Conconully is a tiny fishing town in the Okanogan Highlands — the kind of place you end up on purpose, not by accident. For a while, it was also home to Mr. Magoo's Restaurant, which served old-fashioned American food and real milkshakes, the thick kind that took some effort with a straw. The menu was straightforward, and the food was good. But what everyone remembers is that your order was delivered to your table by a model train running on a track built specifically for that purpose. Someone in the kitchen loaded your plate onto the train and sent it out to you. It sounds like a gimmick, but it didn't feel like one. It was the coolest thing my 7-year-old self had ever seen.
Around 1992, Mr. Magoo's relocated to Omak. People who knew both versions will tell you the Omak location never quite recaptured what the original had. That's usually how it goes — the charm was tied to the place, and the place was Conconully.
What's harder to explain is how rare that kind of restaurant feels now. Not the train specifically, but the general spirit of it: somebody had an idea, built it out, and ran it without much apparent concern for whether it scaled or made sense anywhere else. You don't stumble across many places like that anymore. Maybe they still exist, and I'm just not finding them. But Mr. Magoo's in Conconully was one of them, and it's worth remembering.
