The sign is easy to miss, which is the first thing anyone will tell you. You're on Route 6A in Yarmouth Port, and Jack's Outback isn't on Route 6A — not really. It's back behind the buildings that line the road, up a curvy little driveway that doubles as the parking lot, in an old white-clapboard house with dark green trim that looks more like somebody's home than a restaurant. It's called Outback because it's out back. Finding it is still the first test.
The second test used to begin at the counter.
Here's how it went, back when a man named Jack Braginton-Smith ran the place. You'd walk in and stand there, waiting for someone to take your order. Nobody came. There was a stack of little paper slips under the counter, and the regular beside you was already filling one out — pen scratching, not looking up. The menu wasn't in your hand. It was on the wall, hand-lettered and cheerfully misspelled. Waffils. Korn mufins. Froot. You wrote down what you wanted, dropped the slip in the order carousel yourself, poured your own coffee, and when you finished you cleared your own table and carried your own check to the register. Fumble it and someone let you know. Get it right and you'd quietly joined something.
At the center of all of it was Jack. Wild hair, a gift for sarcasm. When the old general store on Main Street closed, a group of locals threw in some cash, took a vacant house out back, and more or less installed him in it. He lived upstairs for more than twenty years, in a small apartment full of antique glass bottles and history books, and ran the room below. He fed people. He needled them. Both were the point — you came in the morning for eggs and a hard time and left with a full serving of each.
For a while the "outback" theme went fully literal. An actual outhouse turned up on the back of somebody's truck; before long there were something like three of them around the lot, one with a half-moon cut in the door, apparently never used — just standing there looking official. Out front, a flock of plastic pink flamingoes appeared after the restaurant's softball team lost a game to the District Attorney's office, and never left. Come Christmas, they dressed as reindeer.
And most mornings around eight, a tall, quiet man took a seat at the counter with a bowl of cereal. That was Edward Gorey — the famously fur-coated illustrator whose spidery ink drawings you'd know on sight — who lived just up the road, and whose artwork ended up on these walls. By lunch, Ben Muse would roll up from Parnassus Book Service around the corner in a station wagon full of books, and half of Yarmouth Port would be in the room talking over each other.
That was the old Jack's. The original closed, and in 2004 it reopened under new ownership as Jack's Outback II. Jack died the next year. Dona Baratta ran the second version for about twenty years, and in 2024 she handed it to the Calle family, who came in promising continuity rather than reinvention — same hidden driveway, Jack's name still hanging over the place.
Go now and the room is bright and clean: big windows, booths and high-tops and a counter, and if you're lucky, a golden retriever working the door like it owns the place. There's a pan of popovers cooling near the front, and you'll want one before you've even sat down. They come out enormous — plain alongside your eggs, or split and stuffed with salad at lunch — and the one people circle back to arrives under melted brie, raspberry jam, and bacon still bubbling from the griddle. The hash is made in house. So are the English muffins. In summer the line runs out the door, the tables turn fast, and nobody minds the wait as much as they pretend to.
Somewhere near the register, for years, hung a small framed photo of Jack. You'd miss it on the way in. You'd notice it on the way out — which is about right for a place that was always more than the sum of what it fed you.
Jack's Outback II | 161 Main Street (Route 6A), Yarmouth Port Breakfast & lunch jacksoutback.com