Martinsville, Illinois, population 1,118, two square miles wide, an hour and 40 minutes from Decatur, located in the southeast corner of the state, is nowhere at all. That’s more than fair. In fact, you could invite the entire population of Clark County to the United Center and have room for another 10,000. This is a vast and stark landscape that offers mainly expansive skies and endless fields.
Plop in the middle of this nowhere, however, is an old farmhouse that was built in 1912. It used to be a general store and was owned for many years by a woman named Enid Misner, who sold it to Helen Tuttle in 1982, who then sold it 35 years later to Lisa and Jackie Tuttle, sisters-in-law.
It’s called the Moonshine Store, and it was a viral restaurant before there were viral restaurants. They make mostly cheeseburgers here, but they start at 6 a.m. and turn off the grill at 12:30 p.m. sharp, and if you don’t believe they’ll do it, there’s a warning hanging outside. You need to want to be here. And yet there are days, especially in summer, when there’s a cheeseburger line at 8 a.m. The day I stopped by, there was no line at all because it was cold and rainy and spring and the only other people eating burgers had just come in off the fields and were still streaked with grease.
The Moonshine Store is a summer road-trip attraction, though an honest one, not the kind that announces itself with highway billboards for miles around or declares itself a must-visit destination. To get there, you pass by a Hazel Dell restaurant, which is now closed and looks more like a shack, but I’ll take their word for it. You weave around turkey vultures who play chicken with cars. You pass more Trump flags here than Old Glorys, and just before reaching the Moonshine Store, you drive by a small rural cemetery named — no kidding — Restitution. You’re about 40 minutes from the highway. Not to beat a dead vulture, but the Moonshine Store is so out of the way, to some locals, it’s really in Moonshine, Illinois, which is unincorporated land that once had a population of two for years and now, technically, has a population of exactly none. So just put Martinsville in the GPS.
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But go there.
You know the burgers you used to eat in people’s backyards, the kind your parents made in a skillet, the ones that were shaped by hand and sort of resembled craggy, shapeless meteoroids? They still make those burgers here. A Moonshine burger is so outside of the bounds of contemporary culinary ambition or pretense that the Tuttles tell you proudly they do not season the meat. Alas, one needs to travel three and a half hours from Chicago now to find such a rare thing.
However well done.
No one, that is, asks you how you want your burger here. Helen Tuttle, who turned her general store into a hamburger joint in the 1990s, once shared her recipe in Illinois Farmer Today, though she liked to tell people there was no recipe: a half pound of ground beef, nothing else. The bun is just a bun, the condiments — found on a barrel in the center of the store — are nothing special. The cheese is yellow. You settle into the results, a gut bomb that leaves you stuffed after sundown. A cheeseburger is $5, a double $6.75. You wait on long wooden church pews and gaze up at the tin ceiling and mounted wildlife. There are no tables inside, just picnic tables outside, so while you eat, a neighborhood dog named Willie, a large brown Cujo lookalike, will gently inquire about leftovers.
Two events transformed Moonshine into a destination.
The first, a story on “CBS Sunday Morning,” which somehow stumbled on the place in 2003. And the second, the Moonshine Lunch Run, an annual gathering of motorcyclists who drove in from across the nation just to eat a Moonshine burger. The bikes would line the surrounding fields for miles in every direction, and Lisa would use a golf cart to shuttle their riders back and forth. That lasted 14 years, from 2004 until 2017, when Lisa’s husband died. But they still get a ton of bikers.
Lately, they also get a lot of people who have seen them on social media.
“I don’t know if we went viral,” said Lisa. “People tell me we did. Honestly, I don’t know. Apparently on TikTok? Who knows? I tell people to go to the website, but no one looks at that and truthfully, I’m doing away with it.” She gets a lot of calls now from tourists who want a reservation — a reservation!
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None of this was intended.
The Moonshine Store has been owned by six different families in 114 years, and for most of that time, the only hamburgers they made were a casual snack for the local farmers and oil workers. There were general stores all over then, the Orange Store, the Needmore Store, the Hogtown Store. Moonshine is mostly alone now. Lisa and Jackie arrive before 6, and many of those times, the farmers are already waiting.
Neither Tuttle wanted to cook burgers for a living. They were both registered nurses. “I worked hard for my nursing license,” Lisa said, “but when my mother-in-law wanted to stop, I talked to my husband and no one wanted to see this place close, so as long as Jackie and I can work together, it’s fine. But I wouldn’t say either of us are in great shape anymore. I’m 62, she’s six years younger. My rotator cuff is torn, and that (meat) press will kill your back.”
She checked a ledger. They made 1,200 burgers in the past week, just the two of them.
And it wasn’t even summer yet.
Moonshine Store, 6017 E. 300th Road, Martinsville; 618-569-9200, moonshineillinois.com