Riding the Mystery Train from Chicago to Memphis

Chicago to Memphis, Pt. 1: The Northern Migration in Reverse

One of the things about being a 21st century foodie is that far distant cities start seeming like just another place to grab a bite. A century or so ago, San Francisco was an arduous sea journey around the end of the world; nobody went there from Chicago, they went there instead of Chicago and never came back. Now our rising chefs do a stint on their resumes there, and even if direct flights haven’t made us personally familiar with name spots like Slanted Door or Gary Danko, food TV lets us act like we have.

Yet a place like Memphis and the delta blues country beyond it, which is tied historically and geographically to Chicago in ways that San Francisco will never be, still seems distant and vaguely out of time by comparison-- not part of the circuit of modern capitols of Trendsylvania. Just eight hours away by train, Memphis was for much of the 20th century the gateway to the industrial north, the Ellis Island for sharecroppers seeking factory jobs in Chicago and Detroit-- and gigs in the clubs where electric blues was being born. It’s the matching bookend of much of our cultural history, yet Chicagoans rarely think of it as the close kin it is.

Flying to Memphis is for FedEx packages; my family and I decided to retrace the great northern migration backwards, and booked a sleeper on the City of New Orleans, which worked out perfectly since we have exactly the number and height of family members to fit one of Amtrak’s family bedrooms (two long and two short bunks). As my sons settled into their beds, I tried to set the scene for the older one, at least, by explaining concepts such as sharecropping, race music, and why Elvis made a lot more money off songs black people wrote than Big Mama Thornton ever did. (I skipped why Colonel Parker did, too.)

And I explained that we would be living on barbecue and meat and threes for the next week. One son licked his lips. The other said, “I only eat French fries.”

* * *



Seven hours later, half rested and half shaken apart by the rickety tracks, having passed through more beautifully bleak small town winter landscapes than Andrew Wyeth could count, we pulled in darkness into Memphis’ Central Station, piling our bags in the waiting room to tick off the 70 minutes until The Arcade opened.

The Arcade is a pink-and-blue 50s dinette opposite the train station and at the end of the trolley line, so Hollywood-perfect that a plaque out front names all the movies it’s been in (Mystery Train, The Firm, Walk the Line...). Almost too cute to be true, it survived the long period when the area south of Beale Street was derelict and largely no-go for white Memphians (not least because of the shooting of Martin Luther King a block north of there), and now anchors a district of even cuter folk art galleries and coffee houses.



The Arcade may have been saved during the urban neglect years by association with its most famous customer, Elvis, who claimed the back booth for his Memphis mafia. Today you too can sit where the King rested his sequined rump... especially if you’re the only people in Memphis actually up and out that early, as we were. Breakfast was pretty classic stuff-- biscuits and gravy, sweet potato pancakes, hash browns that were no doubt better a half hour later when the place had been running for a bit. It was decent enough if not life-altering, but the combination of setting, stop on the Elvis trail, and Southern hospitality so warm and cozy you could crawl up in it and go to sleep made for a charming welcome to Memphis... or at least a charming welcome to the theme park version of it.

In Chicago the line between ersatz and genuinely old school is pretty clear; nobody really thinks Ed Debevic’s has been there since the 50s, or that Superdawg hasn’t. In Memphis, though, as in New Orleans, Austin and other good-time capitols of the South, people and places seem to delight in living up to the broadest possible cartoon of themselves. When a table full of litigators rolls up their sleeves over a mess o’ fried catfish in a place decorated with “funny” signs and shouts how they’re gonna whomp the other side’s bee-hind, you wonder if John Grisham was describing what he’d seen, or if they’re being what John Grisham described. (Yes and yes, I suspect.)

Still, you can see why people choose to live in a self-consciously flamboyant South when they can get away with it. After spending the morning at the Memphis Zoo (who knew Memphis had pandas?), we hit a meat-and-threes place for lunch called The Cupboard, picked off Jane and Michael Stern’s Roadfood.com. It’s located in a former Shoney’s, and anything that makes a Shoney’s former is points ahead with me.



