It’s impossible to miss the art-deco design of the Bus Stop restaurant in Dyersburg.
Highway 51 runs right by my baby’s door,
Highway 51 runs right by my baby’s door,
If I don’t get the girl I’m loving,
Won’t go down to Highway 51 no more.
— “Highway 51 Blues” by Curtis Jones
It’s often said, by folks more humanist than evangelical, that the journey is the destination. That’s probably true of this meandering story that you’re about to read, as it is as much about lost time and the spirit of travel as it is about the smell of fresh-brewed coffee, satisfying sandwiches, and a nifty road-trip-inspired diner called the Bus Stop, situated off the beaten path in downtown Dyersburg, Tennessee, a faded lumber capital that’s seen better days.
It’s a story that starts in 1914 in Hibbing, Minnesota, when the Greyhound Line was born, then immediately leaps forward in time to 1934 when the rapidly expanding coach service — with a pinch of Hollywood glitter — became an American institution. Claudette Colbert’s famous bus ride with Clark Gable in It Happened One Night, the pre-code cinema classic, brought a whole new set of Depression-era customers to the bus station looking for a lift, and that’s not all. Frank Capra’s screwball romance famously caused a steep decline in undershirt sales when Gable appeared bare-chested. The comic tale of a spoiled socialite’s adventures on the road with a down-at-heel reporter also brought down the curtain on a century of train travel.
More and more people were packing their Samsonite luggage into the family station wagon or letting Greyhound take the wheel. One year after the release of It Happened One Night, rubber tire travel finally eclipsed rail travel, and everything changed. Sleek, efficiently crafted new stations, like the one in Dyersburg, came online overnight, at the dawn of Burma-Shave, before there were Pilot stations, Exxons, and Travel America markets conveniently located at every exit on the freeway.
This was back when the long and winding American roadside was transforming into a quirky souvenir trail, and a blank canvas for advertising. Every barn could be a billboard, and even today, if you know how to read the landscape, the incredible promise and grave disappointments of the twentieth century are easily observed along our highways in the form of sprawling used car lots, endless junkyards, and the rotten or recycled husks of novelty restaurants built to look like UFOs and rockets to the moon. America’s travel paradigm shifted once again in the mid-1950s with interstate expansion and the mainstreaming of air transit. Small-scale family attractions began to disappear but never died out completely.
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The Bus Stop’s dessert menu includes cakes, muffins, and an assortment of pastries.
In its own unassuming way, the Bus Stop is a tastefully apt attempt to bring back a classic roadside attraction and make it upscale. It’s simple — only a gourmet coffee and sandwich shop. But it’s built on quality, wrapped in genuine Americana, and packed tic-tight into Dyer County’s abandoned, but beautifully preserved, Art-Deco Greyhound terminal.
The Bus Stop’s melt-in-your-mouth coffee rubbed brisket sandwich is a tasty enough excuse for travel, especially with a perfect bowl of tomato bisque. But the building’s just as powerful a draw. Every lovingly converted inch of this 1930s-era waiting room reminds diners of another time, and the wild drive-thru wonderland that once existed out in the vast expanse we now call Flyover America.
Memphis may be the home of Sputnik Monroe, and Satellite records, but even in a place that helped define the modern profile, it’s relatively hard to find reminders of a recent past built to look like the space-age future. Unless, of course, you motor north on Danny Thomas past the juke joints, honky tonks, and an epic fireworks stand at the edge of town and into the countryside, where progress is either a dream or a dirty word.
Highway 51 takes you by the pointy A-frame ruins of a What-A-Burger stand and yards full of kitschy, bargain-priced outdoor art guaranteed to mortify the neighbors. It’s a straight shot through Millington, Munford, Atoka, Ripley, and points beyond, where traces of classic roadside America are evident in the sleek, futuristic design of Covington’s Rose Construction, and in the life-sized giraffe statues luring travelers to tour a car-friendly Safari Park in Alamo, Tennessee. You’ll know you’ve arrived in Dyersburg when you see a sign for the Affordable (Storage) Space Center. It’s hard to miss an enormous red, white, and blue missile shooting flames from its tail fins.
