Thicket Cafe and Bar

My girlfriend and I let 'er buck this year and then escaped south.  We stopped in Ukiah for dinner at the Thicket Cafe and Bar.  

The Thicket Cafe and Bar really -is- a Cafe and Bar.  That is, the Cafe is seperated from the bar by a partial wall and some screening.  We chose the bar.  

The bar decoration is solidly hunter-chic with --for example-- a memorable poster about the largely elk-free nature of elk hunting.  

I had the evening's steak special and my girlfriend had the elk-burger.  The steak was the clear winner -- really delicious and a perfect medium rare -- but the elk burger was tasty as well.  The beer selection is surprisingly good too!

The real reason to love this place though is the staff.  The cook ribbed us from behind the bar, and the woman who waited our table was friendly, hilarious, and helped me decode my map.  She hooked us up with some biker-maps of the area and then sent us on our merry way down the 52 road.  

It was a great evening.

What do you get with an indifferent waitress/cook, limited seating and a fairly routine menu?  For me, that's heaven.  Passed up the opportunity to drive into Pendleton for a fancy meal and found this little hole in the wall.  Cafe sat 8 and we were six.  We almost had to conk the waitress on the head to get her to take our orders, but she managed to cook it all with good timing and we got served together.  Two of us had excellent BLTs, two of us had C+ fish and chips (but really, what did they expect?), my wife enjoyed her patty melt, but the star of the show was the Cobb salad with a monstruous serving.  Took three of us to help her finish it.  Good prices, took our debit cards without flinching.  All in all, a pleasant meal.