But the vaguely institutional air, the dull sports memorabilia decor, our table (which either advertised a towing service, or recycled some Formica from one), and the hit-and-miss food-- fried green tomatoes and beets good, fried chicken and collard greens acceptable, steamed squash sent over from the old folks’ home across the street-- was drab enough to be in any strip mall, anywhere in America. (On the other hand, the younger son loved his two orders of tater tots.) If that was the alternative, it was easy to see why lots of people choose to live in, and up to, Memphis’ infinitely livelier caricature of itself.


Arcade Restaurant
540 S Main St
Memphis, TN 38103
(901) 526-5757
arcaderestaurant.com

The Cupboard Restaurant
1400 Union Ave.
Memphis, TN
901-276-8015

Chicago to Memphis, Pt. 2: Visiting the King, Understanding the Que



Who knew Memphis had pandas?



Elvis, on the other hand, everyone knows Memphis has, and Sunday morning seemed like an ideal time to go to Graceland without a crowd of churchgoing folks around us, and pay our tributes mainly surrounded by Brits and Japanese. This was my second trip to Graceland, a decade apart, and the main difference I noticed was that the audio tour is blessedly shorter (no doubt to squeeze more folks in, but a benefit all the same).

Afterwards, we followed Elvis Presley Boulevard north, out of the nice neighborhood where Elvis bought a home after he made it big, back into the black ghetto north of Graceland with its badly paved roads and ramshackle, peeled-paint buildings, reversing Elvis’ evolution out of black music (at some point, shouldn’t the name of the street become Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup Boulevard?)



Our destination was a cinderblocked structure was A&R Bar-B-Que, "Anyone Can Put The Heat 2 The Meat But Only a Few Can Bar-B-Q.” Or rather, our destination was an understanding of Memphis-style barbecue, which I’d only had in authentic terms once on that previous visit, at the decidedly white and yuppie Corky’s.

Chopped pork, a sweetish sauce and sweeter cole slaw, a few not especially memorable sides (including fried pickles, rather harsh pickles in a corn meal type breading)... it was a pleasant enough lunch after a morning with the King, and the parade of dressed-for-church types was fun to watch, but I came away without the keen understanding, the man-to-meat meeting of minds of this style which I had hoped for. The parts-- pork, sauce, slaw, bun-- didn’t quite seem to make a whole which made sense to me. If anything, it seemed to me that good pork was being buried under a lot of sweetness. In Texas they’d never hide the meat like that.

It took a visit to another black-run BBQ restaurant to finally produce my barbecue breakthrough. Neely’s is a branch of the Interstate BBQ empire, run by various Neely family members; this particular one had come recommended by Pigmon, and the moment I bit into chopped pork with slaw on it, the style came together for me:



I’ve often written about the “30s style burger,” the archetypal thin patty slid onto a bun with mustard, pickle and onion and wrapped in white paper, which allows it to steam in its own vapors to form a harmonious whole not dominated by beef, the way the typical modern 1/2-lb. slab of meat burger is. When I tasted the combination of Neely’s meat, the mustardy cole slaw, and the soft, sweet white bread, I understood why Memphis barbecue was so different from Texas barbecue, that it wasn’t about swaggering, meat-drunk excess but about a genteel hint of meat mixed in with the more civil flavors of mayo, cabbage, and white bread. Call it barbecue for ladies who lunch if you like, compared to the testosterone-smoked bronto-que of Texas, but the South is the South and meat without white bread and a touch of sweetness would just be naked.



We ate at one more barbecue shop in Memphis proper, called... The Bar-B-Q Shop. This time I made sure to order a plate of ribs, the first I’d had in the Memphis style since Corky’s a decade earlier. If I’d overcome my bafflement at the Memphis style of pulled pork, I’m still a little flummoxed why Memphians love the gritty rub, which makes every rack of ribs feel like it’s been dragged through a litterbox. But the flavor on Bar-B-Q-Shop’s meat was fine, and the service couldn’t have been friendlier. Emboldened by my success in coming to understand the Memphis style, I even took a bite of my son’s barbecued spaghetti, another beloved Memphis specialty, Spaghetti-O-mushy noodles in sweet barbecue sauce with hunks of chopped pork...

Well, some mysteries will have to remain mysteries.



