New Plaza Cafe offers wider menu selections

Plaza Cafe's Phil Jesse has opened a second restaurant along US 491. The second location includes an addition of a dinner menu that features cajun style food and their famous breakfast pancakes. [Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent]

By Pamela G. Dempsey
Staff Writer

GALLUP — The French toast recipe came with the restaurant, but Phil Jesse didn't share it with anyone.

Until recently.

Jesse, who bought the Plaza Cafe in 1999, said he's seen other local restaurants try to imitate his diner's popular breakfast.

"I guess I should take it as being flattered," Jesse said.

The Plaza Cafe the little trailer-turned-diner on Route 66 that catered to the railroad traffic in the 1950's started serving up French toast, biscuits, and gravy in the early 1980's after it was bought and renamed by Lottie Bradford.

Jesse inherited the French toast, biscuit, and gravy recipes along with the restaurant but brought along his own soup and sandwich ideas to the breakfast and lunch menu.

It wasn't long ago that Jesse decided to share the toast recipe with a second location of The Plaza Cafe.

Two years in the making, the newest restaurant offers a little more than the original diner more space, a meeting room, and dinner hours.

"It's a bigger location," Jesse said, "and I wanted to do dinner."

Along with 15 new jobs, the latest spot not only offers the same breakfast and lunch options as the original location, but also a dinner menu that includes Cajun fare with blackened steak and fish.

"After you've eaten everywhere in town five or six times, (then) what do you do?," Jesse said. "This gave me an ... avenue to try something different."

And reasonable.

A family of four, he said, could eat out at his place for about the third of the cost of a dinner at a national chain restaurant.

The new location is still a novelty to some of his longtime customers.

A few, Jesse said, have tried the place out, but most have gone back to the same Route 66 location they've patronized for the past 20 years. He hopes to appeal to a new clientele in, what he calls, a growing area.

"My customers are creatures of habit," he said.

And it's the customers that drew Jesse away from the electronic manufacturing business he was in to the restaurant venues he enjoys now.

"You come in my place, you eat my food, you enjoy it, and you say 'I'm stuffed.' That makes me happy," Jesse said.

The Plaza Cafe on U.S. 491 is open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Hours of operation are Sundays 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Thursday 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Fridays and Saturdays 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. For more information call (505) 722-8477.