Stepping Out: Drovers Restaurant serves up tasty food to hometown crowd

Brush restaurant lassos customers from auction barn

BRUSH – I first learned of Drovers Restaurant in the original edition of Jan and Michael Stern’s “Roadfood,” their best-selling guide to America’s regional eating places.

I liked the idea of a steakhouse in an auction barn, and resolved to stop along the tiring drive to the Nebraska border, if circumstances ever worked out. I didn’t know then that it would be some years before I could do so.

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The Livestock Exchange in Brush can be found just a half mile beyond the central business district, heading east out of town on U.S. Highway 34. It is hard to miss — a sprawling one-story building with a parking lot full of cattle trucks and pickups in front and corrals behind.

Inside, labyrinthine corridors lead past offices to the auction space — an enclosed amphitheater of raised seats around a sandy ring accented by two large steer heads mounted on the wall — and to the restaurant.

Drovers is about as plain as can be, with cinderblock and brick walls only sparsely decorated with photographs of cattle, horses, ranches and countryside.

The tabletops are covered with laminated business notices under glass, advertising hay grinding, earth moving, auto-body work and farm loans. We were surprised by a touch pleasantly out of keeping with the no-nonsense atmosphere: On each table was a vase containing a fresh carnation.

First impressions may be misleading, but it seemed to us that we were the only outsiders in the cafe for lunch. Most of the other customers showed the easy familiarity of regulars, but though we were new to Drovers, we did not feel out of place, thanks to our waitress, who was as friendly and helpful as she was efficient — an excellent combination.

Drovers serves a lot of steaks, T-bones and ribeyes especially, and you can also get burgers, chicken and other hearty main dishes. I chose the ribeye-steak dinner — a good bargain at $7.95 (Though the waitress told me that in the evening, they would feature a real special: any steak on the menu for $5.95). My companion ordered a buffalo burger.

For a first course, I chose a cup of homemade soup and was very pleased with the hearty broth and the tasty pieces of chicken. The steak was both flavorful and done exactly right, indicating that this kitchen knows that medium means medium and not well-done with a little pale gray in the center.

Along with the ribeye, I enjoyed a generous serving of hash-brown potatoes, the perfect accompaniment to steak, though I left the canned vegetables alone. There was a good homemade dinner roll as well. My companion liked her buffalo burger. It was reasonably moist, unlike the dried-out versions other restaurants sometimes serve.

For dessert, my guest asked for a cinnamon roll, while I chose the sour cream-raisin pie, from a selection that included apple, cherry, and banana cream. She made the better choice. Her cinnamon roll, large, crusty, frosted and full of flavor, went well with a fine cup of strong black coffee.

I liked my pie well enough, but it had much more cream filling than raisins, and its slightly butterscotch flavor did not match my expectations of the sweet/tart pie I remembered.

We found Drovers an inexpensive place. All told, we paid only $15.50 for the meal, which included one entree from the dinner menu and two desserts. Open from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day but Sunday, Drovers is a good stop for vacation or business visitors.

Drovers has been in continuous operation for 30 years, but Jeff Marcus is a comparatively recent owner. He took over in 1996, after seven years of previous experience running restaurants in Denver, Fort Collins and Greeley.

Though this is not a large cafe, it’s busy most of the time, serving 4,000 meals per week. Thanks to the experience of some of his staff — a number have worked at Drovers more than five years, and two have worked at the restaurant for 20 years — Marcus usually can hold his hours at the cafe down to 50 per week, even though he does not employ managers.