A Country Diner in the City - The Cottage

Located on Summer Avenue near National the Cottage is like a small-town country diner sitting in almost the exact middle of the city. It's the kind of place that serves breakfast all day along with plate lunches and dinners of Southern staples.

The menu said the meatloaf came topped with a tomato gravy so I decided to give it a try since I have been obsessed with the tomato and beef gravy that comes on the meatloaf at Southern Hands for several months now. Since I was going to compare it to Southern Hands I decided to also get my standard sides from the restaurant of turnip greens and purple-hull peas.

The price for the plate lunches is only $6.99. After taking my order the waitress, who was the friendly grandmother-type server you'd expect to find in a country diner, mentioned that it was free banana pudding day so if I wanted she'd bring me some for dessert after my meal. I usually take a pass on dessert but I was born and raised in the South and I don't turn down free 'naner puddin.' The server started to walk off before turning around and mentioning that the restaurant was also offering a special with any meat and two combo of four coconut shrimp for $1. At that point I wasn't sure if she just thought I looked too skinny and needed to be fattened up but I told her to add the shrimp to my order too.

The shrimp came out with my cornbread. Four shrimp, two corn muffins, meatloaf, turnip greens, peas and banana pudding is pretty hefty meal for just $7.99 before tax and tip. I only had a few bites of the corn bread but it was good enough that I could have easily eaten more. I was happen to see that it came with real butter (ingredients: cream, salt) not any type of vegetable oil-based frankenfood.

When my main plate of food came out I was disappointed by the meatloaf since the "tomato gravy" listing in the menu had made me excited. The "tomato gravy" it was swimming in looked like ketchup and tasted like ketchup. Southern Hands has definitely raised my expectations when it comes to meatloaf. Also, at Southern Hands I've gotten spoiled by greens and peas that never need additional seasoning. At the Cottage both were way underseasoned. The greens were fine with some salt, pepper and Bruce's Hot Pepper Sauce. The peas didn't have any pork flavor, which should be the foundation of delicious peas. I added Louisiana Hot Sauce, salt and pepper to them but it is hard to get the salt level right on peas that didn't get enough while they were cooking. Like Plate Lunch in Bartlett the Cottage serves up old-fashioned white country cooking as opposed to flavorful soul food. The portions are generous and none of the food I tried was bad, but there was nothing to truly excite the taste buds other than the dessert.

The cottage served me some some great homemade banana pudding and at a price of free it was impossible to turn down.

Texas Transplant - Wing and BBQ Shack

I heard about the recently-opened Wing & BBQ Shack on Mendenhall near Winchester from a friend who is a major barbecue connoisseur who devotes a lot of his spare time to both judging and competing in area barbecue contests. He told me that the the owner was a transplanted Texan and that while the restaurant's pork ribs didn't do anything to impress him the place had an incredible chopped brisket sandwich.

The restaurant is tucked away in a strip shopping center in Fox Meadows and is pretty easy to miss. I drove past it the first time I tried to spot it and had to call my friend to get a specific fix on the location. It is directly across the street from the big bowling alley just south of Winchester. Once I went inside I told the lady at the counter that I'd heard great things about the brisket sandwich. She told me it was available with a $5 lunch special that included a side so I got one with a serving of baked beans. She also asked if I wanted the sauce and slaw on the sandwich or served on the side. I appreciated being offered the choice and opted for both on the side.

The tender, juicy, smoke-infused brisket meat was as good as I'd heard. I ended up bypassing the bun and just eating it with a fork. I was glad I got the mustardy slaw on the side since it let me really appreciate how good it was. It can be hard to really get a handle on how good slaw is when it is a component of a sandwich. The sauce had a nice little kick to it. The beans were great. Sticking to the place's Texas roots they were packed with beef and hearty enough to serve as a meal by themselves.  On my way out I told the lady at the counter how good everything was and that I definitely wished I'd had more of the meat. She said I could have had a jumbo sandwich for just $1 more. That is definitely what I'll do during future visits, which I'll definitely be making since, as much as I love Memphis-style pork, it is nice to enjoy some variety.

