Tiffany's Restaurant | Bindu Trips

Real Amish Cookery

written by:Jane Simon Ammeson

Every morning at 5 a.m. except for Sunday of course, several Amish women arrive at Tiffany’s, a surprising large restaurant in tiny Topeka, about ten miles outside of Shipshewana, to begin making the 15 or so varieties of pies served at the restaurant daily.

In all, they bake about 30 to 35 pies a day including mincemeat, apricot, blueberry cream cheese, Dutch apple, black raspberry and Bob Andy, a spicy custard pie. Other Amish women arrive at the same time to do such chores as peeling potatoes (the restaurant serves 75 pounds of mashed potatoes a day) and make noodles, dumplings and vegetable soup.

Tiffany’s is the real thing. An Amish restaurant where the Amish out number the tourists who happen to stop by. It’s not unusual to hear Pennsylvanian Dutch spoken at tables filled with men with whiskers and dark hats and women wearing bonnets and plain homemade dresses.

The bulletin board is covered with fliers asking for volunteers to help rebuild a barn that burned in a fire or advertising a bake sale for one of the Amish schools in the area.

The restaurant bustles, with young Amish girls serving platters of fried chicken, beef and noodles, macaroni and cheese and luscious looking slices of cake. There’s a buffet at lunch time (though you can still order off the menu) which offers an array of hearty foods.

Delicious, but heavy, the food is designed for the hard working Amish who need the calories because farm work, performed the old fashioned way, is said to be fueled by 4000 calories or more a day. That’s why you hardly ever see an overweight Amish person despite the wonderful helpings of mashed potatoes layered with noodles and creamed chicken.

Remarkably, in spite of the heavy volume of diners, according to Marla Slabach, who works at Tiffany’s, all the food is still made from scratch — they won’t serve anything not made from scratch.

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