Courtney’s

by RICK DANLEY // September 2, 2016

TORONTO — It’s a wonder that in southeast Kansas Courtney’s isn’t a household name. The Wichita Eagle gave her the front page a couple of years ago, calling her restaurant “a big-time Italian restaurant in tiny Toronto.” A PBS affiliate in Topeka broadcast a special on her in 2008. Yelp reviewers from all corners of the country continue to bathe the restaurant — Courtney’s Places, to give it its full name — in exuberant praise. “The food,” everyone seems to say, “the food!”

And if locals haven’t quite cottoned on to Courtney’s, somehow her name has made its way on the wind. Her guest book is lined with diners from Kansas City, Lawrence, Wichita, Denver, Oklahoma City, London, Atlanta, New York, Nashville, Houston, Los Angeles.

And so it is that, by some formula known only to Courtney Neill, Courtney’s Places — a fancy Italian restaurant run by a Scot with no real history in the kitchen — is celebrating its 12th year, and banking on plenty more.

Neill’s, then, is a story of duration. How, when every day in this country a hundred storefront dreams founder on the shoals of a declining rural economy, does a tiny cloth-napkin restaurant in the center of a dilapidated downtown continue to thrive?

The answer, in this case at least, lies in the blessed devotion of its owner, and in the fact that she lives upstairs.

A COMPACT WOMAN with orange hair, smart spectacles, and a wide, infectious smile, Courtney Neill is a lavish talker with a habit of interrupting herself with rhetorical questions: “Aren’t I lucky?” “Aren’t I blessed?” “Isn’t it wild?” Regarding her nervousness surrounding the pasta buffet she plans to launch for the first time this Sunday: “You think I’m going to sleep a wink Saturday night?” And not infrequently she’ll pause, and then ask: “Isn’t this a great life?”

Born in Pennsylvania, the daughter of a well-to-do railroad executive, Neill’s early years were characterized by frequent moves, a footloose habit she cultivated into her adult life, too. Neill is one of those who seem to have taken a bigger bite out of life than the rest of us; she’s worked a variety of careers, she’s lived all over. “I’ve had fun,” insists Neill. Plus, there’s a Zelig-like quality to where Neill turns up. She was in Daley Plaza, in Chicago, the day the monumental Picasso sculpture was installed. “Everybody was saying it looked like a baboon.” She was in St. Louis the day they topped the Arch. She went to college in Fayetteville, at the University of Arkansas. She lived in Boston for a time. She adores Maine. And for years, while she worked as an executive for an east coast convenience store franchise, she made a thoroughly beachy kind of life for herself in Melbourne, Fla. Which is where the story of Courtney’s Places really begins.

IN 1997, plugging away at her office job in the sunshine state, Neill was seized by a notion that most of us dismiss as too risky. “What I found was that I was working all these hours so that I could afford a house big enough to store all this stuff I had accumulated. I looked at my life and said ‘This is really kind of silly.’ It was not a sensible way to live — for me, at least. So I left.”

And in grand fashion, too. Having given her notice, Neill packed up her 1954 RV — an overhead camper outfitted with lace curtains, stars on the ceiling, and a custom-made recliner in the back — and set out to make a new life for herself in Arizona. Her idea was to build a straw-bale house in the desert, and sell hand-sewn clothes enough to bring in a few bucks on the side.

But, first, she agreed to drop off her sister-in-law in Toronto en route. “The RV was packed with my mother’s China, my grandmother’s crystal, my dog, my cat, everything I owned; my sister-in-law, her dog, her cat. Plus, we were towing my Volkswagen Bug.

“Well, my old RV objected. It blew its motor in Mississippi and left me totally stranded.”

The women rented a U-Haul and made their way to Toronto, where Neill could plot her next move. “So I’m here three days,” recalls Neill, “and what do I do? I fall and shatter my knee. I didn’t break it; I shattered it.”

For four months Neill hobbled around Toronto wearing a 40-pound cast. She still couldn’t drive, and by that point, her family had returned to Florida to meet professional obligations. Neill was on her own, a stranger in town — living temporarily at her brother’s home — dependent on the kindness of locals.

“Toronto is such wonderful little town,” Neill says, remembering those folks who nearly 20 years ago taxied her to the grocery store and to the laundromat and who introduced her to her future neighbors. “I decided this was a perfect place. I didn’t need to go to Arizona. I was going to stay here.”

BUT SHE NEEDED a place to live. One day, limping down Main Street, Neill noticed some men working on an abandoned building. She peeked inside. The building, constructed in 1886, served originally as the town’s hardware store. Later it was a grocery. By 1998, though, it had already lain vacant for years. There were holes in the floor, busted windows, soggy patches on the wall. “Honest to God, It was as ugly as homemade soap,” remembers Neill.

“But it had a second floor and I needed a place to stay.”

Neill tracked down the building’s owner. “Well, I found out, on this day, that this gentleman had a cold. So what did I do? I took him a pot of soup, a loaf of homemade bread, a quitclaim deed, and five $100 bills, and I bought the whole building. Isn’t that neat?”