The Wing & BBQ Shack should really do more to promote itself as serving up Texas-style sandwiches here in Memphis. The place is right around the corner from the Winchester Tops location, which is my default for quick, cheap pulled pork in that immediate area. But while Tops recently added brisket to the menu, the chain offers a fairly underwhelming rendition of it. Memphis will always be pork city when it comes to barbecue but that also means there are already an abundance of places offering great pulled pork and pork ribs. Besides Tops, the Wing & BBQ Shack is also a short distant from Leonard's, Showboat and the Mt. Moriah Neely's. Chopped beef brisket is delicious when done right and the Wing & BBQ Shack does it right. Combine it with the place's beefy beans and you have a Texas combo that I'm sure other locals will appreciate for a change of pace.

Giant Sandwich - Kelvin's

I have a friend who routinely mentions how good the enormous barbecue sandwiches used to be at Kelvin's before the place changed its name to Kelvin's Hot Wings and dropped the barbecue from its menu. I was driving down Highway 51/Thomas through Frayser on Monday when I noticed a sign in the window of the Kelvin's announcing the restaurant was serving barbecue sandwiches again.

The little restaurant is mainly a carry out place but it does have a few small tables along the front window. Since the sandwich was what I'd heard so much about I ordered one to see if it lived up to its reputation. 

That is a full-sized bun. The pile of barbecue just makes it look small. This monster costs $4.65.

I think the Kelvin's jumbo sandwich may even dwarf the Payne's jumbo in size. Luckily it came with a plastic fork since there was no was possible to pick the thing up and eat it as a sandwich. The chopped meat had some nice charred bits mixed in with it and a good flavor. The sauce seemed a little to sweet. When I texted my friend to tell him the sandwich was back on the menu he mentioned that he always ordered them with hot barbecue sauce. I asked an employee behind the counter about the hot barbecue sauce and he said it was available so I'll request it the next time I visit. The slaw seemed pretty good too but it is hard to objectively judge a serving of slaw that is sitting under a pile of barbecue that big.

Crosstown Soul Food - Rudabagas

A little procrastination actually helped to make this blog timely. Last Thursday I stopped for lunch a Rudabagas Restaurant, a soul food place on Cleveland just a couple block south of the old Crosstown Sears building. I still hadn't posted about the visit yet Sunday morning when the Commercial Appeal newspaper delivered some very big news about that Sears building on its front page. Keep reading. I'll be getting to that news and what it should mean for the rest of Cleveland Street later in this post.

It's actually harder for me to visit lunchtime stops like Rudabagas that are near my house than the far-flung restaurants from Jackson, TN, to DeSoto County, MS, I frequently write about. Since my job involves working various routes doing sales calls I try to hit stops close to my house at the start or end of the workday and to be as far from home as I'm going to get in the middle of the day. But on Thursday I spent the morning taking one of our cats to the vet, so I left home for work at lunchtime.

There were a couple of moments of confusion during my visit. I ordered the "smothered dark meat chicken" with pinto beans and cabbage. What I intitially got was chicken, dressing and cranberry sauce, which was the special for the day, along with the sides I'd requested. I pointed out the mistake to my server and she quickly switched it out with what I'd ordered.

The menu had offered a choice between fried or smothered chicken. I assumed that smothered meant baked chicken topped with a mix or peppers, onions and gravy since that is what smothered has meant at every other soul food restaurant I've been to. Instead at Rudabagas ordering smothered gets you fried chicken covered covered with gravy. I've mentioned the Ken's Food Find blog several times recently. After my meal at Rudabagas I checked the restaurant's Urbanspoon page and laughed when I saw that Ken had the exact same confusion about the smothered chicken on his first visit to the restaurant.

Since I generally try to demonstrate relatively healthy food choices as a part of this blog I wouldn't have ordered fried chicken covered with milk gravy if I'd known that was what the "smothered dark chicken" was. But what if you are more concerned with taste than health? It's soul food restaurant fried chicken covered with milk gravy. It tastes as good as it sounds. It's a mess to eat that requires a stack of napkins since you can only get so much of the meat off the bones using a knife and fork and once you start eating it you aren't going to stop until the bones are picked clean. Both the sides were pretty average. There wasn't anything wrong with either, but neither was anything to get excited about either.

While I was there I also noted an ominous sign posted in the restaurant. Rudabagas recently increased its prices in what is probably going to be a worldwide trend in the coming months.

