The Magpie—it’s open

Over the course of the weekend, Andy and I ate at two nice restaurants. The first one we encountered was the Magpie.

The Magpie is a coffeehouse/deli that caters to students from the nearby Luther College. It goes out of its way to have an informal atmosphere, from the chalk-drawn menus to the social area in back where you can sit on couches, play board games and read magazines. It takes me back to my college days, when coffee houses were really starting to come into their own, and the stores were trying to figure out the right combination of intellectual appeal and informality to hit the current college demographic.

The menu, though, reads less like a coffeehouse menu and more like the menu you’d see at an upscale deli. They offer mostly sandwiches, but sandwiches with seven or eight ingredients, the type of ingredients that are so good they have to tell you about how they are cooked on the menu. You know, things like slow-roasted chicken, carmelized onions, chipotle mayonnaise, jalapeno butter, ciabatta roll, Panini bread, that sort of thing. If your mouth hasn’t watered at least a little bit on hearing those ingredients, you might want to call a doctor or a psychologist. Just sayin’.  They also offer some really unique side dishes, like potato salad or macaroni salad. Personally, I loved the iced tea, which was clearly brewed from some good tea leaves. Keep your Lipton’s Iced Tea that gets dispensed at the local soda machine. The iced tea at the Magpie has that very slight bite of bitterness that separates the merely okay teas from the very good teas.

Personally, though, I think the best feature about the Magpie is that it’s open after regular lunch hours. Andy and I had finished touring the Bily Clock Museum and driving around Spillville. I wanted to take Andy to a nice restaurant for a late lunch, since I’d told him about the plethora of nice restaurants in Decorah. We parked the car around 3 pm, then walked down a block or two until we got to the Rubaiyat, which closed down at 1:30, to open again around 5:00. Fine, I thought. They’re a fancy restaurant, they can do this. So we went across the street to another nice restaurant, which was similarly closed. Also fine, I thought. They’re also a nice restaurant, they probably only serve important people who know when to eat lunch and dinner, not two anarchists who think they can dine out at any point in the day it suits them.

I was not beat yet. I would take Andy to the backup plan of my backup plan, the La Rana bistro. We would go there, Andy would be suitably impressed by the menu, and we’d both marvel at how the restaurant was laid out, how it was built, and why the proprietor seemed so much like a Tom.

As we walked toward the La Rana, I could see the restaurant’ s door open. This was a good sign. I’m not ashamed to admit I smiled in triumph as I went in, following Andy, and saw a woman with short red hair and glasses, wiping down the bar. She looked up, and Andy asked, rather sarcastically, if they were open for business. At which point the waitress, either naturally or intentionally missing the sarcasm, apologized to us and said the La Rana was not in fact serving lunch or dinner, but it was offering drinks. Not wanting to drink our lunch, we decided to head to someplace that was actually serving food. One block over, we found the Magpie.

I am very happy to say Andy and I enjoyed the sandwiches we ordered, and the drinks were very good as well (coffee and iced tea, respectively). There wasn’t much in the way of waitresses, but we did have a very nice barista who refilled our drinks whenever we took them up. Seeing as how the distance from our table to the counter could be reached in about three paces, it wasn’t much of a hassle.  I have talked previously about having a cute woman to bring me lunch. A cute girl who will refill your iced tea? You know, I can live with that.