Breakfast in Jail

Breakfast in JailApril 14th, 2009

Food behind bars never tasted so good at Moab's Jailhouse Café

by: Anand Rao

In a corner of Moab's main street is an old little building trying to stand out amidst a bustling clutter of color. Its exterior walls are painted hot pink. The windows and doors have bright yellow borders. Like any peak season restaurant in a tourist town it has long lines of people and restaurant staff running around. Once inside, there's nothing to tell you that this place is different from most others. It's called Jailhouse café and the tag line says, "Good enough for a last meal." No, they don't play Elvis or Johnny Cash or any other prison songs you have grown up listening. Even if they did no one would guess what this little place has been up to. It's like any other good breakfast place serving delicious egg benedicts. If you care to look behind the name, it reveals a very interesting story.

For every Jeep or a Harley thundering past today, there are a hundred more muted thunders inside the walls of the Jailhouse Café. There was a time when judges thumped down their hammers and hardened criminals sat behind iron doors waiting for their turn. The building was constructed in 1885 and when it moved hands seven years later, it served as the first county courthouse of Grand County Utah. Adjoining the hall was an actual jail that held several convicts of those times. The basic structure of Jailhouse café still retains the original elements. The kitchen and the store have strong walls that are two feet thick and the door frames are stout iron beams. The other entry doors and windows are intact, standing as mute witnesses. If only they could talk and give me the names of all the past inhabitants of that cell. In the intervening years, the building has been a house, a post office, a store and a crumbling ruin till 1992 when William Petty a connoisseur of heritage architecture and a passionate cook decided to turn the building into a restaurant. Just before it became today's Jailhouse café, the building suffered neglect in a severely strained Moab's uranium-based economy.

Loretta Adkison, who manages the Jailhouse Café said, "The restaurant is only 15 years old but the building has seen so much more over the last 124 years. All the walls and the frames are from the early days."

Loretta Adkison

William Petty himself designed the menu and made all the necessary additions to turn it around into a delightful little restaurant. Now, behind the two-foot thick adobe walls are shelves with lines of buttermilk pancake mix, empty vessels and other items needed for the next day's business. The door to the actual cell could have been an interesting piece of study but Loretta, knows nothing about it. She only laughs and rubs her elbow saying, "The edges are so hard, I have chipped my bones on them many times."

Did the cell have among its elite guests one Mr. Butch Cassidy? Could be, if some time is spent on collecting the details who knows what interesting facts pour out?