The day before I visit to Rudabagas I stopped to look at some of the giant, burnt up fields of corn in between Memphis and Jackson, TN. Many of the dead plants were just stalks that had never even formed ears. Our economy and food supply has become way too dependent on huge fields of a handful of annual monocrops that are controlled by a handful of grain cartels. We destroy topsoil, deplete water tables and drench the land with pesticides to grow crops on land that should be used for natural rotational grazing by livestock. Notice that recent rains have already brought the grass back to life? With an annual monocrop like corn the entire year's harvest is dependent on a few months' weather.

At the start of this post I mentioned some huge news involving the long-vacant Crosstown Sears building. I wrote about the building back in May during a post about the Bikesplotation event hosted there by Live From Memphis. At the time I said, "I'd love to see the majestic building put back to use, but it is a victim of its own sprawling size. It would cost a fortune to renovate 1.4 million square feet in such rough condition and it is hard to imagine any project that would actually require such an enormous amount of space. All the real architectural value of the building is in its towering front section, but demolition work to remove a large portion of the boxy rear warehouse area of the building to make it a more manageable size would still require a huge amount of money."

According to the Commercial Appeal, the developers who purchased the building back in 2007 are planning to remove about a third of the building to make it a manageable size. Of the space that will remain, 600,000 square feet has already been spoken for, mainly by huge names in the local healthcare community like the Church Health Center, Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, ALSAC and the West Clinic.

Those tenants make sense given the buildings proximity to the city's existing medical district. The developer's plans call for filling the rest of the building with a mixed use of apartments, retail, art studios and educational facilities to create a "vertical urban village," the paper reported.  The renovation is expected to cost around $200 million.

The project the developers are describing is a dense, walkable, creative and functional reuse of an iconic historic building. It embodies many of the design elements that this blog has been discussing recently and it is happening a short walk down the V&E Greenline away from my house at a sight that had become a major eyesore and drain on surrounding commercial property values.

I've been posting recently about how vacant retailers are a major drain on property values and tax revenues everywhere from Lamar Avenue to Hickory Hill to Southaven, MS. The bigger the vacant building the more it adds to blight, and it doesn't get much bigger than the former Sears building. Fill the building with working healthcare professionals and expect surrounding vacant commercial property to quickly fill with tenants.

The Crosstown Sears was originally built in 1927. As hard as it may be to believe now, skeptics originally claimed that the store wouldn't last long because people wouldn't be willing to drive that far out into the suburbs to shop. There are plenty of properties around the Sears building that could look great with some money put into them. The area immediately to the east of the building is already very affluent, but businesses have still been understandably

 reluctant to locate in the shadows of a giant vacant building. 

 

Nothing is guaranteed yet. But if renovation work starts on the gigantic old building expect a domino effect as properties like these across the street from it jump significantly in value. Especially since the main tenants for the refurbished building represent huge, well-established names in the local healthcare industry. This is one of the most exciting proposed projects during my lifetime in Memphis.

Smoke Free - Pig House

If you cook a piece of pork meat slowly over low heat it will end up being  tender and juicy. But smoke and seasoning are the additional elements that define great barbecue. After I tried the impressive ribs at Back Yard Bar-Be-Que on Old Hickory last month I wrote about how consistently good all the barbecue I've tried in Jackson has been. I attributed it to all the area's barbecue joints being independently run by locals and aimed at local repeat customers. I also mentioned that I ended up at Backyard because the first place I tried to stop that day, the Pig House Bar-B-Que, was still closed for the July 4 holiday at the time. 

On Wednesday the Pig House was open so I picked up a pulled pork plate. The Pig House is a little drive-thru-only place on Campbell just a few blocks from Back Yard Bar-Be-Que. It is just five miles from Latham's Meat Company and four miles from the Reggi's by Pringles Park. I assumed any barbecue joint sitting off the main road and flanked by competition like that was going to be top notch.

Everything seemed promising when I pulled up. The man taking my owner was extremely friendly and the prices were cheap. A pulled pork dinner was $7 and some change and it included potato salad along with the meat, beans and slaw. Since it was a rare August day with a high of just 87 degrees despite plenty of sunshine I found a picnic table in the shade at a nearby location to enjoy my meal and the weather together.

The barbecue sauce was really good. It had a nice spicy kick and vinegar bite to it. But even using all the sauce provided wasn't enough to make the meat seem flavorful. It was tender but it just tasted like pork. There was no additional flavor.