A & R Barbeque
1802 Elvis Presley Blvd.
Memphis, TN
901-774-7444

Neely's Bar-B-Que Restaurant
5700 Mount Moriah Rd
Memphis, TN
(901) 795-4177

The Bar-B-Q Shop
1782 Madison Ave
Memphis, TN
(901) 272-1277

Excellent post, beautiful pictures.

Thank you, iblock9.

Chicago to Memphis, Pt. 3: Looking For Blues in Clarksdale, MS



I suppose everyone knew that Highway 61 was the road from New Orleans to Memphis (and all the way to Minnesota), and that that's why Dylan used it as opposed to, say, Route 66 or Ventura Highway. Well, I didn't, shows how much attention we in Chicago ever pay the South, so it was with a real frisson of being somewhere historic that I took off south out of town on the road where Robert Johnson sold his soul and Bessie Smith died. Such things seem more mythical than real, so to actually be in the places, and to think that they happened within living memory, is less like being where Lincoln or John F. Kennedy did something, and more like being where King Arthur (or at least Billy the Kid) did.



But never discount Americans' ability to trash a landscape, however mythic. Tunica, Mississippi, the first major town on the river south of Memphis, has become a riverboat casino town, and the ten miles either side of it are blighted with ugly new gaming complexes and, even more, billboards for same. Luckily there is one gleamingly gorgeous establishment predating this fresh hell, the Blue & White restaurant, which by itself redeems this stretch of the road by encapsulating everything the traveler would have dreamed of finding on 61 back in the 40s or 50s.



The name comes from the Pure Oil gas station it originated as— I'm pretty sure none of those are Robert Johnson covers— and though it's marred by the presence of TVs tuned to CNN, the interior is still classic American diner. So too were the doughnuts, the last two of the morning:



We followed those with biscuits and gravy, grits, country ham— all of it exactly what you hoped for, plain, not gussied up, but damn near perfect of the type. A blue and white vision of Heaven, for anyone with a hellhound on his trail.



* * *

The terrific museum at Henry Ford's Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan includes an outdoor "town" consisting of houses and workshops belonging to a lot of his fellow tinkerer-tycoons— Edison's lab, the Wright brothers' bicycle shop, etc. It invites you to imagine a small town 1900s America in which every house held a genius— a white, Protestant genius of engineering, that is.

Clarksdale, Mississippi is like the real-life black version of Ford's fantasy— look around this small town and you see the cabin where Muddy Waters was born, the hospital where Bessie Smith died, the house where Pinetop Perkins taught a kid named Ike Turner to play piano— and, more dubiously, the crossroads Robert Johnson supposedly sang about selling his soul at. How did so many blues greats happen to come from (or in Smith's case, die in) such a small place? I suspect that the question really is, who were the blues greats who we never heard of, because, unlike the residents of Clarksdale, they didn't live close enough to the train to Chicago to find fame? The train was the one way out of sharecropping poverty, and music was one of the tickets to the train. But you had to live close enough to catch it; and so it was mainly by being geographically able to send its best talents elsewhere that Clarksdale got a permanent place on the map of American music.



Today there's a nice museum in the old train station of blues-related ephemera— records, guitars, shiny suits-- the star attraction of which is the actual cabin in which Muddy Waters grew up. It's interesting to note that the cabin, barely more than a pile of lumber, hasn't actually been donated to the museum; it's still owned by the white landowning family who, of course, owned it all those years the Morganfields lived in it, working their fingers to the bone but never getting any closer to owning something of their own— until young McKinley took the music they made in their few hours away from farm work, and turned it into international fame and (at least modest) fortune. What bitter irony it must have been for the white owners of the place that they skimmed the cream of their black sharecroppers' labors on the farm all those years— and then the ungrateful blacks go and create something that's really worth something, and the whites don't get a penny from it.

It just doesn't seem right. We'll lend them the cabin for their museum, but we're not givin' anything that belongs to us away.

* * *

John T. Edge has written extensively on the subject of Delta tamales, a black tamale style which, though it undoubtedly had Mexican origins somewhere, became an authentically black food form over time (see Robert Johnson's song "They're Red Hot" for more details). Rene G has spent some years trying to establish a link between Delta tamales and the tamales popular in black neighborhoods in Chicago. I believe he and anyone else who's thought about has assumed that there surely must be one, if blues and pork-based barbecue traveled up from Mississippi to Chicago it seems likely that tamales did too, but the problem is the near-total lack of surviving historical evidence for a product that would have often been homemade and sold out of a kettle or a cooler.



