Cracker Barrel’s first customer

Reading time: 6 minutes

Last week, something happened in Colorado for the first time in 28 years:

A new Cracker Barrel opened.

And I was one of its first customers.

A Southern tradition

Of my parents’ four sons, only one has ever declared residency outside our native Massachusetts. After my middle brother settled in Georgia, we all packed our bags for a visit to our southern relative. It was then that he introduced us to a restaurant chain that was founded in Tennessee in 1969 and, at the time of our visit in 1993, was still predominantly limited to the American South.

Immediately upon entering a Cracker Barrel, its unique format is evident: like when going through airport customs, visitors must wade through a gift shop to get to their destination. The random tchotchkes, apparel, and candy are meant to hearken back to old country stores; it was here that a younger me picked up some audio cassette recordings of classic radio shows like The Shadow and The Jack Benny Program. But always, I was motivated to navigate through the store as quickly as possible to reach my favorite meal of the day: breakfast.

Breakfast is often the reason I get up in the morning, motivated by an urgent dash to quiet my rumbling belly. I became especially eager for breakfast after I became a vegetarian in 2002, since almost all the basic options — pancakes, waffles, omelettes, fruit, yogurt, granola — are meatless by default.

Cracker Barrel has all those in spades. And, similar to how I like my muffins and bagels, I can get all sorts of fruit in my pancakes. One time, I even convinced the kitchen to go off-menu by combining their cinnamon-apple pancakes and pecan pancakes into one crunchy, fruit-laden stack of carbohydrates — all drenched in maple syrup, of course.

Since 1997, there have been four Cracker Barrels operating in Colorado, none of them in Denver, where I was spending this past winter and spring. So when the news broke that a new restaurant was opening, I knew I had to be in line.

Opening Day

For some people, opening day refers to baseball season, which this year was March 27.

For me, it meant Monday, April 21, at 7 AM. That’s when Denver’s new Cracker Barrel would open its doors.

My alarm went off at 5:45 AM that morning and, after a quick shower, I hopped in the car for the 20-minute drive to the other side of town.

Alas, there were two confounding factors to my transit. The first was that, oddly, the new Cracker Barrel shares the same street address as a nearby gas station. When I showed up at the address that had been reported in the local paper, I assumed there’d been an error. I switched to Google Maps and asked it to send me to the nearest Cracker Barrel, which it claimed was a mile down the road.

A mile down the road was a construction site at the corner of an intersection, proving that Google Maps didn’t know what it was talking about. By the time I realized this, traffic prevented me from turning around; I had to get back on the highway and loop back to where I started. And from the vantage point of the raised highway, there I spotted my destination. Ignoring maps and so-called smartphones, I navigated myself to Cracker Barrel. I slammed into a parking spot and flew up to the entrance, where three people waited ahead of me.

The first person in line was an older gentleman who’d been waiting since 6:15 AM; he was soon joined by a colleague. A young couple were waiting behind them. That made me fifth in line.

As we sat on the rocking chairs, we watched the restaurant’s front doors selectively open from the inside to admit servers and other employees who were hustling to their first shift, arriving mere minutes ahead of their first customers. Anticipation was building.

Just before the doors opened to customers, a gaggle of older women showed up to dine together. While the first five of us knew the order of our arrival, the appearance of so many other customers prompted us to form a proper queue. For some reason, the matriarch of this new crew took exception to me and held out her cane to block me, claiming she was in line ahead of me. I don’t know if she was joking, but I innocently assumed she was and held my ground. I’d waited too long for this.

I don’t just mean the 15 minutes since I arrived, but over a decade beforehand. Although I like supporting local businesses and mom & pop shops, I don’t do so exclusively — and Cracker Barrel was worth an exception: it was somewhere I would take dates out for breakfast. When I was in college, the nearest Cracker Barrel was a 30-minute drive, but the food was worth the one-hour round trip — a trip that extended our date before and after the meal, giving us more time to talk and enjoy each other’s company. It was a fun and innocent tradition.

