One factoid the throngs of road-weary travelers may not be aware of upon setting foot inside Bravo Farms in Kettleman City, California, is that they’re stopping at the house that chipotle built.  
 
No, not the fast-casual burrito assembly line empire Chipotle with a capital “c,” the chipotle flavor … of artisanal cheese.  
 
Bill Boersma, along with wife Patt, co-founded Bravo Farms dairy just north of Visalia in 1995. To hear Boersma tell the origin story, one of their first specialties — a spicy chipotle jalapeño-flavored cheddar — was the creation that initially set them apart from other cheesemakers.  
 
“We decided to create a kind of cheddar cheese using chipotlé,” Bill Boersma told the Visalia Times-Delta in January 2008. “[We were] the first to do it.” 
 
The specialty farmstead cheese (meaning the cheese is made by the actual dairy operators) that came with a little kick took off, and soon the Boersmas, along with business partner and artisan cheesemaker Jonathan Van Ryn, had a hit on their hands.  
 
During its first four years of production alone, Bravo Farms skyrocketed from an initial production of 900 pounds of cheese to a planned 33,000 pounds in 1999, the Modesto Bee reported. From there, it was about expanding the footprint of where you could buy the cheese, and Boersmas and Van Ryn had a vertical integration plan for that too: open up their own shops and restaurants at popular road trip stopovers.  

By 2012, Bravo Farms had restaurant and specialty cheese gift shops near well-trafficked junctions in Traver, Visalia and Tulare. And construction was underway for the biggest endeavor of them all: the Bravo Farms mega-complex that stands today right off Interstate 5 in Kettleman City, a nouveau flat-fronted, Hollywood-style old Western ghost town facade surrounded by plenty of parking.

Bravo Farms in Kettleman City has dubbed itself “The 2nd Happiest Place on Earth.” And copyright laws be damned, the slogan is a good primer for what to expect — not to mention a great spot en route to Disneyland to get in that spirit.

After opening in 2014, the $4 million, over-32,000-square-foot facility that features a giant gift shop, a barbecue restaurant, animatronic games for kids (and adults), outdoor event space and even wine tasting, has turned into a go-to stop — and a clear midpoint for travelers hammering north or south on the freeway between LA and the Bay Area. 
 
It’s also a quick stretch-your-legs or meet-up spot before travelers turn off California state Route 41 and head west toward the wine country and beach towns of the Central Coast.

It was noticeable on my last two visits that there was not a speck of trash on the squeaky-clean main thoroughfare — not a discarded straw wrapper or stray paper napkin to be found in the place. Like in the Magic Kingdom, itinerant sweepers are unobtrusive and make sure the journey from north to south in the building is Disney-clean.

For those looking to stop a while and take in the vistas, there is plenty of outdoor seating where you can see all the way to the seemingly endless, shimmering Central Valley horizon, a front-row seat to where your food came from. And on weekends, a human-scale old mill diorama on the south end of the building has a mining area where children of all ages can pan for semiprecious gems and climb a small staircase to a lookout point hosted by an animatronic chicken tour guide. It’s up on that perch where the bold white letters painted on the rough-hewn facade of an ornamental water tower nearby cast aside all doubt about just where you’ve arrived: Bravoland.
 
Perhaps due in large part to all of these attractions, Kettleman City Bravo Farms has, in just under a decade, become a must-stop for a generation of travelers.
 
“We’re headed over to the coast, and this is our stopping point halfway to walk around and stretch out our legs a little bit,” Visalia resident Dylan Mann told SFGATE as his family enjoyed a Bravo Farms stop Tuesday before Thanksgiving week to break up the drive to Morro Bay. “As long as I can remember, we’ve stopped here.”
 
“Lots of unique gifts,” said Joanna Mann. The couple was traveling with one of their adult children, 24-year-old Ashlyn Mann, who had ducked away from her parents to go check out the gift shop.  
 
“It’s fun with the kids,” Joanna added. “Even when they get a little older.” 

As the Mann family enjoyed a calm perusal of the gift shop, Alisha Bane drove down from Hanford with her toddler to meet up with her best friend from Paso Robles, who also brought her youngster.  

“Right now, it’s a meeting point for us,” Bane said. “Because she’s an hour out that way and I’m this way and it’s a meeting point for us to meet up.”  

Bane said the building is big, with lots of things for the kids to do, and if they’re noisy, especially when it’s crowded, it blends in. 

It’s easy to see why. A shooting gallery with an animatronic bear carnival barker greets visitors who come through Bravo Farms’ main entrance. And the entire building — which connects a restaurant, with games, an ice cream parlor and an oversize gift shop — features, perhaps most prominently when you walk in, ample restroom space with oversize stalls equipped with changing stations.    
 
The whole of it is clean and welcoming and the cavernous feel soon dissipates as travelers stroll in starting around the noon hour.  
 
There are some regulars as well.  
 
On Tuesday, two men in jeans, work shirts and baseball caps were enjoying a meal at Wild Jacks, a Tex-Mex barbecue joint on the north end of the Bravo Farms building. Steven Armstrong and his dining companion Zach Presno are local farmers who said they swing by the restaurant a few times a week for a sit-down meal. The pair said Bravo Farms, especially during down weeks, is a nice alternative to the In-N-Out across the way, with a slightly more relaxed vibe and good food that comes in huge portions. 
 
“Starting about noon every day, In-N-Out just gets crazy,” Armstrong admitted.  

While the restaurant serves specialties like a burnt-ends burrito, an almost football-sized serving featuring a tortilla stuffed to near-transparency with rice, beans, brisket and tri-tip, as well as the Texas barbecue cheeseburger, which comes stacked with pulled pork spilling out from a brioche bun garnished with coleslaw and barbecue sauce, the pair said they usually opt for something a little on the lighter side. 
 
“We always get the Cobb salad,” Armstrong, a resident of nearby Riverdale, said. “I mean, it’s huge, it’s got a good amount of food.”
 
Presno, from Hanford, agreed. “No matter what you get here, it’s piled pretty high,” he said. “The food’s really good. It’s a great stop. We like it.” 
 
Armstrong said they’re some of the few locals who make Bravo Farms a regular stop during the week: “It’s probably 95% people who are traveling. Now it’s not very crowded but when it is a holiday weekend or summer it gets pretty crowded. 
 
“You also get a lot of people who are doing work out here. Their businesses may not be here, but they’re here for work.” 
 
Almost as soon as Armstrong described the typical customer he sees here, families and workers fresh from the road started to arrive in droves at Wild Jacks. Children ran the length of Bravo Farms’ interior hallway as parents fast-walked after their charges, attempting to corral them into the restroom area.  
 
Amy Palacio, who was working behind the counter at the gift shop getting bags of candy ready for display, looked up in time to find some of her first customers of the day. After she checked them out, she turned and observed that she sees signals that the holiday onslaught is coming.

“We kind of get people from everywhere now,” she said. “A lot of people come from the bay. … We get truck drivers, probably like 5%, but it’s mostly families [with] kids. Thanksgiving [week] is busiest, along with parts of the summer.”  
 
I stepped aside as Palacio rang up some visitors. Along with some road snacks, including Bravo Farms-branded almonds and cashews as well as a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels, was a wallet-sized block of Bravo Farms cheddar. 
 
Though not involved in the day-to-day of Bravo Farms in Kettleman City, Boersma still provides the company with its signature cheeses, perhaps the one consistency through all of the businesses’ changes since its spicy inception in the mid-1990s. 
 
“We haven’t tried this before,” the customer told Palacio. “We had to stop. The whole place looked too good to pass up.”