Plains Folk

NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665

March 18, 1999

Plains Folk: Exploring the Empress

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

"I suspect we're creating memories for them."

We'd been talking across the counter about life in general, life in Drake, N.D., and running the Empress Cafe. We watched as the twins, Cynthia and Colleen, put on aprons and began work serving the Sunday crowd. And John Bibelheimer, their father, was answering my question: "What the heck are you doing in Drake?"

The route here was not direct. John's father was a German-Russian farmer who felt called to preach. A half-century ago he was pastoring several churches in central North Dakota, including the Rosenfeld Baptist Church south of Drake. John was born here in 1946 but moved away with the family in 1951.

During the Vietnam war John was a Navy mess cook, first for a destroyer off the Vietnamese coast and then for a tugboat in Danang harbor. After that he worked for a finance firm in Los Angeles, where he met and married Tina, who had grown up there. They were both in the Air Force Reserve, and then they both went active as air transport specialists. In the summer of 1996 they brought their family—including Tommy, two years older than the twins, and Kirsten, now 8—back to Drake for a family reunion. It was the kids and particularly Tommy, who, weary of moving from school to school, came up with the bright idea of retiring the parents to Drake, which has a Class B high school. John's brother Henry already had done the same thing.

Summer 1997, Tina and the kids moved ahead of John to Drake to start school. With them came Tommy's classmate Darrel, who thought the Bibelheimers had a good idea. John caught up with them on Christmas Eve.

They had no plans along such lines, but Tina and John discovered the cafe was something that needed doing and they bought it. My opinion, based on constant travel and a lot of on-the-road meals, good and bad: This is one of the best small-town cafes in the state. There are the usual breakfast, sandwich, and luncheon items, but the quality is superior. Both times I've been there I saw the cook, Geri Dagenstein, peeling potatoes in the kitchen! Peeling potatoes!

John shares the cooking duties and has his own ideas, some homely and some exotic. The breakfast menu includes an item called S.O.S. (ask somebody military about it), and it's a favorite of the regulars. The Sunday noon menu last week was country fried steak with cream gravy (and this may be the only cafe in North Dakota to do this right, with cream gravy, not brown gravy). The menu also featured Jaegerschnitzel and Rammschnitzel (John really liked that Gasthaus fare when he was stationed in Germany). Prices are more than reasonable. Hours are 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday, 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday, and closed Saturday. The local customer base is loyal and growing, but the highway trade hasn't yet learned the way to the Empress Cafe.

"All I could think about was cold," Tina says of her initial thoughts on the move to North Dakota. Then she thought about the small-town environment in Drake, "And I decided my kids were more important." She moves easily among the customers, I observe, takes naturally to the cadence and indirection of regional speech—but she says sometimes it still feels like an episode of Northern Exposure without the moose.

Here's something interesting: Tina and John can tick off two other households relocated to Drake or nearby Balfour from California and another from Las Vegas. They figure the moneyed people from the East are filling up Minnesota, the ones from California are filling up Montana, and in between, North Dakota is the working person's new frontier.

I'll be going back to the Empress Cafe, not just for the food, but also for a mystery. On the walls of the cafe are four large oil paintings signed by one H.B. Bartron. It is said this fellow Bartron was a hobo who showed up every summer in the late 1930s and painted in exchange for room, board and beer. Must be a story there. But of course, there's one up every section road.

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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339

Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136