I've driven past Marlin's on North Cliff dozens of times — that stretch between 41st and 49th where the city starts to flatten out into parking lots and strip malls — and I always assumed it was just another chain diner. It's not. It's been family-owned since 1979, which in Sioux Falls restaurant years is basically ancient history.
The building looks exactly like what it is: a converted Pizza Hut. You can still see the ghost of that red roof architecture if you squint. But inside, it's pure family restaurant chaos in the best way — vinyl booths packed with church crowds on Sundays, families celebrating birthdays on Tuesday nights, construction workers inhaling pancakes at 6 a.m.
I went on a Saturday morning and the wait was twenty minutes. The hostess — who I'm pretty sure has worked there since I was in middle school — wrote my name on a literal clipboard. No buzzer, no app. When she called "Grace, party of one," half the dining room turned to look.
The menu is a spiral-bound novel. Breakfast all day, which is the only correct way to run a restaurant. I ordered the farmer's skillet because the guy next to me had one and it looked like a mountain. It arrived — scrambled eggs, hash browns, sausage, peppers, cheese, all in a cast iron skillet still sizzling. The hash browns were the shredded kind, crispy on the edges, which is the only kind that matters.
Is it going to change your life? No. The coffee's diner coffee — hot and infinite. The décor hasn't been updated since Bush was president. But there's something honest about a place that's been doing the same thing for forty-five years and hasn't tried to rebrand itself into something it's not.
— Grace
I went on a Saturday morning and the wait was twenty minutes.