Peter hunts for Mississippi tamales in Chicago; I decided to do my part for this burning question by seeing how Chicagoan my Mississippi lunch could be. We trekked down the highway, no doubt a preposterous sight as a very white family of four trekked through the dodgier parts of Clarksdale, past the black hospital (my sons immediately started looking for evidence of Smith's car crash— "I think her car hit this stick and its tire blew up!"), until we reached Hick's Quality Foods.



To add to our preposterousness, they were drive-through only at lunch (one assumes this does not apply to deer in need of processing), and so we ordered a bunch of food— including today's special of hog maw— and once it was shoved through a tiny window at us, trekked back to a park named, inevitably, for Martin Luther King Jr. to eat it.



It was the closest thing to Chicago food we ate on our trip. The rib tips could have been straight out of a south side BBQ joint; the (very greasy) tamales were, if not exactly like Chicago style, certainly even less like anything they make in Mexico these days.



We may not have found historical evidence, but we were certainly convinced. When the blues went north, rib tips and tamales like these went with them, I have no doubt.

Blue & White Restaurant
1355 Highway 61 N
Tunica, MS 38676
(662) 363-1371

Hicks Tamales & BBQ Shop
305 S State St
Clarksdale MS
(662) 624-9887

You tell such a good story and you tell it so well. You can share your "what I did on my vacation" stories with us anytime! Great photos, too. I could grab those biscuits right off my computer screen, though some of the other shots ("pork fat," the "Pure Oil Men's Glee Club") are even more evocative. Thank you.

Clarksdale, Ms. Memories... Did you hit Big Jims? How about the Ranchero? I gave up artery to Big Jims. Here is a NYTimes 36 hours piece about Clarksdale. http://travel.nytimes.com/2006/06/16/tr ... 6hour.html

Thanks Ann.

Nope, iblock9, we just went down there for part of one day, you pretty much know everything we did.

Chicago to Memphis, Pt. 4: Chattanooga Charms, But Nashville Rocks



When Jim Leff, founder of Chowhound, was sent on a road trip to get him out of the hair of the folks who'd just bought his baby, one of the places he visited was Chattanooga... and it was probably the place he bitched most mightily about.

Well, I went to the brewpub (Big River Grille) he complained about, for instance, and had a perfectly pleasant steak and beer, neither one of them adorned with excessive cheese. He is right, that it's a big generic place in a neighborhood of generic places, and could be in any suburb anywhere in America where they like to eat meat and watch sports (which is all of them), but it wasn't that bad. Neither was Magic Mushroom for pizza, or the Italian place (Tony's) or the coffee/muffin place (Rembrandt's) attached to our B&B.

But they weren't that great, either. We spent two days in Chattanooga, which is a cute and very friendly town, which has a great pair of aquariums (aquaria?), one of them very interestingly devoted to the wildlife of the river/delta systems of the south, which has a totally charming arts district up on the bluffs overlooking the river, which has fun public art and interesting things like this (somewhat unnerving) glass walkway over a highway:



I would absolutely recommend Chattanooga, and the Bluff View B&B complex (great rooms/setting, incredibly nice people), for a weekend getaway for anybody... anybody who wasn't hoping to eat the kind of interesting food we'd been having in Memphis and elsewhere, that is. Us, we took it as a break from barbecue, a chance to eat salad and get ourselves back in shape for the next round.



Pardon me boys—is that the Chattanooga Choo-Choo? Yes it is, at the old railway station, now a Holiday Inn.

* * *



One reason Chattanooga didn't detract from the food side of our trip was that we had had one of the best— maybe the best?— meals of our trip on the way there. Pigmon had urged, cajoled, implored me to make a stop in Nashville to eat at Arnold's, a nondescript meat-and-threes cafeteria he, Trixie-Pea and Mike Sula had visited and the latter had written about for the Reader, but I had assumed it would be a major detour. Looking at the map, though, I realized that because of the mountains, we actually had to drive northeast nearly to Nashville to then head southeast again to Chattanooga. Arnold's hardly added 20 minutes to the trip, and 20 minutes have rarely been better spent.



