White Fence Farm doesn’t merely suggest or re-create the past; it is the past. The restaurant is as much an antiques museum as a house of fried chicken, displaying the same collector dolls, matte portraits and porcelain trinkets as your Great Aunt Dorothy in her Scottsdale condo.

Except here you find waitresses wearing modest green dresses and aprons; busboys in short-sleeve white shirts and bow ties. They are impossibly polite, and your jaw throbs from smiling back. Those who make the hiring decisions tell me they prefer “an old-fashioned plain Jane.”

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