The promise of summer bliss can be a fleeting romance, especially when you find yourself faced with unexpected expenses or antsy kids. So why not shift gears?
That’s exactly what we did, fanning out from Memphis to discover — and rediscover — small towns and big meals all around the greater Mid-South, just an hour or so from Memphis. All four of our featured food finds are guaranteed to provide a perfect excuse for a half-day holiday.
Photographs by Justin Fox Burks
Big John’s Shake Shack
Justin Fox Burks
For three generations, the Tacker family has dished up griddle burgers and home-made pies, as well as a generous side of Americana.
by Ana Alford and Collins Peeples
Marion, Arkansas — Forty years ago, John Tacker and his wife Loretta drove from West Memphis to Marion to see a development of new houses. During the ride, John talked about his dream of owning a restaurant, which is where the story of Big John’s Shake Shack begins.
Although the restaurant’s proper name is “Tacker’s Shake Shack,” the popular local moniker Big John’s pays tribute to John, who passed away in February of 2005. “Everyone knew who John was,” Loretta Tacker recalls. “He kept eating and eating, and so the name Big John’s just stuck.”
These days, Mrs. Loretta, as she is affectionately called, hands off many duties to son and general manager, Jeff Tacker, who operates the restaurant with the help of his sister, Lisa Taylor. “I had thought about selling the restaurant after Big John passed away, but my kids made it clear I couldn’t do that,” Mrs. Loretta explains.
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The John Wayne Burger combines beef patties and barbecue sauce, while the restaurant’s assortment of pies, both traditional and fried, are made in-house.
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Mac & Cheese Burger ($7.60): It’s easy to understand why this burger on a warmly toasted bun is Mrs. Loretta’s favorite: Bacon and house-made mac & cheese top Certified Angus Beef patties, hand-pressed and fresh off the griddle.
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Pecan Pie ($3 a slice/ $15 per pie): Mrs. Loretta picks the pecans herself for her pecan pies, best eaten with a glass of the diner’s sweet tea. “We sell whole pies by the cases around the holidays,” she says. “And sometimes it’s just slices.”
Now that her children help run the restaurant, Mrs. Loretta can focus on interacting with longtime customers like Terry Ammonds, who makes dinner at Big John’s part of his weekly routine. “The only time I’m not here on a Tuesday night is if I’m out of town, or they are closed, which isn’t often,” Ammonds says.
While customers can order breakfast, plate lunches, catfish dinners, and a variety of burgers unique to Big John’s, the restaurant is best known for Mrs. Loretta’s made-from-scratch desserts such as fried pies (Cherry! Peach! Apple! Caramel!), chocolate fudge pie (the most popular), and bread pudding. In fact, the bread pudding is so popular with the members of the U.P. Steam Crew, who travel nationally to showcase historic trains for Union Pacific, that they left Mrs. Loretta a note that explained that they “travel the country for work eating bread pudding in many different states, and Big John’s has THE BEST!”
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Along with scrumptious homemade desserts, the Shake Shack offers a variety of hamburgers unique to the restaurant. Chef Mark Tacker, who is Mrs. Loretta’s grandson, creates and names all the burgers, such as the John Wayne Burger served with barbecue sauce.
Second-generation general manager Jeff Tacker remembers the day Mark invented the combination, named in honor of his grandfather Big John.
“One day, I said to my son, go fix me something to eat, and he said he didn’t know what I wanted,” Jeff says. “I told him I’ve been eating this food for almost 40 years, just make me something. He brought me out this burger with two patties, pork barbecue, barbecue sauce, some cheddar cheese, bacon, and two onion rings.”
Although residents of Crittenden County shape the restaurant’s customer core, international visitors also find their way to the mom-and-pop diner, where the Tackers ask them to pin their home country on a large world map hanging on the restaurant’s wall. The map is covered with push pins from such places as France, Germany, and Canada, proving that the Shake Shack is a worldwide ambassador for Southern hospitality.