Sula had raved about garlic-studded roast beef, seen here carved one-handed by one of the family who runs Arnold's, while he guided an employee by phone through the process of making a purchase at Costco. The meats were all good, the desserts (chess pie and banana pudding) were very good, but it was the threes that made the leap toward greatness— especially the greens, whose pot likker was Bordeaux-complex in its depth of flavor, smoky, porky, cognac-y.



One thing that keeps me from becoming a vegetarian is a certain deep-seated prejudice that vegetables' flavor, however bright and satisfying, is all on the surface; you need meat to find complexity and profundity in a dish. Okay, so a big reason these greens were so good is undoubtedly bits of smoky ham down in the likker. But still, a dish like this, mostly vegetable in its flavor with ham for counterpoint, goes a long way toward proving that veggies, too, can swim in the deep end of the pool.

Big River Grille & Brewing
222 Broad St
Chattanooga, TN 37402
(423) 267-2739

Arnold's
605 8th Ave S
Nashville, TN 37203
(615) 256-4455

Hi,

I really wouldn't mind being in Jim Leff's position: some extra money in the bank plus an all expense paid trip to explore and eat my way through America. Those new owners were very clever to find a carrot he would really bite into.

Thanks for the armchair touring so far this week.

Regards,

It's only too bad you failed to talk to me before heading to Chattanooga, Mike. As Chattanooga is one of my ancestral origins, I have a certain affinity for the place. My paternal grandfather, an engineer with the TVA, was born there and later settled his family there (for a while) half way up Lookout Mountain. This was back around 1920, when that was NOT where the millionaires wanted to live. Anyway, you really missed out on The Pickle Barrel. And I suppose the kids wouldn't have been hep to it, but Southside Jazz Junction is as fine as it gets for improvised music (non-bluegrass style) in Eastern Tennessee. If you cross the river, you can find plenty of unhomogenized diners mixed in with bohemian bookstores and yuppie baby clothing shops. It's a fun little town, really. Plus, you can go to the Civil War museum for the best lighted map presentation west of Gettysburg, and the most stentorian phrasing ever of those immortal words, "The battle that sealed the fate of the Confederacy" presented anywhere in the South. (And, yes, I realize that every battle sealed the fate of the Confederacy, if you ask the city fathers in the locale of said battle; but this one had so much more style, what with the charging up a mountain in impenetrable November fog and rain.)

You're from Chattanooga? Who knew? I hope it came across that I am absolutely happy to recommend a weekend in Chattanooga as a very pleasant surprise, for everything but remarkable food. And I wouldn't be surprised to learn it exists somewhere there, I mean it is in the heart of a pretty wonderful food area for simple, downhome stuff, but if it does it has yet to have made its way into the Road Food database in any quantity, for one. (Zarzour's didn't sound that great, not Arnold's-great anyway.)

Wish I'd had this guide 15 years ago when we were traveling between Cincinnati, Atlanta and Chicago...but then, I wouldn't have had the money to eat at any of these places ...we were on a strict diet of pb&j at the time.

Looks (mostly) delicious. Thanks, Mike!

Mike G wrote:You're from Chattanooga?

Not me personally, but one branch of the family (paternal grandfather and I think one of my uncles might have been born there, too). I concur with your estimation; note that the Pickle Barrel is primarily recommended for its charm, not its food, which is just fairly standard pub grub.

Chicago to Memphis, Pt. 5: Breakfast on the Mystery Train



You can hardly go two steps in Chattanooga without running across a promotion of some sort for a series of tourist attractions outside of town on Lookout Mountain. While "Rock City" and an incline railway held less appeal than their tourist-trap prices could probably sustain, we did pay our fare for Ruby Falls, a 150-foot natural waterfall deep inside the mountain which was discovered and excavated in the 1920s and 1930s, and "improved" on various occasions since then, but still has a relatively low-key, roadside attraction feel that means the actual sensation of going deep inside a cave hasn't been entirely malled over.

The sensation of having gone back to at least the 1950s persisted for much of the drive back from Chattanooga; with the mountains limiting radio reception, often times we'd scan the AM dial and turn up only a single working station, playing lugubrious white gospel music interspersed with bits of earnestly unvarnished preaching, as if the blow-dried "happy talk" televangelism of the 70s and 80s had never happened.



