Just A Little Cruise Through The Clouds

Hop a freight, grab a star, swim or fly to get to this restaurant!

Or, there are other modes:






Not all as classy as this, I'm sure.

And if parking is tight, there's always that sweet spot by the back door!

Once, a little family climbed down out of a plane, the little kids still in their jammies, and they filed into the restaurant for breakfast.

However it is you get to the Auger Inn at Ogden Hinckley Airport,


it will not disappoint.


Nothing especially unusual about the fare, except it that tastes so dad-gum good, you can't get it out of your head for more than 30 years. My sister used to waitress here in the 70s and we went back the other day hoping that the hamburgers were as good as memory promised. You know, sometimes Memory lies and you have to watch out and her sister, Hope, can mess with your head, too, but this time they were right on.

How could that be, though? Most restaurant burgers look good, right? Even as good as this one looked. I wondered what specifically made my hamburger taste so good, but I didn't want to stop eating it long enough to ask my sister what she thought makes these things taste so good. I even had to comment on the crispy, sweet onions that seemed bigger than the beef patty without overpowering it.

Well, I don't know. It's a puzzle but somehow this food tastes like the past. Oh wait. I know what it is. NO KETCHUP. Who puts ketchup on their hamburgers, anyway?! (I think that was one of the biggest culture shocks my family went through when we moved into this state many long years ago. Forget about religious differences, these people couldn't keep from messing up a perfectly good hunk of meat by putting ketchup on it! I had a friend in high school who would take the Heinz jug out of her mother's refrigerator and haul it with us when we went to Hardee's for lunch. She didn't like their ketchup and ask for her burger plain so she could "fix" it when she got it.)

However, I must say, I had to try Auger Inn's ketchup on those fries, just for authenticity's sake, don't you know. Not bad, and I'm not a fan of ketchup--oh, you knew that did you? It was in a Chef Dave's from Texas bottle and the label was washed out and worn down, some. You can do what you will with that information.

And as we are at the fries, now, yeah, yum. Hot and crunchy on the outside, hotter and soft on the inside.




I asked owner Paul Cromwell, "Remember when Robert Redford came through here?"

He laughed and said he remembered it well. SLC was fogged in and Redford had to hole up in Ogden for a while. He asked Paul if he could hide out in his kitchen, because the runway out back was littered with all these commercial and news planes.

"That was a big mistake. All my girls just went crazy in that kitchen!"




My sister was one of his "girls." He changed her name. "That table's waiting for service over there, Suzy."

"My name's not Suzy."

"It is now."

Suzy

(Well, this was maybe a couple of years before Suzy worked with Paul.)

The restrooms haven't changed that much, either.