Looking at it more closely I could find portions that looked like they had come from the outer edge of the shoulder based on changes in texture and color. But there wasn't any crusty bark or smoke coloration. There also wasn't any indication of any rub or sauce being used during the cooking process. It didn't taste bad. It just tasted like what you would get if you slow roasted an unseasoned pork shoulder in an electric over.

The mustardy potato salad was the best of the three sides. The slaw was a little too sweet and didn't have any vegetable ingredients besides the shredded cabbage. At first I assumed the ketchupy beans were from a can but I found some bacon and onion pieces in them as I ate them. With its low prices and quick drive-thru service the Pig House offers a fast food rendition of barbecue similar to Baby Jack's BBQ in the Memphis suburb of Bartlett.

False Advertising - King's

Regardless of what the sign out front says, King's Home Cooking on Lamar near Shelby Drive doesn't sell barbecue. Just the normal bodega lunch counter selection of fried stuff, burgers and Philly cheese steaks. I stopped in last Thursday and left without getting anything since there weren't any tables in the store and I didn't see any reason to eat in my work vehicle if I wasn't going to get to sample any barbecue. It looked like the word "King's" on the sign had been painted over a previous name so I'm sure the "Bar-B-Que" touted on it was something offered by a prior tenant.

Cooking with Ghee - Salaama

I generally don't mention ethnic restaurant meals in this blog unless they include a menu item with obvious barbecue connection like the puerco asado at Los Compadres or the Bánh mì sandwich at Pho Saigon. I love eating traditional foods from every part of our globe. Anywhere you go on the planet, longstanding food traditions were formed by people figuring out how to create the tastiest and most nourishing foods possible using the locally available plants and animals.

Just keeping up with posting about all the barbecue and soul food places I'm discovering takes up enough of my time that there is no way I could attempt to write about all the ethnic eateries I visit too. Any restaurant that closely follows the time-honored traditions of any single, specific food culture is going to be serving up good, real food. Of course, once restaurants start abandoning those time-honored traditions to cater to American tastes the nutritional value of the food being served can plummet. There aren't any ancient Chinese traditions surrounding sugary, corn-starch thickened sauces on foods fried in cheap industrial vegetable oils. 

Pork-based traditional foods are the focus of this blog. But after a recent trip to Salaama Market and Restaurant on Raleigh-LaGrange I decided it warranted a mention even though its adherence to Halal dietary restrictions means that you aren't going to find any pork products anywhere in the building. But even though the friendly people at Salaama avoid my main source of dietary fat they still manage to work plenty of healthy, natural fat into their cooking.

 

I've eaten at Salaama in the past, after reading about it in Ken's Food Find. The little restaurant and market is right off Covington Pike in an area where I spend a lot of time at work. I mentioned Ken's review of the place in a recent post about meeting up with him for brunch at Three Angels Diner. That post caused a couple friends to read his review of Salaama and decide they wanted to take a trip out there. I was down the street from it when they decided to go last Friday so I stopped in to eat with them. I was the first one to arrive so I decided to kill some time looking around in the market.

I was impressed by the large quantity of ghee on the shelves. Ghee made by heating up butter and separating out the water and milk solids to get the concentrated butterfat. Concentrated butterfat is as delicious as it sounds. And like other natural animal fats, it is a health food. In fact, the same way that a switch from butter to margarine and other vegetable oils in the U.S. was accompanied by a dramatic increase in heart disease rate, populations in India that have switched from cooking with ghee to margarine and other vegetable oils have seen the some kind of jumps in heart disease rates. 

Plenty of people try to blame increasing rates of obesity, heart disease and diabetes in the U.S. on an increase in the consumption of animal fats when the opposite is actually true. Throughout the world, any time a population of people begins replacing animal fat in the diet with processed vegetable oils, sugars and grains it begins to see a steady rise in the "diseases of civilization." Seeing shelves stocked with ghee instead of vegetable oils let me know that the people at Salaama are serving up genuine real food.

Ghee is shelf stable at room temperature. The other main dairy products for sale in the market were yogurts and yogurt drinks. In recent times processed food companies have convinced people that the best way to extend the shelf life of dairy products is to pasteurize and homogenize them until the body can barely recognize them as real food. But for thousands of years before that the healthy, natural way people kept dairy products from going bad in hot climates was to intentionally ferment them with helpful bacterias. Traditional diets formed over hundreds or even thousands of years based on observation of what caused people to thrive. It is amazing how quickly marketing by the processed food industry has convinced U.S. consumers to abandon traditional foods in favor of factory-produced garbage despite the obvious damage that shift has done to the nation's health within just a few generations.

