi-media manager with Lansing State Journal, created the
skull-and-silverware logo, after a fashion, carving it into a 38-pound pumpkin
at the counter of Golden Harvest in the fall of 2005. Zane Vicknair said he
knew quickly it should be the logo. "We put it on our menu, put it on our front
door, put it on a T-shirt," he said. Not long after, a Lansing artist named Tom
Sheerin, "a sign and sticker guy for all of my adult life," started putting it
on stickers. Seeing the stickers out in the world - and they've been spotted as
far off as Dubai - has since become a sort of augury for Vicknair, a sign "that
I'm in the right place at the right time. "It's a happy indication, because
it's connected to us. I feel very connected to them in a weird way. Golden
Harvest is not the only Lansing restaurant in the sticker game. Fork in the
Road, an artisanal diner on the city's west side, has been putting out stickers
with a split-fork logo (also sans words) since this past summer. Fork in the
Road co-owner Jesse Hahn reads other people displaying those stickers as an
endorsement of the Fork in the Road's food and its practice of local sourcing.
"We think it's really cool that they want to tell the city. There are even a
handful of cars in the city that sport stickers from both restaurants. If they
are marks of loyalty, they don't seem to be exclusive. It all invites a certain
amount of speculation about the power of brunch. "Brunch is for debate and
recovery while dinner is for polite conversation," Dievendorf said. "We are
spent at dinner but we bring our whole selves to breakfast. "This," she added,
"is an important subject. Inside Golden Harvest, there is a skull and
silverware made from an old silver bowl, one cut with a laser out of brushed
steel, two in stained glass. A rustier version hangs outside. The stickers once
marked a relatively small circle, Hinze said, but that circle has grown. "I
hope all those people understand that the sticker on their car represents
goodness," he said. "It's hard to put that into words.
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