L-R: Maggie Hall Nicol, Anna Nicol, Will Nicol, Julie Felton, Mary Jean Smith, and Ellen Humerickhouse at The Silver Caboose.
It’s almost like entering a vintage railroad dining car when you step inside the Silver Caboose, located on Collierville’s historic town square. Model trains adorn the shelves, photographs of trains hang on the walls, and a toy locomotive pulls cars along a track near the ceiling. You expect to hear a train whistle, but instead you hear the clatter of dishes and the hum of animated voices in the bustling restaurant.
The Silver Caboose is the brainchild of owner Mary Jean Smith. “One day I had a folly and decided to open a restaurant,” she says. In 1996, Smith opened the business in the town where she was born. She is a fourth-generation resident of Collierville and a third-generation business owner on the old town square. Her grandmother once owned a dry-goods store and her father ran a grocery store on the square.
photograph by michael donahue
Fare from the old Knickerbocker restaurant, including tomato aspic and greens, are now staples at the Silver Caboose.
Smith’s restaurant expertise began in East Memphis when she was for 10 years the administrative assistant for the late restaurateur Vernon Bell at the since-closed Knickerbocker.
“I learned the restaurant business there,” she says. “Vernon was such a great mentor. After I left, I thought, ‘One day I’d like to replicate that.’”
She first went into the real estate business, but she still liked the idea of owning her own restaurant. “I got a lot of recipes from there [the Knickerbocker], because a lot of them were in my head.”
When the space on the square became available, Smith leased 132 East Mulberry, where part of the restaurant is still located. Her husband, Bob, renovated the building, which had been a drugstore that dated to the late 1800s, she says. The location had a family connection. Many years earlier, her father, Ralph Hall, had worked as a soda jerk at the drugstore, Smith says.
She came up with the train theme because Collierville was “a train town” at one time. “So many trains — eighteen a day — went through here before they built the intermodal at Rossville and Piperton.”
Smith expanded the restaurant after she bought the building next door. She chose “Silver Caboose” for the name. “Everybody knows a red caboose. We named it the ‘Silver Caboose’ because our ceiling is sheet metal. It’s not actually silver, but it looks like silver. It’s steel.”
And instead of a “blue plate special,” the Silver Caboose features a “silver plate special,” their lunch special of meat and two sides. The menu also includes many of the Knickerbocker’s specials, including tomato aspic, frozen fruit balls, shrimp salad, pimento cheese, egg salad, and chicken salad But, she adds, “Most of our recipes are our mother’s and grandmother’s recipes. And our own.” Turnip greens are their most popular item. “We pick them, wash them, cook them.”
General manager Julie Felton, one of Smith’s 10 children (three daughters and seven sons), has “taken some recipes and just made them her own.”
photograph by Ellen Humerickhouse
The restaurant closes at 2 p.m., but the Side Car Market, which is inside the restaurant, stays open until 4 p.m. Customers can buy packaged menu items ranging from chicken asparagus casserole to old-fashioned chess pie.
Smith, who is at the restaurant every day, updates the menu on Facebook, maintains their inventory, and keeps the books. She also works at her real estate office, which is near the Collierville square.
Many customers ask to sit in “The Rose Room,” Smith says. Framed photos of roses from her rose garden adorn the walls in that part of the restaurant. “We have 1,200 rose bushes in our garden. And I’ll bring them in five-gallon buckets from our garden all through the growing season.”
The soda fountain, which was part of the old drug store, offers banana splits, ice cream sodas, cherry lemonades, and more.
A vintage coin-operated kiddie locomotive stands outside the entrance. “Put a quarter in there to get a ride,” she tells customers. Smith bought the train, which didn’t work, at a flea market in New Orleans. Her husband brought it back to Collierville in his pickup truck and Felton’s husband repaired it. “It’s been working every day. The little bell rings. And I can hear that bell ringing over at my real estate office. So, I know when somebody is riding the train.”
The Silver Caboose doesn’t advertise, but it still draws crowds of hungry diners. “We just keep our nose to the grindstone,” says the owner, “and just roll along.”
The Silver Caboose is located at 132 East Mulberry Street in Collierville.