The staff at Salaama has been very friendly every time I've visited but there is a definite language barrier. There is always a lot of communicating with hand gestures and pointing at items on the menu. On this trip I ordered the beef stew and both of my friends ordered the goat. All the meals included salads that I forgot to photograph. 

The beef stew.

The goat.

The first time I went to Salaama I had a salmon dish. Every meal I've tried there has been great and my friends enthusiastically devoured their goat in a manner that assured me it was just as good as the stew I was enjoying. All the meals are centered around meats and vegetables cooked with ghee, seasoned with spices and served over rice. The beds of rice on the bottoms of the plate are enormous. I just mainly ate the meat and veggies from my meal and left most of the rice behind. If someone wanted to eat the rice too and take their leftovers home the serving could easily be used for two meals. The server initially forgot our hot sauce. If you don't get a little container full of green sauce with your meal be sure to ask for it. It adds a whole new dimension to the food.

Apparently the meals also include bananas for dessert since our server dropped three of them off at our table as we were about half-way through our meals.

Texas-Style From a Memphis Institution - More Corky's

In most people's minds Corky's is synonymous with Memphis-style barbecue. It may not serve the best pulled pork and dry ribs in the city, but ask anyone in town to name some restaurants that specialize in either of those and Corky's will probably be on the list they rattle off. 

But about a week ago I was talking to a friend who mentioned that while he thought that Corky's ribs were just okay, he thought the restaurant had some of the best beef brisket in town. While my favorite barbecue will always be pork-based, I certainly appreciate the art it takes to make something tender and delicious from a tough fatty cut of meat like beef brisket. Since I've already posted about the ribs at the East Memphis Corky's and the pulled pork at the Cordova location I decided to sample the beef brisket at the Collierville store, which was the only Corky's restaurant I hadn't been to yet. 

The thick sliced brisket was tender and delicious. All the fat in it was perfectly rendered to a melt-in-your-mouth consistency. If I'd known that it came with the regular Corky's babrecue sauce on it I would have asked for the spicy hot instead, but the regular still provided a nice compliment to the smoky meat. The portion was also extremely generous. I wasn't able to completely finish the brisket but it was so good that I found myself still taking occasional bites from the remaining slice while waiting for my check after I'd already declared myself completely full. I've come to expect consistently good beans and slaw at Corky's and the sides on this trip were no exception.

Another nice thing I've come to consistently expect from Corky's is excellent service. The Collierville location was no different. My server was ultra friendly and came by enough to make sure I always had anything I needed like a water refill without ever seeming intrusive. Right now Corky's and Neely's are arguably the two biggest names in Memphis barbecue, and from my experience, Corky's definitely has the best customer service and real smoke flavor if anyone is determined to eat at one of the Memphis's household name barbecue restaurants. 

The Giant Burger with Mystery Seasoning - More Cave's

In my original post about Cave's Soul Food I mentioned that I'd, "heard from friends in the neighborhood that the giant, hand-pattied burgers at Cave's are some of the best in town." Since then I've had other friends in the neighborhood say the same thing. Then last week I saw a post on Facebook from Ken of Ken's Food Find about the wonders of the Cave's burger. This was followed up by a full blog post from him about how incredible it is. In Ken's post he challenged Seth at the Best Memphis Burger Blog to try the burger, saying Ken would pay for it if Seth didn't give it at least four out of five stars. Seth ended up giving it a four-star review on Monday.

Meanwhile, I've been grabbing to-go orders from Cave's on a regular basis since it is right around the corner from my house, but I still hadn't bothered to try the burger. Obviously it was time for that to change. On Tuesday night I picked up one of the huge burgers with a side of turnip greens subbed for the standard French fries since I was already going to be eating a jumbo bun and why waste stomach space on fattening starches when you are getting a half-pound of beef? 

The combination of the jumbo bun and the extra large plate mean that this picture really doesn't do justice to the size of this thing. There is easily a half-pound of ground beef on it.