Located at 409 E. Military Road in Marion, Arkansas, Tacker’s Shake Shack is open Monday through Saturday from 6:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. (870-739-3943).
Heart and Soul
Justin Fox Burks
Como Steakhouse and a secret courtyard getaway anchor this Mississippi Main Street with history and hospitality.
by Pamela Denney
Como, Mississippi — On a blue damask loveseat near the Como Courtyard’s screen door rests a pillow with the inscription, “American by Birth (Southern by the Grace of God),” a Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash song that visitors will likely be humming after an overnight stay in Como, a town on the cusp of the Delta in Panola County, Mississippi.
Founded in the 1830s and sustained by cotton and farming for the next 100 years, the town today feels faded but cozy, like a worn chenille bedspread in an extra room for guests. Plantation-style homes, refined and peaceful, still flank the town’s train tracks, built in the 1850s to connect cotton crops with markets in Memphis. Once busy with passengers and freight, the tracks these days are mostly quiet, an elevated backdrop through the center of town for picnic tables and crepe myrtle trees.
Out-of-town visitors will adjust quickly to the languid pace of Como’s Main Street, with its brick storefronts shaded by sidewalk awnings. But don’t get too comfortable. As dinnertime approaches, so do the people: Couples on dates, Ole Miss football fans, and fishing buddies from nearby Sardis Lake all come with the singular purpose of getting to Como Steakhouse before the lines get too long.
For many people, Como Steakhouse is almost legendary, but for me, the story is all new. I arrive an hour or so before the start of dinner on a spring-filled Friday to meet Mandy Sanders, the restaurant’s general manager, who explains the restaurant’s history and success. Started in 1988 by a former owner of The Butcher Shop in Memphis, it was purchased by Rick King and Gary May, the current owners, and built on serving dry-aged steaks, hand-cut and cooked over charcoal on open-pit grills.
Heartfelt service is another main ingredient in the Como Steakhouse mix. “We can have a table of 20 people and know everyone who is sitting there,” Sanders says. “Our customers might be coming from miles around, but we are still one big family.”
By the time Sanders ushers me around the restaurant for a tour, I already feel like family, too. The coals, fired up at 3 p.m., are hot and snapping. Head cook Donnell Lewers tosses a couple of bacon-wrapped filet mignons on the grill, and the sizzle and smell and the restaurant’s soulful playlist makes the downstairs bar feel like a spontaneous campground party.
For 15 years, Lewers has cooked the steaks at Como, and he is calm and confident, even when 30 different entrees — each cooked to order — cover the grill. “You get the temperature real hot, and you keep flipping,” he explains, turning a bone-in ribeye with aluminum tongs. “I might flip a medium five or six times, so the good hot pink stays right in the center.”
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12-ounce Filet Mignon ($34)
An 8-ounce filet is also on the menu, but don’t debate too long. Both are wrapped with bacon, but the larger cut only costs $5 more. “I always tell people to go for it,” says general manager Mandy Sanders. “It’s just as good tomorrow as it is today.”
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Miss Charlene’s Sautéed Mushrooms ($7)
Cook Charlene Renix has kept the recipe for her signature mushrooms a secret for 30 years, but here’s a guess: White baby buttons with stems intact are sautéed in Chardonnay and butter with a spicy touch of Worcestershire sauce.
I am, quite frankly, mesmerized by Lewers’ skill. Salmon, catfish filets, thick center-cut pork chops, and a lovely rack of lamb join the steak lineup. He tends to each one, with a touch or a prod or a squirt of water from his customized Powerade bottle. The water, he explains, cools the fire and keeps the moisture in the meat, while the charcoal (only Kingsford briquettes) builds flavor. “I also sprinkle some garlic powder and a little Worcestershire sauce on the steak right before it’s done,” he says.
Plating is straightforward: platters, swirled with whipped butter, sprinkled with Willingham’s seasoning, and topped with a steak and a slice of Texas toast also buttered and grilled. “Every steak comes with a salad, house-made dressing, a baked potato, and Texas toast,” Sanders says. “We do not have a lot of vegetables. This is a meat-and-potato kind of place.”
