Traveling Home To A Traditional Part Of East Tennessee
No matter where we travel, where we go or what we experience, we should never lose our roots.
Sometimes, it’s necessary to get back in touch with your heritage, even in a small way, to keep alive the history than can be buried deep within your soul.
And that’s just what I did when I returned to East Tennessee from my Southern California residence to spend the Christmas holidays with my family. Early one frosty mornin’, I joined my dad and a couple of his “Monday morning breakfast” pals at an old-fashioned Southern diner.
“We call this a redneck diner,” one of my dad’s friends said only half jokingly as we walked through the door of the Lamp Post (two words!) Restaurant along U.S. 411 highway in Madisonville, TN, which is outside of Knoxville. “You’re supposed to wear a ballcap to be able to eat here.”
Like many of these places, there’s not much to it. There’s a counter, behind which a cook continually makes a tapping sound by hitting the side of the large metal spatula against the metal grill.
There’s a few booths and some years ago an additional room was added, which has a fake fireplace and a number of Vietnam-era POW and military signs framed on the walls. You get the feeling that, during busier times, the parking lot is full of pickup trucks with gun racks and deers strapped to the hood.
The menu is comprised of the diner basics, which is to say comfort food. And the prices are ridiculous. A biscuit costs just 95 cents, omelets are $5.75 and a country ham steak dinner is $7.50.
There are also – again typically – things I would never eat. One such item is chicken livers. I may be Southern, but my roots only go so far south.
I’m not much of a breakfast person, so I had just the country ham biscuit ($1.99). The ham was good and salty like country ham should be, and the biscuit was simple but delicious. I know it was made from scratch in the back of the kitchen.
It’s tough to get really good biscuits in California. In fact, only a couple of breakfast places even have them on the menu; your typical choices are toast and fruit. If you do find biscuits, most of the time they are dry and crumbly.
Biscuits are not the sole reason to get back in touch with one’s Southern soul, but they are a pretty good place to start, if you ask me.
My only regret is that the waitress did not call us “hun,” as in short for “honey.” I guess they don’t do that when they pretty much know all their customers. Still, it would have been sort of like a little gravy on my biscuit.
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