All the reviews of the Cave's burger have focused on the tasty unconventional seasoning. Seth guessed that a lot of the flavor was from sausage seasonings and I think that is a fairly good guess. I love country sausage so I already think spices like sage, fennel, and red pepper flakes all go great with ground meat. Why not mix it in with burger meat? Of course, that guess could be wrong. But whatever is going into those giant patties, they taste great.

I'd also agree with Seth that the burger is more exceptionally tender than it is juicy. It didn't leave a puddle of grease behind like a double cheeseburger from the Tops Bar-B-Q a block down the street from Cave's. I had my burger dressed the same way I normally get one from Tops, with cheese, mustard, lettuce, tomato, pickle and onion. I think it had at least three slices of cheese on it. I managed to eat the entire burger, which was an accomplishment for me and a compliment to the burger.

The turnip greens from Cave's seem to be a love-'em or hate-'em affair. I've always really enjoyed them. My wife always complains that they are overcooked and way overseasoned. Ken sided with my wife in his review, saying that the greens used way too much salt. I partially got some with my burger to speak on their defense. Then this order of them ended up being overcooked and oversalted even by my standards.

I'm usually quick to add some vinegar-based Bruce's Hot Pepper Sauce to my greens, and I don't make any attempt to limit my salt intake since as surprising as it may sound, there is no real research linking dietary salt to health problems. But these greens tasted like pure vinegar. It was near closing time when I got them and they were some of the last in a steam pan they had obviously been in for a while. Greens can cook down dramatically so that may have been what overconcentrated the flavor. The owner always shows you everything before he adds it to your order so I should have asked for the Broccoli, which looked much better than the greens on this visit, when I saw how overcooked the greens looked.   

Since Alex's Tavern sits in between Top's and Cave's, those of us that live in the Vollentine-Evergreen community may need to give that section of Jackson Avenue a nickname like Cheeseburger Alley. All three places serve up fantastic burgers, but they take completely different approaches to seasoning. Tops sticks to the standard salt and pepper while Alex's is locally famous for it's use of Greek seasoning in the Greek Burgers it cooks in an old cast-iron skillet. The owner's at Cave's said they also use a cast-iron skillet for their burgers.

Each burger fill a slightly different niche. Since Cave's is usually only open from 11 a.m. until 7 p.m., it will be my new go-to spot for a burger when I am really, really hungry and want a burger during the daytime. Tops has longer hours and a burger there is less of a commitment. Alex's, as anyone who drinks in Midtown knows, pretty much never closes. It is the place you get a burger when you are hungry and still wanting to drink after somewhere nearby like Murphy's, P&H or Dublin House has already closed down and told you to go home.   

 
While writing about the burger I got hungry for more of Cave's food so I went up there tonight to get one of the few menu items I hadn't tried there yet. I discovered how good chitterlings can be during a recent visit to Joann's Family Affair Soul Food in Frayser. Tonight at Cave's I got chitterlings with green beans and yams. They were great. I ended up mostly ignoring the yams to eat every bite of the chitterlings and green beans, which were every bit as good as the green beans I loved so much in my original post about Cave's.

I've found it interesting to note how much a a hot dog flavor there is in chitterlings. It isn't too surprising. I don't think anyone believes there are ground-up pork chops going into Juicy Jumbos. But it is funny that there are vegetarian imitation hot dogs that a lot of vegetarians eat. Some vegetarians may try to claim meat is gross. But the fact is there are processed food companies spending a lot of time and money trying to mimic the taste of hog intestines for when vegetarians crave it.

Well-prepared chitterlings are great with hot sauce. Most soul food restaurants just have the standard Louisiana and Texas Pete hot sauces. Since it was the first time I brought an order of chitterlings back to my house I got to try them with my beloved Sriracha. Outstanding.

Breakfast Brisket - Three Angels

I've mentioned before that I think barbecue and eggs make a great breakfast combination. On Sunday I enjoyed some beef brisket with my breakfast during brunch at Three Angels Diner on Broad. My wife and I frequently have brunch together at Three Angels but on this occasion I was meeting up with Ken who writes the always-interesting Ken's Food Find blog.

Ken's blog covers a wide variety of local restaurants. My favorite posts by him are when he points me to previously unknown to me places like Salaama Market & Restaurant, which is a great find in an area where I frequently work, or Roxie's Grocery, which I still haven't made it to yet. Based on his blog I wasn't surprised when he turned out be a great guy to hang out with in person.

