Twenty-plus years of documenting the South's vernacular art, visionary environments and traditions….plus modern art exhibits, Faulkner and Eudora, and This Week's Various. Welcome.
I’ll use that strawberry jam for many things including sweet little surprise gifts, and one way I’m sure I’ll use them this summer is with these little mini croissant sandwiches which always go over great: split a croissant in half, spread with strawberry jam, top with a slice of very good roast beef and arugula. Skewer. Et voila!
Alana Dao wrote had an article at Bitter Southerner last year, An Ode to Luby’s & The Southern Cafeteria: If you’ve ever walked a tray along a rail — looking for green Jell-O salad, hot buttered rolls or mile-high strawberry shortcake — you know the assembly line that is a Southern cafeteria.
In Alabama, it wasn’t Luby’s, it was Morrison’s (and while Picadilly owns all the Morrison’s in existence now, one of those retains its name under agreement, the one in Mobile).
Morrison’s Cafeteria was the default for my Nanny and PawPaw going to eat at the Gadsden Mall: it was always a sure bet to please everyone, not that it was completely delicious, but it was good enough and plenty of choices. I loved the turkey and dressing, the pear salad (so grown up!), the bejeweled cubes of jello with the whipped cream and maraschino cherry segment atop for dessert. Extra hungry? Rather than jello, the apple dumpling — so fancy with its pastry casing, the one dessert alone with the hot food options.
I loved when the woman at the register at the end of the line would ring the doorbell signaling for someone to come help little, young me take my platter.
Here, a cafeteria mix-tape — not all the ones I have pictures from, just the ones that come to mind first:
Niki’s West, Birmingham AL
Now shuttered, The Smokehouse in Birmingham AL — feeling a little fancy? Sit in the back:
a little less so? More homey here:
Also shuttered, Maggie’s in Tuscaloosa:
Swett’s, Nashville:
Sarris Restaurant, Birmingham:
Mary’s Southern Cooking, Mobile:
Arnold’s Country Kitchen in Nashville:
Shuttered, Niki’s Downtown (not Niki’s West) in Birmingham, which blessedly had pastitsio:
Mrs B’s Home Cooking, Montgomery:
Uncle Mick’s Cajun Cafe, Prattville AL:
The Four Way in Memphis:
Betty Mae’s in Huntsville AL:
Minnie’s Uptown in Columbus GA:
The White House in Warrior AL:
The Colonnade in Atlanta:
Victoria’s Cafe, Jasper AL:
Long gone, never forgotten Belle Meade Cafeteria in Nashville:
Shapiro’s in Indianapolis:
Interesting how they do their deviled eggs:
I saw an old Pioneer Cafeteria tray at a kitchen I once picked up at for United Way’s Meals on Wheels when I volunteered:
Eagle’s in Birmingham:
Sisters of the New South in Savannah:
The wild yellow chicken and dressing at the Cedar House Cafeteria in Tarrant AL:
Veranda had an article a few years ago about literary hotels — this isn’t all of them, but the list included, and yes of course I’m going to lean heavily on the ones with Southern ties:
Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in the Antibes where F. Scott Fitzgerald used as the setting for Tender is the Night.
Raffles Singapore is known for Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, W. Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, and Alfred Hitchcock.
Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans hosted William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, John Grisham, Anne Rice, and Stephen Ambrose. The Monteleone along with the Plaza and the Algonquin are the only other hotels make official literary landmarks by the Friends of the Library Association. The Plaza and The Algonquin
Intercontinental The Willard in Washington D.C. is famous for Nathaniel Hawthorne, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, and Charles Dickens. It was here that MLK Jr wrote his “I Have a Dream” speech. Not mentioned by Veranda, but Julia Ward Howe also stayed here.
The Plaza Hotel is the setting for Eloise and is also known for authors F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Truman Capote, who hosted his Black and White Ball there.
Hotel Website: fairmont the plaza hotel
From a 2020 stay at the Pontchartrain
Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire from The Pontchartrain Hotel in New Orleans.
New York’s The Algonquin Hotel is known for Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Maya Angelou (and others of The Round Table).
Brent treated the boys to a trip to Atlanta last month to celebrate Shug’s graduation. We stayed at the Ritz-Carlton.
It was right around Easter so part of the lobby was themed along with foods in the concierge lounge, and even our turndown service treat was a chocolate bunny
Oh! Two of the more random things I really liked:
This honey server in the concierge lounge at breakfast
…and this RC didn’t have the usual Asprey products, but the Diptyque, which I like so much better
We also went to Little 5 Points to take the boys record shopping — they liked Criminal Records
Shug makes our third family member in the Indian Springs alumni association! He will be a counselor at his camp most of the summer and then go to Bama in the fall. I’ve always said that I gave birth to an engineer and he will make an incredible one, but he also has such a gift for finance — so we’ll see how that turns out!
