[msb-alumni] Re: LSJ Article on Golden Harvest
- From: Terry Posont <terryt52@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2014 18:01:10 -0600
I think they have been called the Olympic grill for quite a while now
Sent from my iPhone
> On Feb 3, 2014, at 4:05 PM, "Marcia Moses" <mgmoses@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> 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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