Meeker's gives nod to Greeley school lunch history with legendary chili and cinnamon roll combo
Chef Ron Jackson ladles up his award-winning chili at Meeker’s Restaurant in downtown Greeley. Crafted with thick chunks of tender beefsteak in a savory broth, roasted red and green chiles add layers of peppery heat and provide meaty, vegetal texture. The chili is served with a gooey cinnamon roll, just like the school days version. Photo by Emily Kemme.
By Emily Kemme
When Meeker’s Restaurant opened in the DoubleTree hotel in downtown Greeley in 2017, part of its menu’s charm was how it intertwined with Greeley area history. Why else name a restaurant after the city’s founder?
In 1869, Nathan Meeker, the agricultural editor of the New York Tribune, brought his family to a raw, western environment called the Great American Desert in his quest to establish a Utopian community. For Meeker, farming had to be central to daily life.
Fast forward to today’s farm-to-fork movement: it might seem trendy, but it’s also practical when in an agricultural community. It’s what Greeley folks have always done, and not only in hotel restaurants.
Understanding one aspect of the city’s culinary habits requires looking into regional school lunchrooms, which sometime after WWII began serving a combo of beef-and-bean chili and cinnamon rolls. It was much loved: children waited in anticipation for the meal, doggedly monitoring the school district’s lunch schedule to track when the dish would be offered.
“A lot of the cinnamon roll story is hearsay,” said Kris Simmons, Nutrition Services executive chef at Greeley-Evans Weld County School District 6. “At this point it’s more fairy tale and legend.”
Even so, Simmons is a Greeley native who grew up eating chili and cinnamon rolls. His grandma, Eileen Geisick, was a lunch lady in the 70s and 80s; she worked at a dozen district schools in her time, he said.
“She moved here from London in the 50s and thought the pairing was the strangest thing. She didn’t know how it came about, but it predated her time in lunch rooms.”
Memories of the meal abound; it’s still spoken of with reverence in Facebook posts on the group page, You know you grew up in Greeley, Colorado when. . .
I commiserated with a friend recently as we compared our recollections of those rolls. Most days, we both brought bagged lunches from home packed by our mothers. Her mom made PB&J’s; mine, thanks to her German heritage, packed salami on rye spread with butter. We both admitted to doing whatever we could to wrangle a cinnamon roll; for me, the wrangling meant talking my mother into letting me buy a school lunch.
Simmons thinks the origin of the chili and cinnamon roll pairing likely comes from resourcefulness, driven by the need to use up the United States Department of Agriculture’s shipments of bulk commodities to school districts as it developed a National School Lunch Program after World War II. It was the USDA’s first foray into enhancing childhood nutrition.
“In this agricultural community, a lot of people baked and they worked in the school cafeterias. The meal was born out of necessity,” Simmons said.
The school district used to have a central bakery and the school districts were smaller. Every school had a kitchen staff that fended for themselves to serve their few hundred lunches.
Today, Simmons said the district’s budgeting limitations have created a central kitchen that depleted staffing at individual schools. It’s a larger scale production — he calls it almost a factory setting — driven partly because of new federal nutritional guidelines that include whole grain requirements.
“Because of those, it’s hard to make breads and rolls that kids want to eat. If a kid doesn’t want to eat it, it’s not nutrition,” he points out.
Cinnamon rolls still appear on school lunch menus, but individual schools use prepared dough and a speed scratch method to finish the rolls.
Meeker’s dining room is a far cry from a school cafeteria, but the restaurant traces Greeley lunch room history with its chili and cinnamon roll combo on its menu. Photo by Emily Kemme.
They’re iced fresh, resulting in those fluffy cinnamon rolls of hallowed memory.
“Kids love the icing still dripping and sticky when the rolls hit the trays. It’s not hard and set, it’s gooey. It makes kids feel like they’re getting something special,” Simmons said.
With COVID supply chain issues, the district doesn’t currently serve chili because they can’t source bowls. Once he can, the chili will be scratch-made in the central kitchen and the pairing will return.
He thinks the meal is popular because chili peppers and cinnamon have a natural affinity. Cinnamon is a warm spice, evoking thoughts of comfort. He says it’s probably the reason why Cincinnati chili is served over spaghetti, pairing warm winter spices with tradition.
If you grew up with memories of Greeley schools’ pillowy cinnamon rolls, Meeker’s can satisfy those longings, although a word of warning: Chef Ron Jackson’s award-winning chili doesn’t have beans.
Jackson, who grew up in Colorado, crafts a stew-like chili from thick chunks of tender beefsteak in a savory broth. Roasted red and green chiles add layers of peppery heat and provide meaty, vegetal texture. Swirled with sour cream and sprinkled with shredded cheddar, it’s not school lunch chili, but as it turns out, it’s a lot better.
Meeker’s cinnamon rolls are even more gooey than the ones I remember from my childhood. Dense and seriously cinnamon-y, these days I don’t have to beg anyone to be able to eat them. I can just go and enjoy. And if I feel like it, a local craft beer, cocktail or glass of wine rounds out a perfect (grownup) trio.
Where to go to enjoy the Greeley classic
Meeker’s, A Colorado Kitchen & Bar
Where: 919 7th Street, Greeley, CO 80631
Contact: 970-353-1883 | https://meekersrestaurant.com
Hours: Breakfast 6:30 a.m. - 11 a.m. | Weekends 7 a.m. - 11 a.m. | Sunday Brunch 11 a.m. - 2 p.m. | Lunch 11 a.m. - 2 p.m. | Dinner 4:30 p.m. - 9 p.m. | Happy Hour 5 p.m. - 7 p.m.