[msb-alumni] Re: LSJ Article on Golden Harvest
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2014 18:08:25 -0500
BlankYeah, same location. Some of the greasy fare is the same, but it has
gone through several ownership changes.
----- Original Message -----
From: Marcia Moses
To: msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, February 03, 2014 5:05 PM
Subject: [msb-alumni] Re: LSJ Article on Golden Harvest
Is 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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