TORONTO — It’s a wonder that in southeast Kansas Courtney’s isn’t a household name. The Wichita Eagle gave her the front page a couple of years ago, calling her restaurant “a big-time Italian restaurant in tiny Toronto.” A PBS affiliate in Topeka broadcast a special on her in 2008. Yelp reviewers from all corners of the country continue to bathe the restaurant — Courtney’s Places, to give it its full name — in exuberant praise. “The food,” everyone seems to say, “the food!”
And if locals haven’t quite cottoned on to Courtney’s, somehow her name has made its way on the wind. Her guest book is lined with diners from Kansas City, Lawrence, Wichita, Denver, Oklahoma City, London, Atlanta, New York, Nashville, Houston, Los Angeles.
And so it is that, by some formula known only to Courtney Neill, Courtney’s Places — a fancy Italian restaurant run by a Scot with no real history in the kitchen — is celebrating its 12th year, and banking on plenty more.
Neill’s, then, is a story of duration. How, when every day in this country a hundred storefront dreams founder on the shoals of a declining rural economy, does a tiny cloth-napkin restaurant in the center of a dilapidated downtown continue to thrive?
The answer, in this case at least, lies in the blessed devotion of its owner, and in the fact that she lives upstairs.
A COMPACT WOMAN with orange hair, smart spectacles, and a wide, infectious smile, Courtney Neill is a lavish talker with a habit of interrupting herself with rhetorical questions: “Aren’t I lucky?” “Aren’t I blessed?” “Isn’t it wild?” Regarding her nervousness surrounding the pasta buffet she plans to launch for the first time this Sunday: “You think I’m going to sleep a wink Saturday night?” And not infrequently she’ll pause, and then ask: “Isn’t this a great life?”
Born in Pennsylvania, the daughter of a well-to-do railroad executive, Neill’s early years were characterized by frequent moves, a footloose habit she cultivated into her adult life, too. Neill is one of those who seem to have taken a bigger bite out of life than the rest of us; she’s worked a variety of careers, she’s lived all over. “I’ve had fun,” insists Neill. Plus, there’s a Zelig-like quality to where Neill turns up. She was in Daley Plaza, in Chicago, the day the monumental Picasso sculpture was installed. “Everybody was saying it looked like a baboon.” She was in St. Louis the day they topped the Arch. She went to college in Fayetteville, at the University of Arkansas. She lived in Boston for a time. She adores Maine. And for years, while she worked as an executive for an east coast convenience store franchise, she made a thoroughly beachy kind of life for herself in Melbourne, Fla. Which is where the story of Courtney’s Places really begins.
IN 1997, plugging away at her office job in the sunshine state, Neill was seized by a notion that most of us dismiss as too risky. “What I found was that I was working all these hours so that I could afford a house big enough to store all this stuff I had accumulated. I looked at my life and said ‘This is really kind of silly.’ It was not a sensible way to live — for me, at least. So I left.”
And in grand fashion, too. Having given her notice, Neill packed up her 1954 RV — an overhead camper outfitted with lace curtains, stars on the ceiling, and a custom-made recliner in the back — and set out to make a new life for herself in Arizona. Her idea was to build a straw-bale house in the desert, and sell hand-sewn clothes enough to bring in a few bucks on the side.
But, first, she agreed to drop off her sister-in-law in Toronto en route. “The RV was packed with my mother’s China, my grandmother’s crystal, my dog, my cat, everything I owned; my sister-in-law, her dog, her cat. Plus, we were towing my Volkswagen Bug.
“Well, my old RV objected. It blew its motor in Mississippi and left me totally stranded.”
The women rented a U-Haul and made their way to Toronto, where Neill could plot her next move. “So I’m here three days,” recalls Neill, “and what do I do? I fall and shatter my knee. I didn’t break it; I shattered it.”
For four months Neill hobbled around Toronto wearing a 40-pound cast. She still couldn’t drive, and by that point, her family had returned to Florida to meet professional obligations. Neill was on her own, a stranger in town — living temporarily at her brother’s home — dependent on the kindness of locals.
“Toronto is such wonderful little town,” Neill says, remembering those folks who nearly 20 years ago taxied her to the grocery store and to the laundromat and who introduced her to her future neighbors. “I decided this was a perfect place. I didn’t need to go to Arizona. I was going to stay here.”
