When I was little we couldn't afford to travel much...or do anything much, really. I was 24 before I found out my mom's "secret recipe" for the most amazingly delicious dinner roast started with 'Step 1: Be friends with a land owner who knows how broke you are. Step 2: With land-owning friend's permission, sneak into the back-acres woods and poach a deer. Step 3: Convince your kid it's a secret family beef-roast recipe with super-secret spices.'
One of the few places we did get to stop on our occasional short jaunts around northwestern Oregon, however, is still there...barely. The Fort Hill Restaurant out near Grand Ronde is suffering tremendously after greedy politicians were convinced to rebuild Highway 99W in a way that just about completely cuts them off from highway traffic--now instead of just a quick right turn off the highway and left into the parking lot, you have to know how to get there from an exit like 2 miles away. The reason? As far as I can tell, it is because the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde (2700 enrolled individuals total) want ALL the money on that highway to get funneled over to their crown jewel, Spirit Mountain Casino. It is because of that casino that the Grand Ronde tribes are some of the wealthiest in the west, but apparently one small multi-generationally-run family restaurant is too much competition.
Fort Hill used to have the BEST biscuits & gravy. Any time we were anywhere near it I used to beg to stop, even back in the days when every single hillside visible from the place had been clear-cut right down to dirt. The sight of a shaved-bald hill still upsets me, but at least these days the hills are green again instead of bare brown. I haven't been to the restaurant on any of my annual trips westward even though we drive right by the place to get to my mom's--I don't know which exit works now or how to get to the restaurant whose parking lot is like 500 feet from the highway that no longer allows convenient access. I bet a lot of old favorites got this same kind of treatment...