Dinner Break! - Perkins - Rochester, MN

That "Open 24 Hours" sign, attached high above the restaurant, under the now naked Perkins oval, will always mean Perkins to me. You may have to squint to see it.

The same "Open 24 Hours" sentiment rapidly disappeared over the last two decades. Washed away from rounds of re-branding and makeovers, as well mismanagement, and the labor shortages it indirectly leads to. Face it, the graveyard shift takes a special breed, regardless of the occupation being performed. I'll forever be proud of how I represented the graveyard shift, for well over 20 years of combined service.

But this is about the former Perkins Restaurant & Bakery, located on 16th Avenue, in Rochester, Minnesota.

Despite obvious renovations over time, this was an original corporate Perkins build, back in 1964. (Albeit a rather small one.) As Perkins expanded throughout the midwest, a restaurant in Rochester makes immediate sense. You've got all the travelers coming into town for the Mayo Clinic, or stopping on their way north to Minneapolis. According to everything I could find out about the Rochester Perkins, it did very good business until the last 5-10 years of its life.

Seems like the entire model of cheaper "family" dine-in restaurants has changed over the last 20 years. Trends have shifted the casual dining experience to the quicker take-out type option, or places that specialize in a more specific type of cuisine, causing a drastic narrowing of the one time prominent chain restaurants. Rochester Perkins wasn't immune, and closed for good in November 2018.

I took most of the photos you'll see, on October 12, 2022. Laura and I were staying in Rochester for a few days. While she was at the Mayo this morning, I drove around town looking for cool stuff to write about. That's when I found this abandoned Perkins, driving west on Civic Center Road. When I stopped to look, It had been closed for a little short of 4 years.

On this day, the building was for sale, with a price tag of $1.2 million, for both the building and property. It's located on a busy street, but the lot is oddly shaped. As you can see from this diagram of a proposed five story apartment building, once proposed for the site.

This would be a plan for the ground floor, which was mostly used as covered parking. Four levels of apartments would be built above it. These plans did not materialize, a major reason being concerns about increased traffic to the neighborhood. 

So the Rochester Perkins remained where it was, stuck in time. The land was for sale, but the proposed redevelopment failed. The parking lot was blocked off by concrete barriers, so traffic couldn't cut through the lot to avoid the traffic signal. It also meant I had to find a space on the street to parallel park, in order to take a look.

Coincidentally, I found a parking space just down the street from Perkins, with some boarded up apartments in front of me. Guess this would have been a good exhibit in the arguing that new apartments weren't necessary. The ones next to them are so not needed, that they sit boarded up. 

Now that I look at that planned apartment building for this site, I’m thinking these boarded up apartments would have been included in the new development. Which would require buying and clearing two lots, adding expense and difficulty in getting everything synchronized for a rebuild. From what I could find online about these apartments, they've been boarded up for a while. But going back to October 2012, the apartments looked like this.

Neat huh?

After parking, I decided my best Rochester Perkins approach was to sneak up on it...

Being very quiet, tiptoeing my way across the crumbling pavement, so none of the nosy Famous Dave’s patron’s across the street notice me on my highly important mission.

On a side note. I don't harbor near the vitriol for the Rochester Famous Dave's, than I did for their previous Coon Rapids location... Which resulted in one of my favorite stories I’ve ever written, that has garnered some of my worst critiques!

I’m sure your Famous Dave’s story is much better than mine…

Walls around the Perkins Dumpster House have already been taken down. Guessing they did that to prevent the homeless from using it as a shelter. Whenever you find abandoned restaurant and retail establishments, you can usually find evidence of a homeless person using it for a campsite. But now it’s just a platform with a black outlined white X on it. There's buried treasure under that spot I know it.

Now if I could only find the treasure map...

Decent amount of weeds are poking through the Perkins parking lot. 

I love parking lot weeds. Some of my favorite parts of abandoned buildings.

Looking over my shoulder, back at the boarded up apartments. So you can see what the back of the house looks like. Don't know if there was a fire inside or what the deal is with this. There's no smoke stains coming out of the boarded up windows. I don't know. This building just seemed weird to me.

Here's the uncropped Rochester Perkins building, from the picture that lead off the story. The parking lot wrapped around the back of the property, filling up the odd trapezoidal shape. Sections were painted with diagonal stripes, hinting that you shouldn't park there, but the lot just reeked of potential chaos. Imagine the post-church Sunday morning rush, where you'll have tens of geriatric drivers all not knowing which way they should go, or how they should get there.

