Murphy's Steakhouse

I have eaten at many places in my day. Michelin-starred restaurants. Mob-run diners. Underground dining clubs. I ate sea urchin on a charter boat in Vietnam and yakked up calamari in a local joint in Malta. I survived a combination Taco Bell + KFC in Ohio but got E. Coli from a food cart in Bogota. But I've never eaten at a post office.

At least not until I visited Winchester, a small town of 50 that's home to one of the most interesting restaurants in the state. Built in 1913 by C.H. Schmidt—a German immigrant who put his name on the building in big-ass letters—the building this post office resides in started out as a shoe shop. Schmidt initially stocked his store with 532 pairs of shoes and offered repair services. After some time, he and his wife, Anna, expanded to food items. Anna baked cookies and stocked barrels with sardines and sauerkraut.

When Schmidt died in 1921, his daughter Hattie and her husband took over. The shop expanded into a general store and adopted the Harris General Merchandise name. The Murphy family bought the joint in the 1970s and then turned it into Murphy's Steakhouse in 1995. These days, the co-owner and manager is Georianna Fox-Orona. Oh, and she's also Winchester's postmaster, because the steakhouse and post office are actually in the same building.

Murphy's has been a fixture of the community for a century now, and while it serves up huge, hand-cut steaks, it also keeps the mail flowing. The exposed brick walls and pressed tin ceiling are all original. The bar looks like it has soaked up gallons of cowboy-spilled whiskey over the years. And there's a rotating dessert display that'll hypnotize you into dreaming about pie all night.

I forget which size steak I ordered, but I can tell you that the actual cut came out as an obvious overestimation. (They don't weigh them here, just eyeball it.) The decor was plenty interesting and lunch left me dangerously in peril of falling asleep at the wheel. Overall, I couldn't ask much more from a meal served by a postmaster. If you're in the area, neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow should stop you from visiting Murphy's Steakhouse.