Frontier Cafe

Stopped off the beaten path to find this little gem! It was a good choice. Seems as if the locals like it pretty well too as it was busy even before noon! Prices were great. Three of us had soup and sandwiches bill was only $ 16. Service was fast and friendly!

Breakfast for lunch, yes please. sunday afternoon at 1 pm was hopping. Ordered the corned beef hash plate and it was great. Don’t bother ordering the potatoes as you won’t need them. (The hash browns were great though) Delivered quickly, hot and fresh. really great prices. Only bummer was no biscuits and gravy. Huge downer. Staff super friendly. Clean and open air concept. Parking on the street or the side of the building.

Super cheap American diner food. Greasy, working class grub. But a real sociological experience.

Slightly cheaper than the other breakfast places, not sure on lunch or dinner. Food is nothing special. The portions are good. Staff is always nice.

Recommendation: A solid choice for super cheap food and breakfast served all day. You can’t go wrong with the skillets, and the pancakes aren’t bad either!
Tip: Avoid the post-​church rush on Sundays from 11 – 1. It gets absolutely packed and service can slow down a little.
Tip: Don’t get the Kraft American cheese squares on your food! It’s better without.
Service: The service is pretty decent! Waitresses are helpful and attentive, although during the busier hours we see less of them due to the high demand between tables. However, our water glasses are huge and always full, which is great. Receipts can be split many ways, which is great when groups choose to eat here. You have to pay at the front though, so lines of people waiting to pay can build up during busy times.
Atmosphere: There isn’t too much of an atmosphere. There’s a TV in the back and there is pop radio playing softly in the background. A lot of the «atmosphere» comes from the many conversations emanating from the dozens of tables and booths throughout the restaurant.
Food: There are a couple gems on the menu (skillets!) but in general, the food is good. Nothing special, though. There are no premium ingredients that I’ve seen, which I suppose brings the price down. American cheese slices are used in a lot of the meals, so if you aren’t a fan of low-​grade cheese I’d suggest asking the server to omit it from the dish. The cups of soup that come with most meals are pretty good, if on the salty side!
Final Thoughts: Frontier Café is a good stop in Grinnell if you want typical American food, or breakfast food. The staff is friendly and there are almost always lots of people eating there. When it isn’t at capacity, the food comes out pretty fast! All in all this is a basic restaurant that doesn’t offer anything too special, but does the basics just right. I’ll definitely be coming back when I’m in the mood for breakfast!

5 of us had lunch for under $ 40.00 and it was good. We ate burgers wraps and sandwiches, so nothing too extravagant. Each sandwich came with soup, chili or chicken noodle today, both were very tasty! The fries were seasoned and crispy, just right. WELL WORTH THE DRIVE IN FROM I80.
The service was super fast and friendly.
I would recommend to a friend and will stop again if I get the chance.

Outstanding, quite possbly the best chicken fingers from N.Y. to Las Vegas! Fast and friendly.

The food was adequate, the service was superb, price was very good! we just had breakfast at night for dinner around 7 o’clock. The waitress accommodated my special demands and answered all of my wife’s questions and brought our food out in good time and was nice the whole time. The reason I gave it a 3 is the bathroom is filthy. Otherwise I would have given it a 4.

Last Dinner before leaving town after May ’15 graduation. Great menu! Wide selection. No frills or fads. Real food. Basic but traditionally cool atmosphere. Families, couples, solo. .. casual dress. Wait staff friendly and attentive. Could and would eat there often if it wasn’t eleven hours away.
Get a street side booth to watch the world stroll past.

Snub off college conisouers of high brow food etiquitte, Frontier Café is not for you and your frilly likes. FC has a great selection of breakfast foods plus good brunch lunch selections. Its not your average Starbucks morning toffee cake but its food for real men and real women with dainty toned muscles. NICE!

I have only ordered their standard fair, such as poached eggs or grilled cheese, but it has always been a good experience. The food is ridiculously cheap. And when I mean ridiculous cheap, I mean under $ 5 for a full meal. Not to many places that get cheaper than this.
The food is what you would expect to find at a diner, but there is something just perfect about getting what you expect sometimes. They serve warm hearty breakfasts all day long. Pancakes taste so great at night for some reason.
The service is always friendly and you never had to wait for a table.
Love going when I need a warm breakfast that is simple and will make my tummy full.

A review for breakfast. Quite good! Pleasant atmosphere. Perfectly great service (a friendly hello, grab any seat you’d like, quick and attentive with water, order-​taking, food arrival, and a post-​food-​arrival check-​in).
The food was surprisingly NOT greasy in any way — I got two eggs over easy (cooked perfectly, btw), wheat toast, hash browns, and 3 strips of bacon. All was delicious, and a ton of food for under $ 5.
I would absolutely go back here for breakfast if I lived here!

My 3 year old chose this place because she wanted pancakes. I ordered a chicken sandwich with BBQ sauce, cheese, and bacon. It came with soup; I chose broccoli cheese. The soup might have been made from scratch. It was a basic white sauce with flour lumps and broccoli. The sandwich came in a puddle of grease with wilted lettuce. I refused to eat it.
The service was terrible. They did not come to ask us how we liked things until everyone else was almost finished.
Also, we have small children and needed to do a diaper change while we were there. No changing table.
Don’t waste your time here. Go to some of the much better places down the street.

I am an east coast snob who lives in New York City who grew up in New York. I ate lunch at the Frontier Café with 4 young kids and adults. We had a great, simple meal with reasonable prices and great service! We had chicken sandwiches, chicken wraps, and the kids ordered grilled cheese sandwiches from the children’s menu. Best of all, the prices can’t be beat. It reminds of the Longhorn, but cleaner!

The reviewer above isn’t from Iowa or Grinnell so I am sure his review is just another east coast snob staring down his/​her nose at good old comfort Iowa Food. The place has fantastic food and is very highly regarded in our town. I have never had bad food at this place and the prices are unbelievable low. Right now I rate it as the best place in town to eat.
On a side note I find it frustrating to have silver spoon outsiders from the tiny Grinnell College culture ruin the reviews of eating establishments in my town. They are like cockroaches. when one of them leaves another one shows up not knowing how to act in small town iowa. They pretty much end up making a fool of themselves.

We’ve been waiting all summer for the Frontier Café to open, and finally got a chance to stop in tonight. It’s the only place in town that serves breakfast all day, and in retrospect, we should have stuck with breakfast, since eggs and pancakes are harder to mess up.
We got onion rings, which had a somewhat fishy/​old oil taste and barely any discernible onion inside. I got battered walleye (again, probably a mistake, since it was obvious that it would just be some frozen fish sticks), which were quite salty and «old fried» tasting, with sides of salad (a fair amount of it starting to rot) and coleslaw (alright, but very mayo-​ey). The condiments on the table were also ultra-​budget, and the little packet of «Taste Pleasers Gourmet Tartar Sauce» was basically just sweetened mayo. Their prices are quite low, but to be honest, I would rather have paid a little bit more for a less fast-​foody experience.
They have an enormous menu, really much larger than they could be making fresh or well; there might be some hidden gems here, but someone would really need to explore the whole thing to find out! If I had to go back here, I’d stick with breakfast foods, but I’m certainly not rushing back…
Edit to add, in response to another reviewer: my reaction to this place was based on disappointment with low quality ingredients, not the style of food. It’s quite possible that things have improved since they first opened, but in my experience, we have much better Iowa comfort food elsewhere in Grinnell. (Yes, I do live here)