Put Some South in Yo' Mouth - Nashville, TN

Monday, February 18th

Let me begin with apologies to Brother Jimmy's Restaurant for stealing their slogan, but it seemed appropriate given the week I just had in Nashville.

There are many things I do not like about the South: the accents, the lackadaisical pace, the SEC, the accents. There is, however, one thing I do especially enjoy about the South: the food. I arrived in Nashville, Tennessee with barbecue on the brain. I love the Northeast, but the folks below the Mason Dixon Line know how to cook up a pig. I've been missing it. Before we left Pennsylvania I consulted both my much beloved Roadfood.com (the link will take you to the impressive list of approved establishments in Nashville) as well as Nashville Citysearch, looking for barbecue joints in particular. I was ready to do some damage.

Monday night, after our flight from Hershey, I did some quick shopping and made dinner for myself. Without meaning too, I kicked off my own personal "week of the pig" with a dinner of pork chops. It was wonderful to prepare my own food for the first time since Christmas. While the dinner was nothing spectacular, just making it lifted my spirits.

For our traditional Tuesday load-in lunch, team Spama-management went to a fine representative of a particularly Southern classification of restaurant: the meat 'n three. The one Ken picked out for us was in the Nashville Arcade - a covered alley of tiny shops and restaurants. The arcade was built in 1903 as Nashville's first enclosed shopping center and maintains an antique feel. I've forgotten the name of the meat 'n three where we ate (it may, in fact, have been called "Meat 'N Three"), but the individual restaurant is not as important as the genre: a meat main dish (in this case: fried chicken, salmon croquettes or steak in gravy) and your choice of three sides (mac 'n cheese, collards, potatoes, green salad, green beans) with a biscuit. I was frankly amazed Ken picked this place out, but I was grateful.

Wednesday I headed out to one of Citysearch's top ten barbecue joints. I picked Neely's for my return to all things barbecue. The Nashville Neely's operation is an off-shoot of their famous Memphis operation. (The Neelys also have a show on the Food Network.) The smell outside the place was heavenly, but - alas - the barbecue wasn't what I'd hoped for. The ribs were listed as the specialty of the house, but I found them uninspiring. Possibly, I had built up the event too much in my mind. The ribs were fine, but nothing more. The beans were divine, though. There was barbecue in the beans!

Nashville barbecue meal #1 - ribs, beans & slaw at Neely's.

On the way back to the hotel, I stopped in Nashville's Centennial Park. In 1897, the park was home to the Nashville Centennial & International Exhibition which celebrated (a year late) the 100th anniversary of Tennessee's joining the union. The only remaining structure from the Exhibition is a full scale recreation of the Parthenon. The Parthenon was constructed as a home for the Exhibition's art exhibit and is a nod to Nashville's nickname: "The Athens of the South". (Nashville is home to 19 institutions of higher learning including: Tennessee State University, Vanderbilt and Nashville Auto Diesel College.) Today, the building contains an art museum as well as exhibits about the original Parthenon and the Exhibition in the basement. On the main floor is a 41' tall recreation of the statue of Athena believed to have graced the original Parthenon. As a lover of all things world's fair and grand exhibition related, I really dug the Parthenon. It also afforded many photo opportunities.

The Nashville Parthenon

Athena - she's 41' tall!

JV and the Parthenon (patented arm-out photo).

A photo from the exhibition. Nashville hosted exhibits in the Parthenon while Memphis used the Pyramid.

