Shareholders and stakeholders in the Hotel Pattee met Monday night to celebrate the latest milestone in the hotel’s steady growth: the Frontier Shack food outlet that will soon open along the High Trestle Trail in Madrid.
Jay and Denise Hartz of Perry, owners and operators of the Hotel Pattee since November 2013, are teaming up with the Flat Tire Lounge in Madrid to start “feeding the trail” with some of central Iowa’s finest creations from the kitchen of the Hotel Pattee.
Jay Hartz said the Frontier Shack will open at the end of April, just as biking season hits its stride.
The Frontier Shack is the name of the hotel’s trailside satellite. It will offer a scaled-down ve
rsion of the menu from David’s Milwaukee Diner, featuring items suited to bicyclists’ ongoing needs.
“This is a great opportunity for us and for the High Trestle Trail,” Jay Hartz said amid a host of supporters in the anteroom of the Spring Valley Ballroom. The Hartz’s many Perry well wishers were treated to dinner and drinks, and the atmosphere was festive.
“Any time you 
can invest in the community, you naturally say, ‘Go for it,'” said Monica Peitz of Perry. “As the Hotel Pattee goes, so goes Perry” said her husband, Alan Peitz.
Steady progress on the Perry-to-Woodward link connecting the Raccoon River Valley Trail and High Trestle Trail promises to lead to a flourishing relationship between the two premier recreation attractions and a boost to the local economies of both.