The Three Angels building recently received a nice facelift. The restaurant has been a major part of Broad Avenue's revitalization. You can see a picture of what the front of the building looked like until recently in this review from the Best Memphis Burger blog.

If I'm not ordering from the brunch menu my standard order at Three Angels is the Colossus Burger; the cheeseburger that singlehandedly inspired the Best Memphis Burger blog. I've tried several other items on the menu but that burger is consistently the most satisfying thing on the regular menu to me, although the meatloaf does come close and my wife is a devoted fan of the place's fried chicken. Three Angels has a great rotating list of daily vegetable sides so I always pay up to get one of the them instead the chips that normally come with the Colossus. The restaurant's Facebook page is usually the best place to find out what the available vegetables are on any given day.

During brunch I always order the Kitchen Sink; a glorious combination of beef brisket,  homemade sausage, bacon, garlic cheese grits, potatoes and cheese that is topped with two fried eggs and salsa. For $11 it is easily the best value on the brunch menu. Another standard order for me at Three Angels is Peroni, an Italian beer that is available on draft there. I had one with my brunch Sunday, like I do pretty much anytime I'm in the restaurant. If my wife had been able to accompany us I can guarantee she would have ordered one of the place's excellently refreshing blueberry mojitos. 

Ken order the frittata, which I have always shied away from since it is made with egg whites instead of whole eggs. I don't understand why someone would throw away the majority of an egg's vitamins and minerals, which are concentrated in the yolk as Underground Wellness blogger/podcaster Sean Croxton explains here. But nutrition aside, the frittata ended up looking delicious when it came out. It is definitley less food than the Kitchen Sink. Ken ended up ordering a side a biscuits to go with it. He quickly declared that they were some of the best biscuits he's ever had. And the jam that came with them appeared to be homemade. It's details like that that elevate Three Angels above the realm of your average diner food.

The ongoing revitalization of Broad Avenue around Three Angels has been amazing to watch over the past several years. At one time Sam Cooper Boulevard fed directly onto Broad, bringing a steady stream of potential customers past the street's businesses. My dad worked for roughly 20 years repairing TVs, VCRs, stereos and other electronics at the Sears service center that used to be located on Broad in what is now Hollywood Feed. When the city expanded Sam Cooper to bypass Broad in 2001 it caused most of the then-existing businesses to close in response to the suddenly greatly reduced traffic.

A lot of people in the suburbs of Memphis seem to enjoy derisively comparing the city to Detroit, but that comparison is lazy, untruthful and obviously rooted in racism. People who make the comparison will note that Memphis and Detroit both have large black populations and have both experienced blight caused by suburban sprawl. But Memphis has also experienced a steady revitalization of its older historic neighborhoods. Memphis has been a distribution hub since the early days of steamboats and railroads where the Detroit area tethered its entire economy to the American automotive industry.

The sprawl that eventually crippled Detroit has been going on for nearly a century and was largely led by a steady abandoning of old factories as automobile manufacturers modernized, consolidated and lost ground to foreign competition. The book FORD: the Men and the Machine by Robert Lacey details how big of an improvement it was for the company when it moved its automotive  manufacturing from the old Highland Park Ford Plant to its new River Rouge Plant in nearby Dearborn during the late 1920s. The problem for the city was that in the following decades there was a steady cycle of manufacturers abandoning old plants to move into new ones.

A couple years ago Hot Rod Magazine did an article full of photographs of some of the massive old automotive plants rotting away around Detroit. Many of them were shut down in the 20s and 30s and replaced by plants that were then shut down themselves when they became obsolete in the 50s and 60s. Many of the old plants were for brands like Hudson, Packard, Rambler and Nash that don't even exist anymore.

The Detroit workforce moved outward in pursuit of jobs at newer factories while companies like Toyota, Nissan and Honda steadily chipped away at Michigan's former dominance of the market. The result was a city full of not just abandoned homes, but also a staggering amount of abandoned, outdated and decaying manufacturing sites with no demand to justify their existence.

Meanwhile, Memphis has seen steady revitalization in older areas like Cooper-young, South Main, Vollentine-Evergreen and the Binghampton area that Broad Avenue occupies. The extension of Sam Cooper required the bulldozing of a street that used to be an open-air drug market where suburban high school kids like me would drive to when we couldn't score weed from our fellow classmates.

