Ode: The Sirloin Steak and Eggs at Ranch House Café

You probably noticed the tall yellow sign on East Colfax, with its curlicue iron filagree and a faux lantern at the top, overlooking a low-slung building under peaked rooftops and multiple eaves, white wood paneling sporting a jaunty red trim around the windows. Maybe the marquee caught your eye with its mismatched letters and weird spacing, flaunting

SIRLO N STEAK and

BI SCUITSANDG RAVY, the prices impossibly low.

It’s an East Denver icon that’s kind of a local secret.

“I’ve always wondered about that place,” friends will say when I talk about it. The diner doesn’t have the foot traffic and epic history of Pete’s Kitchen on a busier part of the boulevard. It hasn’t been reimagined like Champagne Tiger’s update just blocks from downtown.

But Ranch House Café is old Denver in all the best ways.

As you’re sipping away at your pretty okay coffee while waiting for your order, you’ll overhear murmurs and snippets of conversations in a host of languages, bask in the scene as a senior couple takes gingerly leave of their pickup truck and shuffles into the place, the man with a cowboy hat and dusty boots holding the glass door for his wife — whose hair is a puff of clouds — and keeping it open for the group of Latino teens in sweats with their hats pulled low. A family with a baby in a carrier has just settled into the booth across the way.

The place is a kaleidoscope of cultures and demographics, everyone coming in chill and smiling and ready for giant plates of tasty chow.

The servers are warm, with an air of cool competency, always there to bring those little creamer packets and top up your joe, ready to advise on your best bets for the morning.

I order my steak med-rare and eggs over-easy, and choose the hashbrowns (extra crispy) rather than the diced potatoes. I opt for rye toast but wonder if I should have ordered the English muffin, because when’s the last time I had one of those?

My slab o’ sirloin has a crisp, lightly salted crust and is perfectly pink in the middle (the next time, maybe I’ll order it rare), and I dip my first slice into egg yolks that are just the right amount of goopy. After that bite, I build a little melody out of the meal, getting the hashbrowns into the composition, with caesuras of toast and jam and sips of hot coffee. I proceed to scour my plate in this manner, with a final stab of steak pressed into the last bit of hashbrown/egg mishmash, and then I use one last corner of bread to scrape up the remnants.

As my pals and I commiserate over the week we’ve finished and the challenges coming in the one ahead, we thank our server for the fresh java and amble our way through our platters of morning goodness, Sunday scaries chased away by the comforting buzz of a happy room and bellies that will be full for hours.

Don’t ever change, Ranch House Café.