Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [86]
Choices range far beyond the famous sandwich. There are slabs of ribs, platters and plates, barbecued bologna, and even a roster of Italo-Dixie combo plates that include spaghetti with ribs and barbecue with ravioli.
Leonard’s is worth visiting not only for its pork, but also for its sign, which is one of the great images in porklore: a neon pig, all decked out in top hat and tails, wielding a cane, captioned “Mr. Brown Goes to Town.” Years ago, a waitress explained its significance: “Mr. Brown was the term used for brown-meat barbecue. It is the outside of the shoulder that gets succulent and chewy from the sauce and the smoke in the pit. The inside part of the roast, which is moist but has very little barbecue flavor, is known as Miss White. People in Memphis used to ask for plates and sandwiches of ‘Mr. Brown and Miss White.’”
Little Tea Shop
69 Monroe Ave.
901–525–6000
Memphis, TN
L | $
Memphis is our favorite place to eat pork, but there’s none served at the Little Tea Shop down by old Cotton Row. Proprietor Suhair Lauck is Muslim, and yet despite her religion’s prohibition against pigs, she serves some of the most soulful eats in the city. We were aghast when Sue told us that her greens were in fact completely meat-free. It had always seemed to us that the opulent “likker” in which they wallow in their serving bowl—a spruce-green broth retrieved from the pot in which they have boiled—gets its intoxicating character at least as much from the hambone as from the collard, turnip, or mustard leaves that the boiling process turns soft and mellow.
But tasting is believing, and let us tell you that a serving of pork-free turnip greens with pot likker at the Little Tea Shop is positively tonic. If a flavor can be verdant, here it is: the heady soul of a plant with leaves that marinate in sunlight. Turnip greens are the centerpiece of Sue’s most popular lunch, on the printed-daily menu every day of the week. For $6.50, you get a bowl filled with sultry dark greens sodden in their likker, the once-tough leaves cooked so limp that you can easily separate a small clump of them with the side of a soup spoon and gather it up with plenty of the liquid. Atop the greens are slices of raw onion, leaching pungent bite into the leaves, and atop the onions are bright red slices of tomato, which are shockingly sweet compared to everything below. On the side are crisp-edged, cream-centered corn sticks well suited for crumbling into the bowl.
We love the do-it-yourself ordering process at the Little Tea Shop. Every customer gets a one-page printed menu of the day—there is a different menu for each day of the week—with a little box next to each item. Like voting with an old-fashioned ballot, you put a check mark in the box next to each dish you want to elect for your lunch. Other than pot likker, some of the outstanding dishes are the Lacy Special (named for a cotton trader), in which corn sticks sandwich a chicken breast topped with gravy, and such vegetables as sliced candied yams, fried corn, baked squash, black-eyed peas, and scalloped tomatoes.
Sue is the life force of the Little Tea Shop, working the dining room with relentless enthusiasm. Old friends who enter get a buss on the cheek; newcomers are instant Sweetie and Dear; and she manages to introduce parties of strangers if she thinks they’d get along. We shake hands with three gents who have been eating at the same table for over thirty years—“No one else would dare sit there,” Sue says. As for the lack of pork in her greens, she sums up her reasoning as she whisks past our table carrying chocolate-draped ice cream pecan balls for somebody’s dessert: “It is dietetic, it is delicious, it is religious.”
Litton’s Market & Restaurant
2803 Essary Dr.
423–688–0429
Knoxville, TN
LD | $
With a catalogue of burgers that range from minimalist beef patties to a Thunder Road burger (named for the movie about moonshining in these parts) topped with pimiento cheese, onions, and hot peppers, Litton’s is the most famous hamburger restaurant in the mid-South.