More Than Food and Coffee

Christy James pours a fresh cup of coffee in the kitchen of the County Seat Café in Benton.

KASSI JACKSON ~ kjackson@semissourian.com

County Seat Café: hometown mainstay for local coffee drinkers

It’s 6:45 on a rainy Tuesday morning at County Seat Café in Benton, Missouri. Six men sit at a rectangular table in the middle of the restaurant, reading the newspaper, swapping stories, eating scrambled eggs and bacon.

Most importantly, they are drinking coffee.

On the television hanging on the wall, the local weather channel tells of more rain. It can hardly be heard, though, over the amicable din of conversation, spoons clinking against the sides of ceramic mugs stirring in cream and sugar, and waitress Christy James’ expertly timed offers for coffee warm-ups.

The men have been there since 5:30 that morning. The second group, James says, will be in around 7 a.m.

“What kind of lies are you wanting to hear today?” Donnie Hennemann jokes, between discussions of people the men know, recent mouse races in Brazeau, Missouri, and memories of area hotspots such as Kern’s Grocery in New Hamburg, Missouri. “We have a lot of them.”

“Some of us try to tell the truth, Donnie,” Robert Schiwitz kids.

“We’re just trying to get a feel for what it’s like for women when they go to the beauty shop,” Hennemann jests.

Christy James tends to regular shop customers at the County Seat Café in Benton.

KASSI JACKSON ~ kjackson@semissourian.com

The Café has been a mainstay of the Benton community since the 1960s, a place where locals and friends gather for hometown, made-to-order home cooking. Before it was a restaurant, the building functioned as a gas station and as a beauty shop.

JoAnn Easter, James’ mother, bought the café approximately three and a half years ago, after working at Ryan’s for 19 years. She’s wanted to own her own food business since she worked at M & M Drive-In down the road from County Seat Café when she was 12 years old.

The previous owner of County Seat, a friend of Easter’s, called her with the opportunity to buy the café on a Wednesday; Easter spent Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday prepping for business. Then she opened the doors as its owner the following Monday at 5 a.m.

“I’ve known most of them my whole life,” Easter says of the regular coffee drinkers. “They’re all people I either went to school with, or their kids. They’re just good guys. They’ll give you crap every day, but if anything ever happened, they’d be the first ones right there to back you up. They’re like family.”

At 7 o’clock, like clockwork, the crowd picks up. Four to five tables are filled with men — and one woman — coming in to drink their morning coffee.

Easter calls each of them by name, mentioning that they are local businessmen, city workers, escorts for tractor trailer trucks, finance people and the carpet company and gas station owners. Many are retired.

The cook, Kelli Kincade, has worked at the café through three different owners, since 2009. She knows the customers, too.

“We have our regulars,” she says. “Every morning at 6:00, the same guy comes in, seven days a week, and orders the same thing. Two over medium, bacon and one piece of wheat toast. You kind of get to know them.”

There is order to the coffee drinkers’ seating, unspoken rules that guide the flow of their mornings.

“If you’re an outsider, you have to come here for a good while before you get to sit with the locals,” they say.

“When I first came here, I sat over at the window for years,” says Russ Bremeyer, who has been sitting at the table in the middle of the café for the past decade. “Then I finally graduated to this [table] — I don’t know how that happened.”

To the men, the café is more than food and $1.50 coffee.

“It’s a better way to keep up with the news than this,” Hennemann says, thumping the newspaper sitting in front of him, “because you get it right from the source.”

“If they’d just bring the rest of the world in here for just a week or so in the morning, we could solve the problems,” Schiwitz says.

The men at the table resoundingly agree.

Then there’s the million-dollar question: why drink coffee?

“Because it tastes good,” Hank Gilliland says, from the full table by the front window. “It’s good for you. And it’s brotherhood. Every day.”