DiPPER: Familiar food cart grows into new restaurant
Megan Miller, co-founder of The DiPPER, puts the finishing touches on the menu board, the day before her new restaurant opened its doors. The DiPPER offers a new cuisine centered around their French Dip sandwich.
The scent from the Northwest Boulevard refrigerator was somehow both mysterious and unmistakable, spiced in secrecy as well as comforting familiarity.
“I can’t tell you what’s on the rub,” Carol Faber admitted with a sly smile, standing next to an enormous slab of spice-coated beef. “It’s our company secret.”
But the secret’s out. The Montreal spices — blended with whatever proprietary deal with the devil the Faber family signed into to produce that kind of mouth-watering aroma — weren’t the only flavors filling the air. The taste of excitement among Faber and her co-founding daughters, Megan Miller and Lauren Buck, was palpable as they counted down the final hours before opening their new restaurant. On Dec. 12, Coeur d’Alene’s newest restaurant, The DiPPER, opened for the first time, fulfilling the next step in a family dream.
“This is beyond amazing,” Buck said less than 24 hours before The DiPPER’s debut. “I can’t wait for tomorrow.”
“This is just a dream come true,” Faber agreed. “So many people have come by in the last month or so, thinking we’re open. We hated to turn people away. It’s so exciting to finally be able to welcome people in and let them enjoy.”
‘Finally’ is a relative word. The turnaround time between the family’s discovery of the 1500 Northwest Boulevard location and the decision to make it their restaurant’s inaugural home was only a fraction of their week-long beef-aging process.
“We discovered this place on Oct. 8, I believe,” Buck recalled. “We signed the lease October 10. We looked at a few places in those few days in between, but I knew as soon as I saw it: This was the place for us.”
The DiPPER was born in 2018 along the shaded Prairie Avenue grass of the Kootenai County Farmers’ Market, where Faber, Miller and Buck first championed their take on the French Dip sandwich. Their mobile vending cart included little more than a grill and a portable meat slicer, but Buck said their skill sets were just as valuable as their farm-fresh ingredients.
“Mom’s the chef,” Buck explained. “She’s a marvelous chef. Megan has a culinary background. And I’m a [Certified Public Accountant] by trade.”
Together, Hader said, the trio makes up the foundation of a business steeped in culinary history but grounded in family.
“When people walk through the front doors,” she said, “we want them to feel welcome. We want them to feel like they can sit down and enjoy a family meal.”
What began at the Farmers’ Market carried forward to Hayden Days,
