Review: Airpark Cafe

Review: If you want to eat delicious food in a diner just before you take flying lessons, Airpark Cafe is the place to go. It's also a good place to go if you just want to eat good food! It's a local business and family-run, and it's tucked away above the hangar of Benton Airpark, a small airstrip in Redding. They get a lot of pilots here, but also locals. The owners are friendly, and when they're not cooking, they're always happy to say hello. They almost always have food projects going, usually trying out a weekly or daily special of some sort. It's under new management as of now, but it doesn't make the food any less tasty.

Geography: This is transportation cuisine of a different sort. It's different from the Coast Starlight Diner because it always stays in the same place. It caters to people in the transportation industry as well as locals, which results in hearty and generous servings of food. It's not a fusion cuisine per se, but more of a “generalistic cuisine”. It generalizes American diner cuisine, without giving thought to regional variation. This can be a good thing: it still is good food, and catering to the common factors of regional diner food helps bring in pilots from all over the country. It also makes it very true to American cuisine; a rare quality in food in general because it can be hard to sum up the regional differences in American cuisine due to its diversity.