Little wonder the wait for tables can be an hour or so, except for parties of eight or more who can make reservations ahead. Large celebrations are commonplace at Como Steakhouse, but there is still plenty of room for smaller groups in the restaurant’s main dining room or in the Magnolia Room, where framed portraits of Como’s long-gone ladies recall the Victorian age.
Head upstairs to the Oyster Bar, as my husband and I do, for drinks and a dozen raw oysters from the Gulf Coast. We sit at an outdoor table on the bar’s balcony, and I watch the twilight silhouette of a busy carpenter bee. Across Main Street, I see Four Oaks, a mansion built in 1919 which, I am later told, only has one oak still standing.
My reverie is broken by a server who passes by with a glorious plate of shaved pecans, chocolate pudding, cream cheese, and whipped cream piled high on a shortbread pie crust. Clearly the restaurant’s signature dessert, I ask for its name. “Como Delight,” she replies, a description I am by now certain will apply to our dinner, soon to come.
Located at 203 Main Street in Como, Mississippi, Como Steakhouse is open Monday through Thursday from 5 to 10 p.m. and 4:30 to 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday (662-526-9529).
A World Away
Justin Fox Burks
Talented chefs at Wilson Café add elevated home cooking to a small Delta town’s modern renaissance.
by Pamela Denney
Wilson, Arkansas — In May, when the magnolias smell sweet and heavy, a 50-mile drive in a late winter snowstorm sounds a bit far-fetched. But let’s stick with my story of how the promise of dinner and an unexpected snow led me to Wilson, an enchanting kind of place.
To start, my husband and I have lived in Memphis long enough to know that the threat of snow should keep us home. Still, we stick with our mid-March plan to eat at the Wilson Café, heading west on I-40 to Exit 36 in Mississippi County, where we soon find ourselves on U.S. Highway 61, the Great River Road that parallels the Mississippi. By now, we are deep in the heartland of the Arkansas Delta. The unplowed fields are still, and I can feel the full moon, hiding behind the snow clouds.
“Where in the world are we going?” I ask, laughing, when, as if on cue, the answer appears: a single word — Wilson— scrawled in stylized script across the roof of what I now know was a cotton seed storage house. Soon we come to town and the intersection of a railroad crossing. To our right, a five-story flour mill dominates the night sky. There’s a cotton gin, no longer used, and a row of grain silos line up like gigantic pipes for a sacred church organ. To our left is a town square — post office, bank, supermarket, and the Wilson Café — built in Tudor Revival architecture during the 1920s.
Wilson itself is even older, a company town founded in 1886 by Robert E. Lee Wilson to support his cotton empire. In 1959, the town was incorporated, and in 2010, the Wilson heirs sold the family’s fertile farmland and the town’s commercial buildings to farming magnate Gaylon Lawrence Jr., a benefactor committed to the town’s rebirth.
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Owner/chefs Joe Cartwright and Sheri Haley are key players in Wilson’s renaissance, a trajectory far different from most forgotten Delta towns.
Three years ago, town planner John Faulkner recruited the couple to reopen the shuttered Wilson Café, a project they embraced with little reservation. “The real risk was missing out,” says Cartwright, who grew up in Crittenden County. “If we had passed on the restaurant, I don’t think we could bear coming to Wilson today.”
At the time, both Cartwright and Haley were chefs at popular Memphis restaurants — Cartwright at The Elegant Farmer and Haley at Interim — and like many young chefs, they favored New American cuisine. “We came to Wilson with the idea that we know food, and we are going to show you what we know,” Cartwright says. “We had to adapt pretty quickly.”
The couple’s pivot toward more comfortable Southern food appealed to locals who come for lunch every day, and to the many out-of-town guests who travel to Wilson Café from three different states. “When I worked at McEwen’s, we would blanch green beans, sautée them, and add a little garlic and sea salt so they were nice and crispy,” Cartwright says. “But honestly: don’t green beans cooked with bacon and smoked peppers just taste better?”