A similar out of time air, Dairy Queens of the Ford Administration, hung over our lunch stop, Scott's Barbecue in Lexington, Tennessee (I point out the state so you don't confuse it, as I did at first, with Lexington, Kentucky). Pigmon, again, had highly recommended this stop, having taken some marvelous photos of whole hogs cooking there last year, and so had the entire Southern Foodways Alliance Unfortunately for us, it became something of an object lesson in how you can be at the right place and yet fail to have the right experience. The sky was gray so my pictures were dull:



I foolishly ordered hot sauce on my sandwich, largely negating the flavor of the meat:



and anyway, I later learned as I read the walls that I was supposed to order what part of the pig I wanted my meat from (clueless city slickers!) What part of the pig? Jesus, how should I know? And so what had been one of Pigmon’s culinary high points was just in the middle of the pack for me.

* * *

Some notes on other places we grabbed a bite in Memphis:

Flying Fish— a mostly fried seafood place just north of the Beale Street tourist singularity, blurring the line between real and ersatz pretty completely. The kids really liked it for some reason, so we went twice, it was useful to have a reliably decent place near the tourist stuff.



Gus’ Fried Chicken— When it comes to famous fried chicken places, I’m all for pan-fried over deep-fried, deep-fried requires an armor-plated coating to withstand bouncing around in the fryer. But as deep-fried goes, Gus’ is top-notch, comparatively delicate and with a vinegary tang to the crust. I bought my older son a Gus’ T-shirt to go with his Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles one.

Automatic Slim’s Tonga Club— This turns up on Roadfood.com as if it’s a genuine 50s tiki place. In fact it’s a modern yuppie theme restaurant serving the usual square of grilled fish on a mound of black rice, that sort of thing. Not bad of its type, but not what I thought it would be at all.

Blue Plate Cafe— Another place mentioned on Roadfood, the bigger downtown branch of a well-loved little neighborhood cafe serving the standard southern breakfast stuff. Unfortunately everything— pancakes, biscuits, you name it— fell a little short of what it should have been; I was very glad to make it (also on the Sterns’ recommendation) to Blue and White in Tunica the next day, and have the real deal, first rate.

Huey’s— A much-loved, collegiately-oriented burger joint that routinely wins Memphis’ Best Burger in the local publications. Well, nobody said Memphis was a burger town.

* * *



Our last couple of days back in Memphis we stayed at The Peabody (well worth the money, especially since it’s half the money of a comparable five-star place in a bigger, coastal city; the kids loved the duck parade in the lobby and saw it five times in two and a half days, I thought the sheets were the nicest I’ve ever slept on). Saturday we had hours to kill before the train left late that night, and did every little museum open within walking distance of the hotel; most interesting was the Cotton Exchange, the one-time exchange floor where cotton was traded, which spawned a whole subculture (from raffish after-hours poker games where the real deals were made, to the high society Cotton Ball— and, inevitably, its counterpart in the black community).

At last our train arrived from New Orleans, and boarding, we went quickly to sleep. Morning would bring our last meal of the trip:



which was not, by any means, terrible. Having ended our trip at the genteelly white Peabody and Cotton Exchange, we had strayed pretty far from our original intention of retracing black migration, and yet the trip was still evocative of so much we had seen. The winter Illinois landscape in pale morning light was worthy of Andrew Wyeth, the industrial landscape of the south side echoed with memories of when it had called to the black South like a promised land. A new generation of immigrants to the North was busy making tacos and pambazos at Maxwell Street as we rumbled by on the tracks above them. And then, like so many on this train before us, we were home, sweet home Chicago.







Scott’s Bar-B-Que
10880 Highway 412 West
Lexington, TN 38351-6282
(731) 968-0420

Flying Fish
105 S 2nd St
Memphis, TN 38103
(901) 522-8228

Gus's World Famous Fried Chicken
310 S Front St
Memphis, TN 38103
(901) 527-4877

Automatic Slim's Tonga Club
83 S 2nd St
Memphis, TN 38103
(901) 525-7948

Blue Plate Cafe Downtown
113 S Court Ave
Memphis, TN 38103
(901) 523-2050

Huey's
77 S 2nd St
Memphis, TN 38103
(901) 527-2700