Rockets have yet to catch on as a means of travel in West Tennessee, but perched on the Forked Deer River, Dyersburg was once a major steamboat port. It grew into a hub for the Illinois Central Railroad and, as the Art-Deco station on Court Street suggests, it evolved into a busy transportation hub serving northwest Tennessee. Sadly, you can no longer buy a bus ticket to Memphis at this gleaming blue-and-white-tiled terminal, though it certainly looks like you could walk right up to the counter, past shelves of fluffy pastry and fat-top muffins, and order a one-way ticket down Route 66 all the way to the Pacific Coast.
“We’re just trying to do something different,” says Eric Moore, executive chef for the Bus Stop. Moore, a Connecticut native who grew up in Germantown, is a peripatetic spirit who took an appropriately winding path to his tiny kitchen in Dyersburg. Moore studied film and video production at the University of Memphis and worked behind the scenes for years in local TV news. But he didn’t like it a bit. So he bounced around from job to job looking for something that fit.
“I found myself working in restaurants,” he says. “And I thought, ‘Hey, I kind of like this.’” So Moore enrolled in L’École Culinaire, and started his professional life all over again. “People think when you get out of culinary school you’re a chef, but you’re really not,” he says. “You’re just an educated cook that’s $60,000 in debt. It takes a little while to figure out how things really work.”
To learn the finer points of his trade, the newly minted cook packed two suitcases into a “piece of crap” Camaro and headed north to New York, and then took a succession of planes, trains, and automobiles to explore more exotic locations like Essex and Iceland. “I guess it was a pretty roundabout way to get back to West Tennessee,” he says. “But I wouldn’t change any of it, honestly.”
You can still catch a busride from Dyersburg’s West End Market, but the British-owned, Dallas-based Greyhound company abandoned its Dyersburg station in 1980; today, the Bus Stop restaurant isn’t affiliated in any way. After Greyhound left, a variety of tenants occupied the building, including a Domino’s Pizza. Nothing stuck. The property owners, John and Martha Lannom, were determined to preserve the building and use its special history to lure people downtown. But what kind of business would fit in an old bus station? A frozen yogurt stand? A bakery? A coffee shop?
“The original idea was we’d sell yogurt, but we wound up being a restaurant and coffee shop,” Moore recalls. “The goal was to make the Bus Stop a part of the community, not just a place to eat. So when you think of Dyersburg you think of the Bus Stop, and when you think of the Bus Stop you think of Dyersburg.”
The walls of the Bus Stop are decorated with colorful vintage advertisements from the early days of Greyhound and mass travel by motor coach. Some advertise the service as an affordable way for farmers to get out of town and see the world. Others tout the convenience of being able to relax and leave the stress of driving to somebody else. Moore has internalized all these ideas, and plugged them into the concept.
“People are shifting from fast food,” he says. “Places like Chili’s and Friday’s are great, and there are really good reasons why they’re so successful. But I also think people want to experience things differently now, and that extends to how they want their food. That’s what Greyhound was always advertising, isn’t it? Why stress out? Let us do that for you.”
Keeping up with a menu where 98 percent of everything available is prepared in-house can certainly be stressful. “We’re doing things this kitchen was never meant to do,” Moore says. His tiny 18-inch oven is only big enough to fit a single turkey, and that can take between four and five hours to cook. The Bus Stop has sold a metric ton of turkey since opening its doors in 2015, one five-pound bird at a time.
The brisket also takes five hours to prepare, and the pork belly — ultimately served with fermented garlic, herbs, and a ginger maple aioli — spends 24 hours in the sous vide.
“To do all of this in a space the size of ours takes a lot of planning, and I don’t get a lot of down time,” Moore says, laughing off his cramped circumstances. Having maxed out his workspace, the chef looked for other ways to streamline his process. “My most complicated recipe has six ingredients,” he says, “because you don’t need 20 things in one recipe to make it a decent meal.”