I am certainly ready to find out as we settle into a window booth in the café’s cozy bar, renovated along with the rest of the restaurant with style and detail. Outside, the snow is still falling in big fluffy flakes. Inside, Memphis songstress Amy LaVere eats at a nearby table before performing in the dining room for a private birthday bash. (Memphis realtor Joshua Spotts and a busload of revelers braved the bad weather, too.)
The café menu, we discover, is home cooking, elevated by the know-how of professional chefs. Haley’s chocolate chess pie and donut bread pudding are mainstays for both lunch and dinner. Other Southern favorites also dance across the menu, like steak and eggs, fried catfish, and a Good ‘Ol Burger made with Certified Angus Beef. Although the menu feels familiar, chef de cuisine Jonathan Sawrie sneaks in unexpected trills like griddle-fried cornbread with a side of collard dip. The flavors are layered in with premium ingredients and organic produce, sourced from Wilson Farms, conveniently located down the street.
Pleased with the menu, we dig in, sharing an excellent Caesar salad and pesto deviled eggs topped with Parmesan and Italian parsley. Our entrees come next: for me, half a roasted chicken, finished in a skillet and topped with green tomato gravy, and for Tony, scampi and grits. The scampi dish is colorful and three-dimensional and reminds me of an animated character from a Disney film: curly kale and sliced peppers — red, yellow, and green, a mound of grits made with basil and Parmesan, and a circle of colossal shrimp on top. For dessert, we share buttermilk pie and a square of banana cake with icing. Both are exceptionally good.
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Deviled Eggs ($6)
Smooth and creamy, the deviled eggs at Wilson change every day, mixing up ingredients like pesto, cilantro, chipotle, and jalapeno. At Easter, Chef Jonathan Sawrie’s secret technique turns deviled eggs blue.
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A popular dish is scampi-style shrimp plated with sautéed kale salad and Parmesan and basil grits.
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Chicken, succotash & roasted garlic mash ($16)
Mindful of manners, I try to eat my chicken with a knife and fork, but soon give up, using my fingers to dip the meat into warm green tomato gravy. Love me tender. Love me true.
Throughout dinner, we are impressed with the café’s service and the friendliness of everyone we meet. As we gather up our things to leave, Johnny and Ronda Worsham, longtime Wilson residents, start a conversation so genuine that we sit back down to share their booth. They tell us about the Native American artifacts at the town’s Hampson Museum and the restoration of the long-vacant movie theater into a venue for music and plays. They are buoyant with good cheer. “You’ve got to come back in April for the Phil Vassar concert,” Ronda insists, “because it’s so nice to see new people here in Wilson.”
Located at 2 N. Jefferson Street, Wilson, Arkansas, the Wilson Café is open 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday through Tuesday and 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5 to 8:30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday (870-655-0222).
No Clowning Around
Justin Fox Burks
Bozo’s Hot Pit Bar-B-Qin Mason is more than a West Tennessee institution. It just might be the longest-running real barbecue experience in America.
by John O’Leary
Mason, Tennessee — Okay, so there’s a place in Texas (Southside Market in Elgin) that claims to be the nation’s oldest continuous BBQ joint. So check it out at texasbarbecueforum.com, and you’ll find comments like “tourist trap” or “I have nothing good to report about this stuff” or “I did not even finish my lunch; it’s in the trash.” That’s not even allowing for the fact that Texans, in the first place, have no idea of how to make barbecue.
Say what you will about Texas. If there is a holy site for Memphis-style barbecue — after all, by now the whole world knows that ours is the international gold standard of the genre — then that place must be Mason, Tennessee, a small Tipton County town 43 miles to our northeast, the very place where Thomas Jefferson “Bozo” Williams founded his eponymous restaurant in January of 1923.
