Camp 18

Camp 18 is the sturdiest restaurant in the West. A log cabin building the size of a train terminal, it features a main room supported by what the management believes to be the largest known ridge pole in the United States: twenty-five tons and five thousand board-feet of lumber. On the walls are massive lumbering saws and old photographs of lumberjacks at work; deep-cushioned couches surround a walk-in fireplace; even many of the customers look like outdoors types, dressed in jeans and flannel. The air smells of cut wood and flapjacks.

This is a theme restaurant, and the stage effects work. More important, the food delivers on the promise of the mise en scene. The kitchen’s specialty is brawny Northwestern cuisine, including family-style dinners of meat and potatoes or chicken and dumplings, big hamburgers and sandwiches for lunch, and proverbial lumberjack breakfasts.

You can order griddle cakes (here known as “flatcars”) and blueberries, waffles (“corks”) with slab ham and eggs, or four-egg omelettes (“bunkhouse” style) served with chunky, well-oiled fried potatoes and big powdery biscuits with melting butter shoved inside. We especially enjoy breakfast of pan-fried razor clams, a regional specialty that is quite popular in lunch counters as well as deluxe restaurants. The clams are big, crunchy, sweet, and relatively tender, accompanied by spuds, eggs, and biscuits. The Camp 18 cinnamon roll is ridiculously large, covering most of a normal-size dinner plate.

You will have no trouble spotting this place as you travel along Highway 26. It is surrounded for hundreds of yards by heavy tree cutting equipment. It looks like it might be a lumber camp or, on closer inspection, a lumbering museum.