Kati Stauffer’s family moved in the 1990s from eastern Iowa to Lincoln to open a restaurant serving honest Midwestern cooking. Hot beef sandwiches. Pork tenderloin. Rhubarb pie. But they quickly realized they needed to offer two seemingly unrelated items as a combo.
“Someone gets in the mood for it and they come in for it,” she said. “They say, ‘I just had to have chili and cinnamon rolls today — please tell me you still have rolls left!’”
The pairing is still a fixture on the Stauffer’s Café menu, but it’s much more than just a diner thing — you’ll find it in school cafeterias, at high-end Omaha restaurants and at Husker tailgates. The unofficial season tracks almost perfectly with the non-daylight saving time months — from the first heavy coat for a football game to when the last of the blackened snow is melting in the Walmart parking lot…