Featured flavors: LeClaire’s Crane & Pelican serves timeless flavors in a historical setting
By Gretchen Teske – Quad City Times, Davenport, Iowa (TNS)
History and charm aren’t on the menu at the Crane & Pelican Cafe, but they’re among the first things customers notice.
Owner Mandy Harvey has lived in the Quad-Cities all her life, with a special affinity for LeClaire — a river town about 15 miles upstream from Davenport.
Harvey was working at a different restaurant in town when she heard the building at 127 S. Second St. was for sale. She’d always wanted to own her own place one day, she said, and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to own a piece of LeClaire’s history.
“If you remember what was going on in the economy in 2009, this building kind of just landed in our lap,” she said. “It was a deal that was too good to pass up.”
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A look at The Crane & Pelican Cafe in LeClaire.
It was originally built in 1851 and was the residence of Daniel and Sabina Dawley, where the couple raised nine children. Daniel spent 30 years on the Mississippi, owning and working on boats before retiring and becoming the LeClaire postmaster.
His wife, Sabina, was a prominent Universalist and during the Civil War hosted events to make bandages for Union soldiers.
“It stayed in their family for over 100 years. The unwed daughters stayed, kept living here,” Harvey said.
Over the years she’s collected more stories about the home. Years ago, a customer told her she rented a room upstairs in the 1940s and there was still no indoor plumbing at that time.
In the 1960s, another family moved in and renovated the home.
“A lot of their footprint on the house still remains. And then one of the descendants brought me pictures of what it looked like at that time, which was cool to see like, all decked out for Christmas,” Harvey said.
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Mandy Harvey, owner and chef of The Crane & Pelican Cafe, talks about building a staff that loves what they do to provide top notch service.
Over time the house was occupied by a couple of private families before it was turned into a funeral home in the mid-1980s, she said. The home stayed that way until 2005, then sat empty until Harvey purchased it in 2009.
The funeral home had already installed modern windows, she said, but the home still looked like it had been sitting unused for five years. Work began right away to turn the main floor into the restaurant, and the home’s garage into the kitchen.
“The building was structurally very well maintained throughout its life,” she said. “Most of what we did was to take it back to its original historic charm. It was wall-to-wall pink carpeting when we bought it, so that had to go.”
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The Crane & Pelican Cafe owner Mandy Harvey restored the historic building after she bought it. The first job was getting rid of the pink carpet in order to restore the pine floors.
Extra care was taken to ensure the original pine floors, chandeliers, fireplaces and trim were all kept in top shape, in an effort to showcase the beauty of the 1800s craftsmanship. The home sits on a hill, overlooking the Mississippi River, with two porches and a generous lawn space for entertaining.
“There’s so much character to it,” Harvey said of the house. “Anything that we did to the property has been to try and restore the original charm because it just makes sense for our purposes.”
Once the house was finally up to par, the new restaurant needed a name. Pelicans were something Harvey and her family had always loved, and right around the time she was renovating the house, they were beginning to return to the upper Mississippi Valley.
“When this house was originally built 170 years ago, pelicans would have migrated through here,” she said. “But when I was a kid, you never saw a pelican here in the Quad-Cities. But then about 2009 they started migrating through, which is a sign, actually, of a cleaner, healthier river.”
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A look at one of the dining rooms in The Crane & Pelican on Thursday, Oct. 10, in LeClaire.
A friend later suggested Crane & Pelican Cafe, and it stuck. With a name ready to be printed on menus, next came the food.
Harvey largely created the menu herself, using her decades of experience in restaurants for reference. The menu is full of classics like a chicken salad sandwich and gourmet grilled cheese, alongside a variety of soups and salads.
For those looking for a heartier meal, the “Bourbon & Blue” New York strip, slow roasted beef brisket and pecan crusted salmon stand out. Orange crepes, hummingbird cake and homemade ice cream round out the sweets menu, with local beer, wine and spirits offered on the drink menu.
After 15 years in business, Harvey has learned to adapt to and expect change. As soon as things are figured out, she said, change happens.
But, that’s okay. A majority of the staff at Crane & Pelican have been with Harvey for years and are all dedicated to it. It shows, she said, in their level of service.
“I like to say we’re restaurant professionals. That’s my little tagline right now because everybody that works here, we know what we’re doing and we enjoy doing it,” she said. “There’s nobody who works here because we want to just work in a restaurant so we can do something else with our lives. We actually love doing this.”
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Photos: The Crane & Pelican Cafe
A look inside The Crane & Pelican Cafe located at 127 South 2nd Street in LeClaire.
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