While we were still in Hershey, Karl started talking up this breakfast place he remembered from his days touring with The Phantom of the Opera. He couldn't remember the name of the place, but a google search turned up a roadfood.com review of The Pancake Pantry! I got an email that read something like: "... now we HAVE to go!" Thursday morning a large part of the Spamily convened for a trip to The Pancake Pantry. The Pantry offers 24 different varieties of flapjacks - everything from buttermilk and silver dollar through buckwheat and sweet potato. Nearly everyone at the table ordered a different variety - all were delightful, but we hardly made a dent in the offerings. It was at The Pantry that I had my first brush with the food item that has come to define Nashville in my mind: country ham. This salty, cured, bone-in, sliced and pan-fried deliciousness was undoubtedly my favorite part of Nashville. I'm pleased to report that country ham rates both a wikipedia entry and a national association of its devotees: The National Country Ham Association. (Membership makes a great gift.) Christopher Gurr and I shared a slice and made noises worthy of the diner scene in When Harry Met Sally.

Spamily at The Pancake Pantry: Gurr, Nate, Esther, Tera-Lee, Ben, Julie & Karl

Esther and her pancakes.

For breakfast on Friday morning Roy and I loaded up into the rental car and headed for the Natchez Trace Parkway. At the end of that venerable road from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville lies The Loveless Cafe. The cafe began as a fried chicken and biscuits concession in the lobby of the Loveless Motel, but has since taken over the entire property. The former motel buildings have been taken over by a mail-order and souvenir operation and the cafe has taken over the main building. The cafe is famous for its scratch-made biscuits and rightfully so. If my taste buds didn't deceive me, they were about 2/3 made of butter. They come with homemade preserves and sorghum molasses - perfect. My breakfast of biscuits, country ham, red-eye gravy (pork drippings AND coffee?!?!? Come on!) and eggs was divine.

Scratch biscuits.

JV outside The Loveless Cafe

Friday afternoon I visited Ryman Auditorium. Built by a Civil War-era steamship captain as a home for revival meetings, the Ryman is probably best known as the long-time home of the Grand Ole Opry. While I'm not a fan of country music, the history in the place was evident and interesting. I took a guided tour of the backstage areas from Buddy, a former stage hand for the Opry. The dressing rooms are all named after stars of the Opry (the Johnny Cash and June Carter Suite, the Minnie Pearl Room, etc.) and contain pictures and posters. The house itself has display cases with artifacts from the hey day of the Opry and was restored in the early nineties after nearly 30 years of neglect after the Opry decamped to Opry Land. The Opry has returned to the Ryman and performs a three month winter season from "The Mother Church of Country Music". The acoustics in the place really are amazing and it must be a thrill to play from the stage where so many greats have been.

Ryman Auditorium

Buddy and the rest of my tour group at the Ryman Auditorium's Stage Door.

One of Minnie Pearl's $1.98 hats.

On the stage of the Grand Ole Opry!

After my visit to the Ryman, I was ready to give Nashville Barbecue another shot. Also on Citysearch's list was Hog Heaven. Hog Heaven is a shack next to Centennial Park. There is no dining room. One orders from a window in the front of the cinder block building and either takes one's meal to go or sits at a picnic table on the screened-in porch to eat. Happily, the weather had warmed quite a bit from the snow squall earlier in the week and I could sit on the porch. The specialty here was pulled pork with cole slaw sandwiched between two rounds of fried cornbread. Pork on cornbread sounds like a good idea, but in this case it left the whole affair feeling a bit dry. Dry was my impression of the pork alone as well - not good in the case of pulled pork. The sandwich could have benefited from more sauce. I have, however, come to appreciate the penchant for serving dill pickle slices with barbecue (something I used to discount). They make a nice, simple counterpoint to barbecue sauce; almost the pickled ginger to the wasabi of sushi. Their turnip greens were very tasty - they even came with a tiny take-out container of vinegar.

Hog Heaven - that's the "dining room" on the right.

Pulled pork on cornbread.

Since I was in "Music City, USA", I thought I had better head out to hear some of their famous live music on Lower Broadway. I joined a fair portion of the crew boys on Friday night and went to Robert's Western World where we squeezed in to hear Brazibilly. While, as I've mentioned, country music isn't my thing, I enjoyed these guys. They had an older guy on the fiddle who could really tear it up! I'm glad I went with the boys and got out to see some of Nashville's nightlife. I called it a night before it got too terribly late, though, as I had another breakfast date Saturday morning.