But then I dated someone who held an extreme value: she wouldn’t dine at any chain restaurant. For the two years we were together, she refused to step inside a Cracker Barrel. Shortly after our relationship was finally over, I became a nomad. In the six years since, despite seeing the restaurant’s highway billboards in 45 states throughout the nation, I’ve never stopped at one. The context in which I used to patronize them was gone.

But the opportunity to be one of this Cracker Barrel’s first customers was unprecedented. And I wasn’t going to let anyone — not an ex or a little old lady — stand in my way.

Grand entrance

Finally, the doors opened — and the staff was there, lined up to greet us and applaud us. As I made my way in, one of the staffers thrust a card into my hands. A bit overwhelmed, I shoved it in my pocket for later.

I made my way to the maître d’ station. The two men who were first in line prioritized perusing the country store, so although I was the fifth person to enter the restaurant, I was the third to be seated.

As I browsed the menu, I realized there were no vegetarian “combo” breakfasts: everything included bacon or sausage. I nonetheless ordered my old standby of apple-cinnamon pancakes with a fruit cup substituting for the meat.

As I waited for my meal, something spectacular happened. I pulled out the card I’d been given at the entrance — and discovered it was a $100 gift card to Cracker Barrel! Not only was this meal on the house, but so were the next several.

I was confused how I ended up with a card labeled as being for “the fourth person or party in line”, though. I was the fifth person and third party; did someone else get two cards, or none? And did I miss out on getting an even greater value card by getting lost on the way and not being earlier in line?

Regardless, I wasn’t looking a gift horse in the mouth. When I excitedly shared news of my prize with my oldest brother, he asked how early the night before I’d lined up outside. I thought he was joking — but apparently, had news of these rewards been broadcast, there would’ve been people for whom a cold night outside a closed Cracker Barrel would’ve been worth it!

The only thing that could’ve made that moment better was if I’d finally defeated the infamous peg game. Alas, the closest I could come was getting the board down to two pegs. I instead enjoyed the prerequisite metagame of ensuring all the pegs were arranged symmetrically by color.

The food arrived, and it was as good as always — except I got charged for the fruit and the absent meat. A manager had to be called over to clarify that fruit can’t be substituted for meat, but she could ring everything up as separate line items instead of as a combo, which would be cheaper. (Just because the meal was free didn’t mean I wanted to deplete my gift card faster than necessary.) I presume my server was new — it was her first shift, after all — and she would’ve gotten it right with practice.

Fortunately, the meal ended on a high note when a different server came over to fill my water, and we struck up a lively conversation. She works at Cracker Barrel and Chili’s during the day so she can audition for plays at night — following in the footsteps of her father, who works for the film distribution company A24. This server even claimed to have an IMDb credit (just like me!). Even though I couldn’t find her online profile based on the details she provided, it was nonetheless fun to connect with someone in an unexpected way. I apologized for monopolizing her time, but she said it was all part of her job in customer relations. I called the manager the next day to praise this young employee.

Worth the wait

I’d anticipated the opening of the new Cracker Barrel for weeks — but as the date approached, nobody shared my enthusiasm. When I detailed my plans to my friends, the best response I got was “I love that for you!”; certainly no one else asked to join me for this early-morning outing.

But that’s what life as a nomad is like: deciding what fun, quirky, harmless, unique thing I want to do next, and then allowing myself to do it. Sometimes, love doesn’t mean sharing pancakes; it means giving yourself permission to enjoy your own pancakes.

This wasn’t the only line I stood in this week; three days later, I’d spend over two hours with two dozen other people outside a GameStop. But nothing will ever be as simultaneously profitable and delicious as being one of the first five customers of a Colorado Cracker Barrel this millennium.

Now that’s a breakfast worth getting out of bed for.

What’s one of your favorite restaurant chains, and why? Let me know where I should stop in the comments!