Now mind you, Mason in 1923 was not exactly a booming metropolis, although today it has quadrupled its 1920 census population of 387. But Bozo Williams was nobody’s fool; he opened his restaurant in the early automobile age on what was then Tennessee Highway One, the first paved road that ran from Memphis to Nashville, then all the way to Bristol. His restaurant became one of America’s first truck stops, even before there were trucks. In fact, buses stopped at Bozo’s for decades, until I-40 opened nearby in 1968.
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Bar-B-Q Plate ($9.95)
I am nothing if not a creature of (bad) habit, so I can’t remember when I last had anything at Bozo’s other than the Plate, which gives you the pork and cole slaw to make two modest sandwiches rather than the monster one on the menu; ask for an extra bun. I’m also partial to the “brown meat,” which brings out the flavors best. And don’t forget the classic onion rings with that.
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Lemon Icebox Meringue Pie ($3 a slice; $15 a pie, ordered in advance)
Like many country restaurants, Bozo’s has its very own “Pie Lady.” She’s Catherine Perry from Somerville, and delivers her goodies daily. If lemon icebox is not your style, check out the egg custard or the German chocolate. Yes, that’s pie, not cake. Pretty terrific.
Nevertheless, Bozo’s continued to prosper, then and to this day. As current owner John Papageorgeon explains, “This is just a very special place, and I feel honored to be its custodian.” A native Memphian and a proud graduate of Memphis Catholic, John worked for Wendy’s and was involved with the Backyard Burger start-up. After retiring from the fast-food business, he bought Bozo’s nine years ago, after the lineage of the Williams family had finally ended. The most telling part of the excellent historical brochure you can pick up when you dine at Bozo’s is that John’s name does not appear in it, not even once. He wants the place, the food, and the service at Bozo’s to speak for itself.
I first visited Bozo’s (gulp) 40 years ago this fall, and my three daughters, now beyond grown, have as fond memories of the place as I do. The décor hardly has changed from that first day that we walked into this pink building in the Memphis hinterland, back when the last surviving Williamses — Miss Helen and Miss Rubye — were still running the show. I can remember many a fine family gathering at Bozo’s on Saturday afternoons, after which we’d wander around the back roads of Tipton and Fayette Counties until we finally figured out how to get home. Great times.
Bozo’s has been in its exact current location since 1950, and not much has changed since then. The Sixties-style wood paneling and the gingham curtains are still there, just as they were when our family first stumbled in. The swarm of newspaper clippings is still on the walls (though these have been modified with each passing generation’s comments, and there are now even Bozo’s T-shirts and coffee mugs for sale). Nevertheless, there’s a strange sense that time has actually stood still in this place. Maybe the barbecue has something to do with that.
Oh yes, the barbecue. To me it’s the same as ever. For whatever reason, it has, for me, a certain simplicity, sans bells and whistles, but then, I’m a sauce freak. John does tell me about the evolution of the sauces in the little bottles on the tables. At first, all Bozo Williams allowed was hot sauce, but at some point in the last half-century, the restaurant bowed to transforming public opinion and did a medium, and then a mild, though the owners thankfully never countenanced a sweet. Good call; to me, the sauce is indispensable to the barbecue here, which seems timeless and utterly traditional, in the best sense of both words.
The menu now does include all kinds of salads along with the usual country restaurant staples, so don’t be afraid to bring your vegetarian friends along for the ride; the green beans in particular are excellent. And when you get to Bozo’s, be sure to have someone tell you how the family of Mason, Tennessee’s own Bozo Williams won a lawsuit against America’s own Bozo the Clown. Decided by the Supreme Court in 1991, this particular trademark case is still studied at law schools to this day.
As the restaurant’s current patriarch, John Papageorgeon tells me that he’s determined to stick around for Bozo’s 2023 centennial, something few barbecue joints get to enjoy. So am I. So should you.
Located at 342 Highway 70 W. in Mason, Tennessee, Bozo’s Hot Pit Bar-B-Q is open Tuesday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and ’til 9 p.m. on Friday and Saturday (901-294-3400).
