MOWEAQUA - The menu at the Hog Trough Too recently featured a hot new special: Hollywood.

The Moweaqua restaurant was used to film several scenes involving Matt Damon and Scott Bakula for "The Informant," the upcoming movie about the early 1990s lysine price-fixing scandal at Decatur-based Archer Daniels Midland Co.

Given a full dose of the Tinseltown treatment, the Hog Trough was redecorated for the occasion and served up a new name for the movie, "The Cat & The Griddle," the name change made for legal reasons, apparently.

But the reason the restaurant was chosen to star in the picture was obvious: Mark Whitacre, the informant played by Damon who blows the whistle on the price-fixing, was a regular at the popular eating spot when it was called "Bruce's Place."

Whitacre, a Ph.D. chemist, was president of ADM's Bio Products Division and lived in Moweaqua's grandest home, a Victorian gem on the west edge of the village that locals just call "the mansion." He won friends easily and was a guy with a lot of twinkle who didn't mind splashing the cash.

"He was a $100 tipper," recalls Hog Trough Too owner Angie Knight, who used to waitress there in the early '90s when Whitacre consumed the restaurant's food products. "All the girls wanted to serve him."

She said the restaurant's former owner, Bruce Ball, always said that Hollywood would get around to doing a movie about the Whitacre story. The call finally came in November, when the movie makers asked Knight if they could use her restaurant. "I just didn't believe it was real," she said.

And when a crew showed up to check the place out and shoot some pictures, Knight's aunt, general manager and "right-hand woman" Brenda Adams, didn't believe it, either.

"They came in wanting to take photographs of the place, and Brenda asked to see their driver's licenses because they didn't have any business cards," Knight said.

But it all began to seem very real when teams of carpenters, painters and decorators began arriving more than a month ago to groom the restaurant for its brush with stardom. Working when the place was closed, they changed the exterior beige color to blue and painted the taupe interior a barn red with matching red check wallpaper. All pig-related decorations, the Hog Trough's signature animal, were removed in favor of cat-related knick-knacks.

Filming of different scenes, set at breakfast and lunch, was supposed to take place on May 12 but got bumped a day earlier to Mother's Day because bad weather scrubbed some outdoor shooting planned for that day at the mansion.

"They came in Sunday and wanted to close me down early, and I kind of had a tizzy," Knight said. "I told them I close at noon, and they were nice enough to wait outside in the parking lot (the film crew, not the stars). I wasn't going to throw any of my diners out early because, like my husband, Todd, says, we have to keep doing business here when the film crew is gone."

As for the attitude of the crew and the stars themselves, Knight gives them a rating of two thumbs, way up. The image of Hollywood haughtiness and indifference to ordinary people was about a million miles from the attitude the Hog Trough encountered.

"The film crew and its painters, carpenters, everybody, were the finest, I mean the finest, of people," Knight said.

"And Matt Damon and Scott Bakula were just so fun. They spoke to everybody and were just the nicest people. Matt Damon signed our menus, coffee cups, and took the time to speak to fans who had waited to speak to him. He was very gracious."

Knight wound up being an extra playing a waitress in her own restaurant, and she put the call out for any of her 19-strong staff who wanted to come in and enjoy their 15 minutes of fame as extras playing other diners.

"I said, 'It's Sunday, and I know it's Mother's Day, but if you want in this, come on up here because they're filming,' " she said. "I think we had 10 of the staff come in."

Amid the pandemonium of moving out furniture and bringing furniture in to turn the Hog Trough into the The Cat & The Griddle, there was also a lot of food to prepare as the edible props for the breakfast and lunch scenes. Cook Juanita Goodrich played a major role in the food prep and helped serve up everything from a full breakfast menu to sandwiches, hamburgers, chicken breast, salads, broasted potatoes and salads.

Nothing was too much trouble. When the filmmakers wanted square-shaped waffles and the restaurant only had round ones, Goodrich went home and got her own square two-waffle iron to oblige and cooked Damon six waffles, which he appeared to enjoy greatly.

Asked if she was nervous cooking for the stars, Goodrich, who was also an extra as a guest eating her own food, smiled. "Honey, I am 70 years old; you think a little movie star makes me nervous? I mean I was excited, but no, I wasn't nervous."

She's been cooking professionally for some 30 years and was working at the restaurant when it was Bruce's Place and the real Whitacre came in.

"A very, very nice guy," she said. "If you would ask him something, he'd tell ya. Just so polite and nice. When it all happened with him, I couldn't believe it, but I guess you never know, do you?"

She'd never seen seasoned actors work before and said watching it all happen where she works was "just wild." As an extra, she got to share a table with her son, Joshua, 32, and was very impressed with the actors' abilities to focus on the job and get it done.

"They told them, 'Action!' and they just did their thing," she said. "Very professional."

Now the cameras are gone, and the stars are back in Hollywood, but the Hog Trough Too will be forever changed. The exterior color is back to beige with chocolate trim, but Knight loves the red interior and is keeping it, along with one wall still covered in the matching red-check paper. She plans to house a shrine of signed mementoes here and will dust off the The Cat & The Griddle signs for a special display before the movie's scheduled debut in March.

"Having a movie filmed in your restaurant with Matt Damon doesn't happen to most people," she said. "I think we've been blessed."

Tony Reid can be reached at treid@herald-review.com or 421-7977.