FOR THE FIRST few months, Neill, pushing 60 by then, carried her sleeping bag from one corner of her new loft to the other, dodging spots where the roof leaked into her apartment, desperate in her search for a good night’s sleep. But by dawn her mind would be churning with ideas for how to breathe new life into the store below. And then one day she hit upon a winner.

And so it came to pass that, after a period of intense renovation, Neill opened Courtney’s Places, Toronto’s newest…mini-mall. “That’s right. When I opened it up, I put in five little businesses. None of them was an Italian restaurant.”

There was an ice cream parlor called The Cone Zone; a gift shop called The Toronto Trinket; a tea room, Tea for Two; a pastry shop called The English Muffin; and a pizza stand called Divine Pizza.

After about a year, on a whim, Neill inserted a sixth idea: a bring-your-own-bowl pasta house. “My thought was this: You bring me your dinner plate, I’ll put my lasagna on it. I won’t have dishes to wash and you’ll have a dinner that you can take home with you.”

The only problem: folks never went home.

“I would say that I was dragged kicking and screaming into the restaurant business,” jokes Neill. “Pretty soon the ice cream parlor went away, and the gift shop, and we became an Italian restaurant. It wasn’t my plan. But what I did was listen, which is not a trait my father would ever think that I possessed. People wanted lace tablecloths and candles on their tables, they wanted a nice sit-down, relaxing dinner. And they wanted, really wanted, good food.”

GETTING NEILL to admit that she’s a fabulous cook is harder than persuading a magician to show you his bag of tricks. “I’m not a trained chef, I’ve never been to culinary school. My brother is a better cook than I am. My kids never ran around saying ‘Oh, my mom’s the best cook in the county.’ I was going to college while raising kids. They ate hot dogs, Ramen noodles and macaroni and cheese. And now I have this wonderful restaurant and I cook Italian and people come from all over to have dinner? Isn’t it amazing?”

But if you ask about her favorite dishes, you can gather some clue as to the kind of fare in which she dabbles and why it’s routinely praised by passing gourmands as among the best they’ve tasted.

“I have a few favorites. In a couple of weeks, I’m doing my Italian sausage-filled puff pastry on a bed of fresh spinach with an Asiago cheese sauce. I love those. This past weekend I did a caramelized onion-and-mushroom with a sautéed chicken breast in a creamy port wine sauce over angel-hair pasta. That would be a top-five choice. I would say the shrimp in a spicy garlic cream sauce ranks real high. My lasagna I think is delicious. Of course, everybody loves the Chicken Parm, but everybody does a Chicken Parm. We also do a caramelized onion-mushroom chicken stuffed shell in a creamy asparagus sauce. We do pork chops, you know. Manicotti.”

Her latest dessert is a pound cake she makes from a recipe she recently found while going through her stepmother’s old things. “It’s the original pound cake: pound of sugar, pound of eggs, pound of flour, pound of calories. We call it the Wicked Stepmother Pound Cake. They eat it here like crazy! … My brother and I agree the dish is aptly named.”

Neill has an assistant, Barbara, who helps her plate the dishes, and a son, Christopher, who serves as her head waiter, and an area high-schooler who pitches in, too.

The practical aspects of dining at Courtney’s are straightforward. She’s open Friday through Sunday 5 to 8 p.m. Reservations are required. Credit cards are not accepted; cash or check only.  Everything is made fresh, which means the wait for food is sometimes an hour or more. There is no dress code, and attire most nights seems to run the gamut (on the night we were there a woman in a peach-colored sweatshirt and orthopedic sneakers cast a sort of long, semi-horrified stare at my friend’s six-inch high heels as we were led to our table). Most entrees are under $20. There is a modest drinks menu (“We do a frozen peach-mango daiquiri that is to die for”), but patrons can bring their own bottle of wine for a small corking fee. There is a large courtyard, with a fire pit, where diners are encouraged to enjoy a cup of coffee or glass of port after their meal.

MOST AMERICANS never solve the problem of finding work that they love. But Neill, in the autumn of her life, has established the shortest of commutes between vocation and avocation; she’s found in her restaurant the thing she loves to do. And she has no intention of forsaking it. “The thought of sitting on the sofa and watching TV for the rest of my life?” says Neill. “Gag me with a spoon.

“When I decided to go to Arizona, what I wanted in my life was security, I wanted happiness, I wanted comfort, I wanted creativity, I wanted love. I did not want an Italian restaurant.

“But, see, in a funny way, this has given me everything that I could ever want. All the security, all the comfort. Every day is fun. And there’s love here. I have people who come in and, when they leave, they give me a hug. Do you know many other businesses where, when they walk out, they hug you and pat your hand and put their arm around you and tell you how much they enjoyed it? You can’t imagine what that does to you — when something you have created, and that you love, brings pleasure and happiness to other folks. It’s the most heady experience. This place just supplies so much of what I want.

“Really — how much luckier can you get, to have a life like that? Try it.”

This story originally appeared in The Iola Register on September 2, 2016.