And the two handicapped spaces directly at the front door with no space to maneuver a large handicapped vehicle. 

This place had to be terrifying when busy.

Now it’s just sad, decaying and vacant.

Which sucks because I'm really craving a tasty chicken pita sammich, served in a dirty catcher's mitt.

Looking inside the entrance doors, closest to the scary handicapped spaces. A buncha promotional stickers affixed to the glass. You can see that are (were) an E Verify employer, Kids Eat Free!*, look at our big Coke machine!, and that blasphemous damn "Smoke Free Environment" decal. I bet those religious wind chimes play a beautiful tune, locked inside a windless indoor room.

At least there's no smoke in there!

The lobby of the Rochester Perkins is looking pretty rough now. Talk of demolishing the building in favor of a new apartment tower, were going on around the same time I took these pictures. That project hadn't been shot down yet, so work on clearing the restaurant may have begun about the time I was snooping around the place. 

Googles offers up a shot of the server area, between the seating area and the kitchen. Kind of hard to see in this picture, but those angled boards with the small shelf, just above the kitchen window are a Perkins icon. Many years ago, the server area wasn't walled off from the dining tables, so you could see those boards from any point of the restaurant. Typically painted yellow, against a much darker brown brick wall. If they were kept intact through a remodel, the trademark slantboards were painted a more neutral color, then hidden from public view. 

Probably for the best.

You don't want to see how the sausage is made.

Those same styled slantboards, once inside Coon Rapids Perkins may have been painted off-white in 1991. After a round of mid-1980’s remodeling (and removal of the Perkins Salad Bar), they were obscured behind a wall from the general dining public, with the rest of the server area. 

My first legitimate paying job was at the Coon Rapids Perkins. My time there lasted roughly from March 1991, through April of 1992. From the Crapids Perkins, I moved on to the Brooklyn Center Perkins for another five months, before advancing to a Hardees in Blaine, where I was hired to toast buns! Lasted there until shortly before my 18th birfday. Biding my time, I did a one week stint back at the Crapids Perkins in March, 1993, before landing my 18 year old dream job in a 24 hour gas station. Just before I graduated high school. 

Coon Rapids Perkins was built and opened in 1977. Perkins was a staple in my life from early on. My parents ate there all the time, from that 1977 opening, to its somewhat sudden closing, on Sunday July 27, 2003. The building sat ignored for the next five years. Ignored even by me, who stupidly did not take ONE PHOTO of the Coon Rapids Perkins, during all the time it was open and/or closed. 

Call DJ Sikka! And tell him that no one wants an aged, decaying Perkins. Especially not one in a part of town that has become unwelcome towards the very businesses that built it up. The former Coon Rapids Perkins building was demolished in 2008.

Soon to be replaced by the boringly named, Coon Rapids Car Wash.

A few months back, I drove by and saw the Coon Rapids Car Wash had been boarded up. Turns out, the Coon Rapids Car Wash had just been bought by a different car wash and was going to re-open as an even car washier car wash, than it was previously. Which is great because Coon Rapids has absolutely nowhere to wash your car.

Daydreams of watching the Coon Rapids Car Wash’s demolition, and replacement by a statue of a restaurant booth, with the date July 4, 1993, etched on the table. 

And it dispensed free coffee!

Text messages were recently shared between Doktor John and I, reflecting on the anniversary. Under whatever circumstances, he'd ended up at 99 Spillihp that night, near the end of my shift. Was supposed to be off at midnight, but my replacement called and said she'd be late. No big deal. We hung out in the store, making our own fun until she came in. Now after 1am, the idea of boothrotting at Coon Rapids Perkins was proposed. 

Great idea, but I hadn't planned on going anywhere after work. So I didn't bring a change of clothes. And I loathed going out in public wearing my 99 Spillihp colors. For one reason...

Brown polyester pants.

(Full 99 Spillihp story, parts one and two.)

The official 99 Spillihp color scheme was red, black, white and turd brown. They made us retail workers wear turd brown polyester pants, that the company provided. After the first year I worked there, the dress code was amended to allow black jeans. Employees had been lobbying this change for years, but corporate kept propping up the "Naaaaaawwwww... We went to humiliate you some more. The just above minimum wage we pay, doesn't satisfy us nearly enough..." excuse. Thankfully someone from accounting eventually showed them how much they were spending on these turd brown polyester pants, and corporate decided the cost put out wasn't worth the joy of employee belittlement they received back.

