Blue Ridge Country March/April 2021 - 25

town Johnson City through plates of
Turkish kebabs and rice mixed with orzo
pasta. Their roasted eggplant appetizer
with yogurt and garlic is a mandatory beginning to every meal.

ing. On a typical day, Wade's sells over
3,500 yeast rolls. Listed on the 15-item
vegetable board are speckled butter beans,
a southern favorite. Another clear sign
that you're in the South is the presence of
macaroni and cheese and rice and gravy
on that vegetable board.

Ridgewood Barbecue, Bluff City,
Tennessee. Shortly after the COVID-19

The Bean Barn, Greeneville, Tennessee. When the Hartsell family retired in
2019 and The Bean Barn closed, it was
a sad day in Greeneville. But paint and
body shop owner Gary Hoese revived the
restaurant and had the good sense to keep
Beans All the Way on the menu. It's a dish
that the late Romie and Zella Mae Britt
started serving at what was then called
Britt's Grill in the 1950s. In a documentary film we produced about the restaurant
several years ago, we called soup beans
and cornbread " the iconic, dollar-stretching, belly-filling, soul-enriching meal of
Southern Appalachia. " Romie and Zella
Mae added a bit of homemade beef stew
to their lard-seasoned pinto beans and
scattered chopped onions on top. The result was Beans All the Way.

The Little Top, Greeneville, Tennessee. The Big Top building has been bulldozed away. Its former location is now an
empty lot. But Sonny Paxton's drive-in
was so popular in the mid-20th century
that auxiliary policemen had to be hired
to direct traffic in and out. A dying tobacco market and the end of the Magnavox
company spelled the death knell for The
Big Top. But its signature sandwich, the

RED MEZE

ABOVE: Red Meze's Lamb Shank.
BOTTOM LEFT: The Double Cheese Chipper
from The Little Top, Greeneville, Tennessee.
BOTTOM RIGHT: Lisa Proffitt Peters and
her father Larry Proffitt, owners of Ridgewood
Barbecue, make sauce from a secret family
recipe.

Chipburger, lives on at The Little Top,
Keith Paxton's diminutive version of his
father's restaurant, on the other end of
town. Made with very thinly sliced and
lightly grilled pork shoulder, the Chipburger, and especially the ramped up
Double Cheese Chipper, rank, in our
book, among the grandest sandwiches of
the South, on equal footing with the New
Orleans muffaletta, the Tampa Cuban
sandwich and the Kentucky Hot Brown.

Red Meze, Johnson City, Tennessee. Bulent and Sengul Yaman are contributing to the revitalization of down-

outbreak, Ridgewood owner Larry Proffitt, a pharmacist by trade, assured us that
the fires at his family's barbecue joint
in Bullock's Hollow would continue to
burn. His parents, Grace and Jim, started
the place in 1948 as a beer joint. It survived the county going dry in 1952 and
the construction of a new road to Elizabethton in 1987. The location has never
changed, nor has Proffitt family ownership. Unlike barbecue houses on the
other end of the state in Memphis where
pork shoulder and ribs dominate menus,
neither is served at The Ridgewood. The
hickory fires there enrobe fresh hams that
are then sliced and slathered with a sweet
and sour, spicy, tomato-based sauce, its
flavor described by our friend and barbecue scholar Dr. John Shelton Reed as
" what ketchup will taste like in Heaven. "

The Shamrock, Johnson City, Tennessee. The oldest food-related business
in the city where we live is The Shamrock Beverage and Tobacco Shop. It's the
only place we know where you can get a
house-made chicken salad sandwich and
a bag of pipe tobacco. The Shamrock is
a survivor, having opened in March of
1929, seven months before the stock mar-

MARCH/APRIL 2021

Blue Ridge Country March/April 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Blue Ridge Country March/April 2021