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The Yellow Deli

This one is weird, and I really don't know what I am talking about.

When we arrived at the Farm in the late 1970s, Grace Haven had a restaurant downtown, located in a basement next to the Richland Bank building. The point of it was to provide temporary employment for the itinerate learners and space for a Christian bookstore. It was also a venue for the ever-present Christian guitar music.

There are a lot of happy memories about the Deli, but it was sort of a money pit and always had management problems. One big deal was that the church folk were committed to the idea of keeping it open in the evenings, but downtown Mansfield was absolutely NOT an evening place. Everyone goes home at five, so there was no point in running a restaurant after about three PM. But they kept trying.

Now here is the mystery. If you Google "Yellow Deli," you discover that there is actually a chain of them, scattered through several cities in the South. The details all look familiar: the decor of the restaurant, the menu, the concept of the staff living in several communal houses. Even the typography of the sign looks like the Mansfield version. The current Yellow Deli is apparently the outgrowth of some kind of Christian ministry. The mystery is that I never heard a word about any connection to these other "Yellow Deli" establishments, even though theirs began in Chattanooga, Tennessee (pretty close to the home base of Buddy Luster, one of the powerful early personalities of Grace Haven) in 1972 (about the time Grace Haven was getting off the ground).

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