Yay for the little guy!

After hanging at Coon Rapids Perkins until just before the sun came up, we drove to my parents house. They were out of town for the Holiday, so we threw a wild party consisting of old Nintendo games and whatever I had recorded to VHS. Later that morning, Doktor John got to meet (Name Redacted) Star, for the first time. In fact, it was on this day that he gave (Name Redacted) Star his official (redacted) nickname. 

“I’m coming over... I’ve changed my mind, I’m going back.”

Fast forward some thirty years later, after both of us being gone for years, the good Doktor and I are both back living in Coon Rapids again. This time, in different houses of our own with our own families. We briefly mentioned the odd paths we both took to end up in the same spot 30 years later, but agreed this conversation was too big for text messaging. It needs a grander format, like a podcast of maybe even a zine...

A few days later, I walked around the closed up car wash.

The old Coon Rapids Perkins ghosts could be felt and seen, still haunting the property. 

Someone needs to think about the true victims of all this...

The aging malcontent Gen-X’er...

Those aging former angry youths, with their hair dyed black , apathy and indifference in their hearts. 

Dark poetry succumbed to male pattern baldness. 

Approaching -or in- our 50’s...

Grown annoyed that not only can we no longer visit our once beloved habitat.

That's been wiped out completely by its owners, or distorted by a younger generation that just doesn't understand.

You don't write or draw in a notebook, you share memes on a cell phone. 

And smoking isn't allowed near the coffee in public, anymore.

Baffling, I know...

Those booths are empty for a reason.

I've saluted boothrotting in both print from (Wasted Quarter issue #57; Bottomless Pot of Wasted) and blog form (Anoka Perkins - Boothrotting no more) before, so there's not a lot of fresh ground untread upon now. This story is just another time that I was reminded of those long gone days, from something that triggered the memories.

And I also know that you're saying: "Dude, we don't care about some stories of what you and your friend drew and wrote, from over 31 years ago, at a Perkins none of us ever went to, nor is anywhere near the subject of these photos!" 

Well fans of this closed-up Rochester Perkins, you're absolutely correct. But I don't have any photos of the Coon Rapids Perkins. And this story is only happening now because I was reminded of that July 1993 anniversary, and I wanted to write about it! So there!

Rochester just happens to be that setting today.

Here, I'll make it up to you for indulging in my stupid flashbacks, with some free Perkins coffee!

It's only good at the four listed Duluth MN, Perkins restaurants. And probably only during some unknown time frame in the early 1980's. But if you want to print them out, bring them in to see if they’ll be accepted. Just tell them Captain Honkass sent you!

Is it just me or does that "Your Manager" in the lower right corner seem like it doesn't need to be there. Unless that manager was supposed to sign it? But that still wouldn't make him or her manager of the customers...

Wait, this coupon is a little newer and includes locations in Oskosh, Wisconsin, and one just outside the Miller Mall in Duluth. In January 2004, I ate a waffle at this Perkins during a blizzard, while waiting for an absolute joke of a job interview at the Miller Mall Office Depot Max.

No, I will not cut my hair and move to Duluth for $7 an hour.

Hmmmmm... Make it $10 and I keep my hair... 

After all, I always wanted to live in Duluth.

Guess the "Your Manager" is intended to be there, since it wasn't removed for this revision. 

The hint of a crop mark on the lower right corner makes me happy.

"Please, no outside food or drink thank you."

Did this really need to be said? Were a lot of people coming into the Rochester Perkins bringing a sack lunch with them? Was Famous Dave's customers bringing in their to-go orders from across the street, because Perkins had cheaper fountain drinks? That big new Coke machine advertised on the other door right?

Sign announcing the new Rochester location on June 10th of some year.

Which had to be pre-2021, because it was open then.

Walking away from that entrance.

Landscaping outside the atrium is looking overgrown, but not that bad.

It's very colorful.

Stunningly beautiful nature inspired some dude to get naked and leave his underwear amongst the ferns and evergreens.

The first very dirty window I could see in, shows a little Interior demolition has been going on.

This isn't a very good photo. 

Looking into a window on the north side shows a bit more of the building clearing. 

Another from the Googles, taken in the northeast corner booth of the dining area, looking towards the kitchen. Trademark Perkins kitchen window slantboards now painted mauve. 

Hmmm.. Is the electricity turned off? Seems rather premature for that...

Can't be, the kitchen lights were on.

I enjoy censoring people's Googles faces.