The minimalist approach means every ingredient matters, and the Bus Stop menu has all kinds of special touches. Mushroom confit is a perfect match for slow-cooked brisket with cumin and brown sugar aioli. The sharp, tart flavor of pickled red onions sets off the burn of smoked chicken and turkey.
“I worried that Dyersburg might not be ready for some of this stuff, but they’ve really embraced what we’re doing here,” Moore says. In addition to sandwiches ranging in variety from the classic BLT to pork loin with bernaise, the Bus Stop also serves specialty salads like spinach with slow-rendered bacon lardons, and fresh tomatoes with mozzarella and basil. The dessert menu is limited to pastries, which pair nicely with the Bus Stop’s 30 specialty coffee drinks. Chef Moore’s menu changes seasonally, and during summer months when farmers markets open up, most of the restaurant’s produce is locally sourced.
Although the Bus Stop’s menu was developed with locals in mind, it’s already attracting tourists. “We get lots of people who travel around looking at old bus stations,” Moore says. “We also have people who are 80 years old that come in and tell me how they used to catch the bus here. They love it — that they can hang out in the old place.”
People also still call regularly hoping to purchase a ticket to somewhere, only to be disappointed. For the perfect old-school bus travel experience you’ve got to drive 48 miles southeast of Dyersburg to the Greyhound station in Jackson, Tennessee, where the food choices are limited to snack cakes, potato chips, and other items you can purchase from a vending machine. In Jackson, travelers stare at their phones while waiting in an austere room that doesn’t look like it’s changed much since the station was built in 1938. Literature made available for phoneless passengers is limited to colorful religious pamphlets warning against the sinful perils of broadmindedness. Framed maps on the wall are made from paper and pigment, not interactive pixels.
Although it has clearly seen better days, Jackson’s Greyhound station is still worth a visit, even if you’ve got nowhere to go. Vintage floor tiles are old and scuffed, and the depressing battleship gray walls have rotted away in places, but the nearly 80-year-old stop (just across the street from the Ned Ray McWherter Cultural Arts Center and right next door to a rocket-themed small engine shop) is a diamond in the rough. If Dyersburg’s Bus Stop is a good example of all the smaller Greyhound stations built in the wake of It Happened One Night, Jackson’s larger terminal is a sterling example of Greyhound’s Streamline Moderne look, with an emphasis on sexy curves, and long horizontal lines. This was Art-Deco architecture and design at its most purely scientific — stripped of decorative elements, relying instead on aerodynamic forms to evoke a giddy sense of motion and speed. But for all of its fading beauty, there are at least two, possibly related, things completely wrong with the picture in Jackson: There aren’t many passengers waiting for a ride, and you can’t get a decent cup of coffee.
Eric Moore, back in Dyersburg, sees an opportunity. “I would love to franchise this idea out,” he says, imagining what it might be like to open similar restaurants in either abandoned or possibly even functioning bus stops.
“People like to take old stuff and turn it into something new and hip. The only thing we did to the outside of this building was pressure wash it and put up the sign. There’s a building like just this one in Humboldt. There are buildings like it all over the country.”
In 2002, a historical marker was hung on the Jackson station’s increasingly dilapidated exterior. It names the construction company that built it, and notes, “Many a person has boarded the bus at this location in search of a dream, or gotten off the bus returning home. Memories are made here every day.”
The plaque is low on information, appealing instead to sentiment as effectively as pictures of old dogs and sad clowns. In very few sentences it turns the promise of the American landscape into pure, unfiltered kitsch — all gauzy recollections and quaint fantasy. By way of comparison, a vintage Greyhound advertisement, originally published in 1940, now hanging on the wall of Dyersburg’s Bus Stop, has more to say about journeys and destinations.
Using only a dozen letters, the ad’s headline announces Greyhound’s newest fleet of modern, air-conditioned motor coaches and says everything you need to know about getting out, seeing, smelling, and tasting America: “Cool’s the Word.”
Indeed, it is.
Bus Stop
304 West Court St., Dyersburg, TN 38024
731-334-5205
