When you walk through the old wooden door of Juniper Valley Ranch Dining Room, past the little stone patio where cholla cactus and yucca lean against the red adobe wall, you don’t feel like a customer. You feel like company coming for Sunday dinner.

And in a way, you are.

Juniper Valley, a humble, mud-brick building hidden among a grove of junipers on a particularly pleasant stretch of the highway to Cañon City, serves only two dishes, ham and fried chicken, accompanied by a herd of country sides, which were pulled from a family recipe box when the dining room opened in 1951 and have not changed a lick since.

Everything is served family-style. If you want seconds, just ask. Most of the folks cooking and bringing dishes to the table are family, descended from the original homesteader, a cowpuncher named Guy Parker.

Western landscapes that Parker composed by lamp light hang on the walls. The lamp shades are old colanders. The fireplace crackles with sweet piñon wood gathered from the ranch.

The whole thing started when Parker’s daughters, Ethel Shirola and Evelyn Ellis, opened the restaurant 60 years ago with the idea of serving a country-style Sunday chicken dinner for $2.50 a plate.

“It’s the kind of food they grew up on,” said Guy’s great-grandson Greg Dickey, who now runs the restaurant with his sister. “More than anything, we strive to keep it how it was; I still use hand-written recipes of my grandma.”

The walls are covered with old farm tools and other antiques. The curtains are tied back with red bandanas. Anyone wandering in off the highway (unlikely, since the restaurant is easy to miss) might think Juniper Valley is a just kitschy tourist joint with a Little House on the Prairie gimmick.

But sit down, take a deep breath and let the long-forgotten leisurely pace and feel of the place seep in, and you realize that, in fact, it’s not Juniper Valley but you — you with your Twitter feed, your phantom ring syndrome and your ludicrous cable bill — and the rest of the modern world that are the gimmick, and that Juniper Valley is just a preserved slice of a more-human era that has somehow survived.

That jarring realization alone almost justifies the cost of dinner ($17.25 to $18.25), but the food ain’t bad, either.

The start is a bit odd. Everyone has a choice of local cherry cider or curry consommè. Sounds interesting enough, but the cider tastes like Kool-aid. The consommè — chicken broth laced with curry powder — is not a whole lot better. Both suggest the meal ahead could be something out of a nursing home. Take heart. It gets much, much better.

These starters date from 1951. And the family is loath to change a detail.

“I’m too scared to — why mess with a good thing?” Dickey said. “For years and years I thought about adding a chicken-fried steak, but I just haven’t dared.”

Diners really have only one decision: Chicken or ham. Most go for the chicken and are rewarded with tender, moist pieces fried crunchy brown the old-fashioned way in weathered cast-iron skillets. The chicken is crisp and indulgent without being weighed down by too much breading. The amber coat of batter has just the right mix of seasoning, and the practiced hands of the family, after six decades, know how to fry without leaving the bird greasy. In short, it is the best chicken around.

The ham is less exciting, but still good: Lightly smoky, tender and served sliced in a dish of slightly sweet juices spiked with cloves.

Both entrees share the same homemade sides, served in big dishes on the table. First come the fresh, hot biscuits, still steaming in the round tin they were baked in. Tear one off and slather it in butter and cool, sweet apple butter rife with cinnamon. There is nothing better. One could make a whole meal of the stuff.

But that would unfairly exclude the riced potatoes. Don’t expect the typical oversalted, overfattened restaurant mashed potatoes. These are simply boiled and pressed through something akin to an oversize garlic press, leaving them much lighter than the mashed stuff. Season them yourself or, better yet, ladle on a healthy douse of peppery country gravy from a big mug set on the table.

For greens, there’s an okra casserole. Mixed with tomatoes, celery, onion and rice, the okra is almost a jambalaya. It is not slimy or sticky as okra tends to be, and has the right balance of flavors. Long ago, it was the first okra dish I ever had and still the one I judge all others against.

Take your time enjoying these dishes. Steal a little ham or chicken from a companion’s plate. Start a conversation with the neighboring table. It’s that kind of place.

While $18 can seem a tad steep, it is actually less than the original $2.50 price, when adjusted for inflation. A voraciously loyal band of diners, some who have been returning for decades, obviously know they are getting a deal.

Despite offers of seconds or thirds, save room for dessert. Ice cream with homemade butterscotch is always a hit with the kids, but don’t pass on the chocolate cake — saucy and cocoa-y but not too sweet — or the luscious bread pudding, an old recipe with raisins and eggs, topped simply with a splash of cool, fresh cream.

Juniper Valley borders Fort Carson. Thanks to Uncle Sam, the gorgeous, grassy valley to the east, hemmed in by distant juniper-studded mesas — straight out of a Georgia O’Keeffe landscape — is totally undeveloped. The only welcome change at Juniper Valley would be a small porch off the back where, on sunny summer evenings, diners could look out at the mesas and see the same scenes the cowpunching rancher used to paint.

“We’ve thought about it,” Dickey said. “But all changes around here come slow.”

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