Burgers and conversation fill this beloved Moberly diner
Story by Sara Schafer | Photos by Paul Newton
The 24 chrome stools swivel as customers take their spots around the horseshoe counter at Bubba’s Burger Bar and Egg Emporium. Plates heaping with diner favorites slide across the counter as the smell of frying onions and burgers hangs in the air. The employees welcome each guest — most of them by name. Part retro diner and part modern gathering place, Bubba’s Burger Bar is a community table where breakfast, lunch and small-town life are all served family style.
“It’s always been a place where you can come and eat by yourself without feeling alone,” says Angie Taylor, owner of the restaurant. “I can come in, sit down and listen to other people’s conversations. I can participate if I want to. I might see friends or I might meet somebody new. It’s very communal. It’s like being at home.”
Meet Bubba
Angie bought the Moberly icon in 2001. The downtown building that houses Bubba’s Burger Bar was built around 1910 and has been home to a restaurant since the 1920s. It became the restaurant with the most perfect name sometime in the 1970s.
“There’s a little bit of lore behind the name,” Angie says. “The thing that seems to be the most true is there were a couple of waitresses who called everybody Bubba — like how diner waitresses sometimes call everybody hon or honey. Everybody here was Bubba. So, there isn’t a particular Bubba. It’s kind of more of a collective Bubba.”
When Angie bought the business, she knew the name should remain. “I mean, how can you do better than ‘Bubba’s Burger Bar and Egg Emporium?’ You can’t do any better than that,” she says.
Angie and her daughters, Skylar Reynolds and Savana Wear, run the restaurant with the help of one other employee, Marie Colwell. The menu has mostly stayed the same for decades. It is filled with hearty breakfasts like the kind your grandma would make for you and burgers cooked like those you’d be served at a family barbecue.
The breakfast crowd can start the day off right with The 111, which is one egg, one slice of bacon and one piece of toast. Or opt for the 222, which includes two pancakes, two eggs and two strips of bacon.
“Our pancakes are almost plate-sized and we use a sweet cream pancake mix,” Angie says. “They are light and fluffy.”
To honor the Egg Emporium part of the name, try an omelet or skillet, which feature local farm-fresh eggs. You can choose from 10 different varieties of toppings for either option. Omelets include your choice of fillings and are served with hash browns and toast. The skillets use the hash browns as the base for all of the fillings and are topped with two eggs cooked any way you like them.
A popular one is the Western Skillet. The made-from-scratch hash browns are fried on the grill with butter and then layered with sausage, ham, onions and peppers. Next comes diced tomato and shredded American cheese. The dish is finished with the two eggs.
“A lot of people will just mix it all up, and it makes a nice gooey mess,” Angie says. “It’s really good.”
Anything on the breakfast menu is customizable. “The menu is there as a suggestion — lots of people just order what they want,” she says.
“Our early-morning crowd — we hardly have to take an order,” Skylar adds. “We know what they’re going to get. They’ve ordered the same thing every day for the last 20 years. They sit and talk and hang out with each other for at least an hour and drink a pot of coffee.”
Big-Time Burgers
Don’t leave Bubba’s Burger Bar without sinking your teeth into one of the signature burgers. As the menu proudly proclaims, the burgers are “made the old-fashioned way, hand smashed, quality ground beef.”
The classics include single quarter-pound hamburgers, cheeseburgers and Swiss burgers. Or go for a double that weighs in at half a pound. “When most places say half pound, they mean precooked weight,” Angie says. “For ours, we aim for half a pound after it’s cooked. So, it’s going to feel a little bit bigger.”
The specialty burgers take those classics and add a punch. The Farmer’s Fantasy features a quarter-pound cheeseburger topped with a fried egg and two pieces of bacon. If that’s not enough to fill you up, go for the Farmer 4-Way, which also includes a quarter-pound sausage patty.
For a burger you need to attack with a fork, order the Hubba Bubba. A double hamburger is served open-faced and smothered with chili, grilled onions and shredded cheese. If that sounds like a bit too much, go for the Baby Bubba, which has just one hamburger patty.
“Our chili recipe was handed down to me from the person I bought the restaurant from,” Angie says. “People really like it; it’s not super spicy.”
Another popular dish is the Decadent Chicken Sandwich. A 6-ounce chicken breast is marinated in Italian dressing then grilled. It’s topped with Swiss cheese and two pieces of bacon.
The most popular side is the hand-cut French fries. Idaho potatoes are run through a hand slicer that transforms them into long, thin strips. They are then fried until crispy and seasoned.
The honor of making French fries has been held by Angie’s daughters for years. “From when we were tall enough to reach that fry cutter, we’d cut 50-plus potatoes a day — hundreds of potatoes a week,” Savana says.
For Angie and her daughters, the relationships built across Bubba’s counter are just as important as the food coming off the grill. “Because it’s such a small restaurant, my customers do feel like family,” Angie says. “When you come here, you’re going to have a unique experience and get good food. You’ll be welcomed and be asked to come back — and you don’t always get that nowadays.”
Email Sara Schafer at sschafer@ruralmissouri.coop.