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lovely slices of pie ranging from low-profile chess to lofty meringues, plus a couple of hot fruit cobblers. Beyond the sweets are the meats: magnificent fried chicken, spice-encrusted baked chicken, sausages, country steak, and beef tips. Now comes the real fun: vegetables. Swett’s repertoire is a southern symphony of steamed or fried okra, fried corn, squash casserole, candied yams, mashed potatoes, mac ’n’ cheese, stewed cabbage, candied apples, baked beans, turnip greens, rice and gravy. Most customers get one meat and two or three vegetables. Some fill their tray with nothing but four or five vegetable dishes…accompanied, of course, by corn bread, either baked as a loaf and sliced or in the more typical local formation, as a cake fried on a griddle.

Draw your own iced tea (sweet or unsweet) at the end of the cafeteria line.

Sylvan Park

4502 Murphy Rd.

615–292–9275

Nashville, TN

LD | $

With all the ambience of a prison cell, Sylvan Park remains one of the most charming meat-and-threes in Tennessee. Serenaded by the loud hum of an ice cooler, you sit at one of the dozen tables scattered through the small cinder-block dining room and order off a short menu that includes such entrees as country ham, fried steak, and salmon croquettes, as well as a long list of vegetables and side dishes. The standard meal is one meat and three vegetables, but we often forgo the meat and get a four-vegetable plate.

For dipping and mopping the juices and for serving as uncomplicated punctuation among the assertive flavors of the vegetables, Sylvan Park offers tender little biscuits with great absorbent qualities as well as tangy corn bread muffins with a rough texture that crumbles nicely over a serving of creamy white beans.

Sylvan Park is known also for its pies: chocolate, butterscotch, egg custard, sweet potato. They aren’t pretty. Cut to order in the kitchen, a slice often arrives half-fallen-apart on the plate. That’s because these pies are very, very delicate, with fragile meringue on top of the creamy ones. A highly recommended alternative to pie, when available, is banana pudding. Its flavor is huge, and it is made the classic southern way, with softened vanilla wafers and streaks of meringue throughout the custard.

Note: there is a second, larger Sylvan Park at 330 Franklin Road.

Wiles-Smith Drugs

1635 Union Ave.

901–278–6416

Memphis, TN

BL | $

Just up the road from the Sun Records studio, where Elvis made his first recording, is a drugstore that opened when the King was nine years old. Wiles-Smith has been remodeled, so it doesn’t look ancient, but its culinary values are tradition itself. You can sit at the boomerang-pattern Formica counter and enjoy a nice breakfast or lunch sandwich or meal-size beef stew for about $3. Ice cream concoctions are classic, including perfectly blended sodas, cherry and chocolate sundaes, and milkshakes that come in tall silvery beakers so you can refill your glass approximately 11/2 times. When Memphis sizzles in the summer, this is the place to come for an icy fruit freeze.

Zarzour’s

1627 Rossville Rd.

423–266–0424

Chattanooga, TN

L Mon–Fri | $

When you get lost trying to find Zarzour’s, don’t bother looking in the phone book to call and ask driving directions. There is no evidence of it in the Yellow Pages; its number is in residential listings, under the name of the manager’s mother-in-law. And if you do finally locate the noman’s-land café, you will not be able to eat unless you arrive during the fifteen hours a week that it’s open for business: Monday through Friday from 11:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M.

When we first visited, we encountered two women dressed in business suits and heels coming out the front door. Apparently noting the bewildered looks on our faces—watching these two fancy executives coming out of a building that looks like a bail bondsman’s office—one said to us, “This is the place!”

“The best hamburger in the world!” added her companion.

The two of them stood at the door, effectively blocking our way and, sotto voce as if imparting a secret