After a 5 hour drive, we pulled into Sikeston Missouri and the Lambert RV park. It was right beside the famous Lambert Cafe.
The Lambert Cafe was established in 1942. In 1976 Norman Lambert, son of the founders Earl and Agnes Lambert, threw the first roll. Norman would walk around and hand out the rolls. One day it was really busy and when Norman couldn’t get through the crowd, one of the customers yelled “throw the D*** thing!”, and with that the only home of throwed rolls was born. So of course we had to go and find out what this was all about!
The cafe had an extensive menu with “walk a rounds”. We chose Louisiana smoked ribs with mashed potato and gravy and beets, as well as pork jowl with corn and coleslaw. The portions were “normal” for the ribs, but the pork jowl was a massive pile of thick bacon.
Then there were the “pass arounds”. There were servers with huge bowls of fried okra, fried potato, black eyed peas, macaroni and tomato, apple butter and sorghum molasses. We tried all but the black eyed peas. Liked the okra, apple butter and sorghum, LOVED the potato and disliked the macaroni as it was sweet.
Then the “event”, the bun throwing. One would think that these folks would have to audition for this task as their aim seemed to be incredible accurate. We asked one of the servers if this was indeed the case, and she said nope, anyone could do it and at the end of the night there are buns everywhere and she in fact had been hit in the head numerous times while waiting tables.
The buns were right out of the oven, super hot, and HUGE. They were also delish!!! As you can imagine our greatest accomplishment that evening was making it back to the RV, and it was a DRY restaurant, in case you were wondering.