Shugie will be in 11th grade this coming school year, and in the meantime he is taking courses at Bama and then heading up to New England to be on-campus at another university for more classes in a few weeks (can I turn this into a Nantucket and/or MV trip? We shall see!). He’s racking up those hours!
Last weekend, Brent and I went on a foraging hike with a group and the Land Trust of North Alabama at Harvest Square in Harvest, Alabama. We learned about (and snacked some) sumac, cattail, Virginia pepperberry, Queen Anne’s lace (be sure not to get that one wrong), and some other things.
Land Trust of N AL does a good number of these hikes and other activities, and we’re planning on a mushroom hike our guide told us about for later this year.
I visited a newer bookstore earlier this month: Blue Apple Books in Madison, Alabama — it’s in the more historic part of town, with other shops with lots of extra character around. This is it, below:
A while ago, I looked for a good list of independent bookshops and couldn’t find a great one. I liked the idea of a map so I could see if I was close to something great, and wanted to filter out the ones that were, say, dedicated to trading paperbacks.
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Poppies, Frist Art Museum, Nashville TN from a visit last year
The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts has on exhibit through June 1, 2025 Zelda Fitzgerald’s Paper Dolls. Even if you’re a Zelda fan (like me) this is maybe not the exhibit you’re jumping for, but we get so little, we take what we get. The ones pictured at the MMFA were donated by Scottie.
The overview from the site:
Montgomery native Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was the wife of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald as well as a creative artist in her own right. Collections of paper dolls are a part of her artistic legacy, the earliest made for her daughter Scottie in the 1920s. Much later, in the early 1940s, she created a series of characters from fairy tales and a group drawn from the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. She approached a publisher in New York, saying she intended these for a publication to be used and enjoyed by children.
As always, all images unless otherwise noted copyright Deep Fried Kudzu. Like to use one elsewhere? Kindly contact me here.
Affiliate links are sometimes used. That means that if you purchase something via one of the links, it costs you nothing extra, but may generate a commission, offsetting the cost of DFK… e.g. as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Also: remember that Bookshop is fab because they’re giving orders to indie booksellers. Grateful for your support. xoxo!
Yellow magnolias at Bellefontaine Cemetery in St Louis, from a visit earlier this year
Cafe Mado’s chef, Nico Russell, is preserving the flowers in sour honey. He plans to serve them in a dessert with buttermilk and local strawberries when the latter is in season around June. The restaurant’s bar team is working on a nonalcoholic cocktail that combines amazake, a Japanese fermented rice drink, with magnolia tea. Wong also provides the buds to Flynn McGarry, the chef at Gem Home in NoLIta and the forthcoming Hudson Square restaurant Cove (scheduled to open this fall). He’s been soaking the petals in vinegar and plans to serve them “like pickled ginger,” he says, with crudo at Cove. The Brooklyn-based chef Hannah Musante collected her own flowers from a friend’s backyard, then stuffed them with sourdough toast ice cream. She covered other buds in sugar to create a syrup, and used the leftover macerated flowers to fill a tart shell that she topped with crème fraîche and dried thyme flowers.
And if you’ve ever wondered why the gas station next door has been restored and not the Bryant store where the Emmett Till story begins, this was covered in the Fall 2017 Southern Cultures:
In July 2011, Annette Morgan and Harry Tribble won a Mississippi Civil Rights Historical Sites grant for the restoration of Ben Roy’s Service Station. Because Bryant’s Grocery was crumbling and because Ben Roy’s had a covered portico, the Tribbles reasoned, the gas station had become a default lecture site from which tourists could gaze at the grocery and learn their civil rights history. The application put its case for civil rights dollars like this: “It is very likely that the events that transpired at Bryant’s Grocery … were discussed underneath the front canopy of the adjacent service station.” And, with nothing more certain than the possibility that Till’s murder was discussed from the adjacent [End Page 55] building, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History gave $200,000, earmarked for civil rights, to the restoration of Ben Roy’s.
From a visit to Antoine’s in 2016
Someone paid over $2100 for the opportunity to have a party of four dine at Antoine’s during Super Bowl weekend. Now there’s a bill in the Louisiana legislature to stop that kind of thing.
George Jones Jr. carries on his great grandfather’s broommaking tradition on family land: growing and harvesting broomcorn, hunting sticks, hand tying, and winding brooms on 19th century equipment. Over three decades, George has evolved in his craft: blending conventional and new elements, realizing broommaking as an art, and relying on it in difficult times.
Create Birmingham & such great news: thanks to the Mellon Foundation, we are now working with Joe Minter and LaStarsha McGarity, Legacy Museum Conservator and Co-Director at Tuskegee University, to ensure its conservation.
The trailer for Lilly, the story of the Alabama lawsuit leading up to the US Supreme Court and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay act of 2009. The movie is in theaters as of May 9.
You must be logged in to post a comment.