At Robert's Western World: Scott, Berg, Jeff, Tony & Ben

All week Nate raved about a breakfast place he had visited on a previous tour stop in Nashville. More breakfast in Nashville (another chance for country ham?), sign me up! Another sizable gathering of Spamily descended on Monell's in Nashville's Germantown for their famous "Country Breakfast". This is the sort of breakfast the lady of the house would send the field workers out with in the morning. The sort of breakfast you eat when it's the last hot meal you'll eat until the threshin's done. The menu for Saturday's breakfast: smoked sausage, bacon, country ham, biscuits and gravy, fried apples, pancakes, scrambled eggs, hash browns, cheese grits, skillet fried chicken, corn pudding, broccoli and cheddar fritters, peach/molasses preserves, coffee and tea. Monell's serves everything family style at tables for twelve (the nine of us were joined by 3 strangers) and they keep bringing the food until you cry for mercy. It's like eating at your Grandma's house, if you're Grandma was a mess cook for the Southern Army. It was absolute genius. I was, quite literally, high from all the good food by the time we rolled out of there. (Ben went home to take a nap before the matinee!) Props to Nate for taking us there!

Spamily at Monell's: Karl, Jeff, Ben, Tera-Lee, Berg, Cuz, Maggie & JV

Nate relaxes after breakfast.

I was just about ready to THINK about food again by the between shows dinner break on Saturday. Jeff Brewer heard about my barbecue needs and mentioned that he had been to a pretty good barbecue place on his last visit to Nashville. Jeff, Cuz and I went to check out Rippy's on Broadway. We fought our way through the hockey crowd (hockey, in the South?) to get a table and ordered up some barbecue and tea. This time the ribs were right on! Dry rubbed, with sauce on the side, these were winners - just what I had been hungering for all week. Hooray!

Finally, the ribs I'd been waiting for!

Cuz reacts to the arrival of his ribs.

Sunday, I had no culinary adventures. I had fruit, cottage cheese and shredded wheat for breakfast in an effort to apologize to my body for a pork-fueled week... There was, nonetheless, excitement - Julie Barnes made her debut as the Lady of the Lake! Lyn, our usual cover for the Lady was out sick, so Julie got to have a crack at the role. She was, of course, fabulous! Such fun to see her break out of the ensemble and step downstage to sing in the spotlight. (I took some photos from the wings with Sabra's camera, if any of them turned out I'll share them...)

The show played quite well in the Tennessee PAC. The new company members are settling in and the show has a different (quite honest) energy as everyone is listening and responding to one another. The crew cracked me up. There were a bunch of ladies on the wardrobe crew that I nicknamed "The Paulas" as they all reminded me of Paula Deen. They all did their hair up in that helmet-like style that ladies of a certain age all seem to do in the South and they all smiled at me all the time, addressing me as "Sugar." (I kept trying to find an excuse to take a picture of them, but couldn't find a way that didn't seem rude...) The stage crew didn't need my help with nicknames - they came equipped with names like Jimbo and Chew-Chew. Even our sign language interpreters were characters - we dubbed them Weezer and Clairee. They were perfect Southern Gentlewomen; they dropped by our office twice just to introduce themselves.

TPAC - quite likely, the only theatre we'll play with a state office building above it. The theatres share a lobby with the office building. (The State Museum is located in the theatre's basement!)

This morning, before the plane ride to Jacksonville, Karl and I couldn't resist one more trip to the Pancake Pantry for breakfast. We bumped into Julie, Tera-Lee and Ben in the lobby - they were also headed back for one last Southern breakfast! It was a great way to say goodbye to Nashville and to wrap up a very busy (and very enjoyable) week.

An album of the week in photos is on Snapfish. Enjoy.

JV