Anyone who is foolish and/or naive enough to think that marijuana prohibition helps keep young people safe should have seen the old dope track that was just south of Broad back in the 90s. You pulled up, told someone what you wanted, gave them money and then waited for someone else to bring you a bag of what you hoped was the same thing you asked for. It was let-the-buyer-beware because if there was a problem with content, quantity or quality there sure as hell wasn't anyway to complain or ask for a refund.

The most fascinating thing about the current revitalization of Broad is that it wasn't caused by large government grants or the city making a priority out of it.  When Strong Towns director Chuck Marohn visited Memphis he referred to Broad Avenue as a perfect example of guerilla redevelopment. It wasn't revitalized through any type of high-dollar government initiative. Instead, local artists recognized the streets potential and began buying up buildings to create studios.

Because so many of Broad Avenue's revitalization pioneers are property owners there they don't have to worry about being victim's of the area's newfound success. Oftentimes when an area is turned around by enterprising artists and entrepreneurs who clean things up and make it a hip place to hang out those same people are later chased off by dramatically increased rents.

This blog spends a lot of time talking about good and bad urban design. Broad has a lot of buildings lined up side-by-side next to the street to create an environment that encourages people to walk around. These are the qualities created the street's potential for renewal. About two years ago the businesses there decided to take things a step further and repainted the road to reduce it from two lanes to four in order to create on-street parking and bicycle lanes. The restriping wasn't done by the city and was done according to the wants and needs of the local community instead of city and county codes. The results have been so successful I can't imagine any bureaucrat trying to undo the changes now. For years people were concerned that not enough people drove past the businesses on Broad. Now people specifically to the street to get out and walk around.

I've always used locally-owned Town & Country Locksmith, Inc., for all my locksmith needs. As someone who is constantly messing with classic cars I need old lock cylinders and ignition switches re-keyed more than the average person. Town and Country moved a couple blocks north to Summer Avenue when the loss of traffic from the rerouting of Sam Cooper Boulevard caused it to lose a lot of business. Now the old building is home to Jack Magoo's Sports Bar and Grill. I love being able to drink a beer and catch a basketball game at a building I remember visiting as a teenager. The place has been successful enough that it recently added a large outdoor seating area. A gearhead friend of mine, local artist Shawn Young of Kingfish Metal Works, is responsible for the classic Cadillac on the side of the building. The building next door is Broadway Pizza, which has been in the same spot for decades as the street has transitioned from success to decline to its subsequent revitalization.

Roadside Diner Barbecue in Brownsville - Cuz's Smokehouse

I was driving through Brownsville, TN, on Wednesday when I noticed a roadside restaurant on Dupree with "BBQ dinner" written in large letters on one of the windows. I've passed by the building numerous times in the past but never even knew what the place was called since it has never had any type of exterior identifying signage. It was lunchtime and the parking lot was full. Any local, independent place that draws plenty of customers with no advertising has to be doing something right so when I realized I could get a barbecue dinner there I doubled back to try it.

Once I was seated I got a menu that told me I was sitting in Cuz's Smokehouse N Grill.  The menu also told me that a pulled pork plate was only $6.99.

 

It's a generous serving of food for the low price.

The barbecue and sauce were both good and the beans were nice and meaty. I also enjoyed the big, thick-cut onion rings that I subbed for the fries that are normally included with the dinner. The only problem I had with the meal was the cole slaw, which looked like rice pudding from an Indian restaurant. It also had the consistency and sweetness of rice pudding. But it had the cabbage crunch of slaw and it was being served with a barbecue plate. I know different people have different philosophies on slaw, and there are people out there who like it creamy, runny and sweet, but I thought it was terrible and only ate a couple bites. 

Cuz's has waitresses to take your order at your table, plenty of non-barbecue options on the menu and it also offers a country-cooking buffet. And I've heard the place serves up really good breakfast food in the mornings. So it's more of diner that offers barbecue as one of its options than a genuine, old-school country smokehouse like Helen's Bar-B-Q, which is right around the corner and offers a truly perfect barbecue plate. Of course, Helen's also has a far shorter menu and if you want to eat there you'll probably end up sitting with some complete strangers at one of the the cramped restaurant's two tables. Helen's and Cuz's both draw steady crowds of repeat customers. Which of the two someone will prefer will depend on what they are looking for in their dining experience.