New restaurants today are the talk of the town, and that’s putting it lightly. But few know restaurants have, in fact, always been this way. Even when Maricopa was a settlement of just a few dozen people.

In the late 1800s, in the days of Maricopa Junction, one of the few restaurants in town was known as the Lunch Room. It sat near what was once the Hotel Williams and the iconic water tower, which still stands since circa 1800 near the Amtrak Station.

The Lunch Room was a place rail passengers frequently patronized, passing time by sitting and watching the trains load and unload, according to the Maricopa Historical Society, which provided the photos.

While details about the Lunch Room are little known, Sing Ching and Song, whose surname has been lost to history, were two of the Chinese-American chefs who worked there. They were some of the finest cooks in the Arizona territory, historians noted.