About the diner

I'm Ruth Maki, and I've been flipping eggs at this counter since 1998. My folks ran a supper club up in Iron River when I was a girl, and I grew up peeling potatoes and rolling pie dough before school. When the old lunch counter on Gitche Gumee Avenue came up for sale, my husband Tom and I emptied the savings account and never looked back.

We cook the way my mother did — from scratch, because that's the only way we know how. The hashbrowns are grated fresh every morning, the soup starts with a real stock, and the pie crust gets rolled out by hand before the sun's up over the bay. We buy our whitefish off the boats down at the marina when the season's on. It costs more and takes longer, and we wouldn't do it any other way.

These days our daughter Annika runs the griddle on weekends and Tom still works the register and tells the same jokes he told twenty years ago. Most of the folks who walk in, we know by name — and if we don't yet, we will by the time your coffee's cold.