Researching the Rochester Perkins for this story obviously included reading the various online review sites. Yelp reviewers can be petulant little prima-donnas, but I can't deny their usefulness. I've found that the typical online review site tends to go back as far as 2011. Which becomes more and more useful as the years go by, and more businesses fail.

As i somewhat expected, the reviews tilted unfavorably for the Rochester Perkins. Complaints were a consistent blend of: slow food service, distracted and inattentive waitstaff/management and poor restaurant cleanliness. Not all of them, there were some genuinely positive reviews as well. The category receiving the most praise was the food. Ultimately the most important, I would argue.

With any review of product or service, you always dismiss the top and bottom 10%, since those can never be counted on as accurate. That middle 80% of reviews will give you a good idea of what to expect from any business or service. Just eliminate the ones that are definite over-exaggeration, or someone whining that their unrealistic expectations were not met. As you would the ones obviously written by friends of the owner's son.

Any combination of truths in these reviews could have contributed to the the Rochester Perkins closure. But I'll just go with the blanket explanation that pretty much applies to any long time business closing. Market changes. People go to less restaurants these days, and the chain of "family restaurants" are nowhere near as popular as they were 40 years ago. Now these chains are desperately clamoring for relevance as they slowly fade from the landscape.

Although there is still that newer location in Rochester, off Broadway.

Treasure of Rochester Perkins HAS to be buried around here somewhere...

******

Laura and I were back in Rochester six months later.

I drove by the Perkins again to see if anything was different.

March 9, 2023.

Well, it's snowing...

The green and white striped awning seems to be sagging quite a bit too.

Due to both weather and lack of notable change, I didn't take any more pictures. And in happy news, I haven't been back to Rochester since this trip. Nothing against Rochester. It's a fine town and I enjoyed visiting. But I’m happy that I don't have to go back there. At least for now.

Besides, they demolished the old abandoned Kmart, so why go to Rochester anymore?

******

In June 2024, it was announced the former Rochester Perkins will be renovated into a salon, with 22 suites for lease. 

That's a good use I guess. Much lower cost than a complete tear down and rebuild. Given the odd shape of the property, reusing what is already here probably makes the most sense. Hopefully they address the chaotic parking lot.

******

Also in June 2024, Perkins announced a massive rebranding campaign. One that would see them drop the simple and long running "Restaurant and Bakery" tag line, that's been in place since the mid 1980's. 

They've come a long way since it was Perkins Pancake House.

Which evolved into Perkins Cake & Steak (my favorite surname).

Then just Perkins.

Then Perkins Family Restaurant.

Then that there mid 1980's rebranding to become the aforementioned Perkins Restaurant and Bakery.

So what comes next for the long running chain of Perkins casual dining restaurants?

Really?

Well, that's certainly cold and sterile.

"Yeah, it's food and it's American. Shut up."

So... You guys don't even want to be a restaurant anymore?

That name sounds a lot more like a distributor instead of a bakery and/or restaurant.

Looks like they consulted the same Nike design committee to revamp the traditional Perkins logo. That's an awful lot like the terrible redesigned Twins logo, that Nike dumped on us last year. In addition to the crappy new font, dropping off the Bakery & Restaurant sentiment, in favor of whatever "American Food Co." is supposed to mean. 

Which made their next move even stranger. The rebranding roll out included a computer generated graphic of what Perkins intends their new builds to look like. Which bears a strong resemblance to a certain similar chain of aging casual dining restaurants...

No.

That is TGI Fridays. Not Perkins.

Decked out in green instead of red.

I look at this picture of this imagined building and I can just envision a board room, filled with rich, fat, sweaty, white guys, viewing this pitch: "Our Senior Marketing teams have determined that this is the look and feel that most appeals to the younger, hipper, on-the-go, generation that makes up today's Perkins customer." Or some other inane form of corporate jargon which is insanely expensive and always misses the point completely.

Well, what do you have to say about this whole CGI TGI Perkins deal, concrete parking lot barricade?

No, it's not.

Goodbye Rochester Perkins.

Enjoy being anything other than what your corporate parents no longer believe in.

They've made poor choices...

******

I started writing this blog, just over 7 years ago.

This will be my 275th story posted here.

There have been over 315,000 visitors to Four Baggers since went online, July 18, 2017.

I hoped it would last, but I didn't think I'd be this productive (and consistent) with it.

So hooray for me.

See where we are in seven more years... I've definitely got the material...