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This is both just a restaurant and more like a landmark. It also comes with a bit of controversy in the world of today, an interesting history, a certain misconception, and no small amount of affection.
After waking in Tillamook and driving south down 101 to Lincoln City, we decided it was well past time for a real breakfast. Like legions of people who grew up in the mid-Willamette Valley the place we usually found ourselves larking of to to see the beach was the central coast, and that meant Lincoln County, and that meant, for starters, Lincoln City.
I'm old enough that I dined as a kid at what was then called Lil' Black Sambo's, a family restaurant whose brand was taken from Scottish writer and illustrator Helen Bannerman's 1899 children's tale of a clever Indian boy who escaped being bullied by tigers by convincing them to chase tail 'round a tree until they melted down into ghee, which was then enjoyed on pancakes by the protagonist's family. And the old restaurant would serve us kids pancakes with a side of 'tiger butter'.
Latterly, it has evolved slightly. It's now simply Lil' Sambo's, the protagonist being elided in favor of the tigers, and has lived through a fire that destroyed the building in 2004 and the 2019-now pandemic. Located at 3262 NE Hwy 101 in the Oceanlake district, it has a spiffy, more modern building built on the footprint of the old ... and a proud tiger with his stolen shorts and parasol marching on top of the sign out front.
The interior has mementos from its now-64-year history of being in the main drag in L.C., and the decor is all about the tiger.
There is also a trinket-filled gift shop part of the restaurant, because selling such things is what you do when you've been a landmark as long as that.
The history of the business is pure 20th Century Oregon Coast. It actually exists because the Pixie Kitchen did. The Pixie Kitchen is a coastal legend that existed from 1953 to 1985 in the same area of L.C. and was the place for families with kids to stop at through the 50s and 60s (I still have fond memories of the funhouse mirrors they used to have near the dining room entry). They didn't serve breakfasts, though, so in 1957 two of their cooks opened a spot called "Pixie Pancakes" a little ways down 101.
The restaurant history does not mention when they decided to brand as "Lil' Black Sambos" or when they decided to omit the word black from the name.
There's another misapprehension about the name, in as much as there was once a national 24-hour diner chain called Sambo's. The name similarity tends to suggest to people that Lil' Sambos was once part of this, but that never has been, indeed, the national chain's name was derived from its two founders, Sam Battistone Jr and Newell Bohnett, and not from the children's story (though that didn't prevent them from also trading on the images from Little Black Sambo for a while).
I really ought to mention the food, because that is, indeed why we stopped, but a place with this much history and modern issues generates more than its share of digressions, I suppose; the breakfast here is not to be missed. I had the closest thing I could find to a taco omelette on the menu, the Spanish omelette, combining salsa, sour cream, seasoned meat, olives and cheese, and it was superb. The Brown Eyed Girl treated herself to her bliss, basted eggs.
They know how to put on a good breakfast. It was worth the trip.
The name and the heritage behind it is an issue that'll have to be resolved and it's being approached quite slowly, as any BIPOC resident of Oregon presumably might not be surprised to hear. As recently as 2020, as Willamette Week reports, there are current calls for the restaurant to retire the old and problematical brand. And the current owners are, if slow to rise to it, not wholly unaware: the WW quotes the current general manager as acknowledging that change is in the air, but is reluctant to say when.
I don't know about anyone else, but I think they had a winner in the name "Pixie Pancakes".
After all, pixies still ride seahorses on the outside of the building. Maybe they should embrace that.
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