Robinson Kat - Classic Eateries of the Arkansas Delta

Published by American Palate

A Division of The History Press

Charleston, SC 29403

www.historypress.net

Copyright 2014 by Kat Robinson

All rights reserved

Front cover images (clockwise from upper left): Rustic Inn, Blytheville (historic postcard); Dog n Suds, Paragould (Grav Weldon); Josies at the Lockhouse, Batesville (Kat Robinson); Trio Club, Pine Bluff (historic photograph); Order-Matic at Burger Shack, HelenaWest Helena (Kat Robinson); Rhodas Famous Hot Tamales, Lake Village (Grav Weldon).

First published 2014

e-book edition 2014

ISBN 978.1.62585.303.5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014952359

print edition ISBN 978.1.62619.756.5

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For more information on Arkansas foodways, restaurants and itineraries, please visit TieDyeTravels.com.

To Neale and April Carter, and to Leif Hassell

My Greek chorus

And to Kim Williams

The voice of the Arkansas Delta

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Im sitting down to write this foreword on the day after my favorite event of the summerthe Grady Fish Fry in the Hardin pecan grove in Grady in Lincoln County.

For the fifty-ninth time, the Grady Lions Club put on an event that drew people from all over southeast Arkansas, not to mention the fact that it attracted seemingly every politician in the state. It was hot and humid, in contrast to what has been an unseasonably cool summer here in Arkansas, but the crowd seemed bigger than it has been in recent years. The fried catfish, fries, hushpuppies and sliced watermelon were as good as ever. And there in the thick of things, taking photos and talking to people, was Kat Robinson. Kat seems to be everywhere when it comes to chronicling the states food culture.

Like me, Kat doesnt hail from the Arkansas Delta. Also like me, she has an affinity for this historic part of Arkansas, which has been losing population since at least 1950. Theres something that captures your soul when driving those back roads of the Arkansas Delta, and often the attraction is food.

My favorite barbecue in Arkansas? Craigs in DeValls Bluff. My favorite catfish in Arkansas? Murrys, near Hazen. My favorite tamales in Arkansas? Rhodas in Lake Village. My favorite plate lunch in Arkansas? The Pickens Commissary in Pickens, which is just south of Dumas. My favorite place to hang out in a restaurants back room and swap tales with hunting buddies? Genes in Brinkley. I said my favorite summer event is the Grady Fish Fry, so my favorite winter event? The Slovak Oyster Supper in southern Prairie County.

All of these places are in east Arkansas. And Im from southwest Arkansas, though I have roots in the east, since my mother grew up along the lower White River in Des Arc. When it comes to eating, give me the Delta. Give me a lunch at Rhodas Famous Hot Tamales, where Rhoda Adams has been turning out Delta-style tamales for almost four decades. Her husbands aunt asked her to try making tamales, and the rest is history. Rhoda is the mother of fifteen children, only eleven of whom survived to adulthood. She has almost sixty grandchildren and great-grandchildren, some of whom she has never met. Business executives have been known to fly private jets down from Little Rock just to have lunch with Rhoda and then take several dozen tamales home.

Give me a Friday night supper of catfish cooked by Stanley Young at Murrys on U.S. Highway 70 between Hazen and Carlisle. I began patronizing the original Murrys in DeValls Bluff when I was a child. My grandparents lived in Des Arc, and we would often make the short road trip from the Prairie County seat in the north to the Prairie County seat in the south in order to consume mounds of catfish at Murrys or barbecue at Craigs.

When I was in my twenties, there were times when I would load up the car with hungry friends for a trip to DeValls Bluff. We would have a pork sandwich at Craigs (with medium sauce, since the hot sauce is a bit too hot for my taste) for an appetizer and then drive over to Murrys for catfish. I miss that rabbit warren of trailers that housed the original location, though I always had the feeling when eating there that a grease fire in the kitchen would quickly incinerate us all. While the current location doesnt have the ambiance of the old place, the food is as good as ever, maybe better. And Becky Young is the best hostess youll find anywhere.

Give me a plate of barbecue at any number of places in the Delta, the strongest barbecue area of a good barbecue state. The barbecue is pork here (beef has crept over from Texas into parts of southwest Arkansas), though the sauces vary from place to place. At Craigs, youll walk into the ramshackle building and immediately be asked if you want your barbecue sauce mild, medium or hot. The crowd is a mixture of locals, hunters from Little Rock and Memphis when its duck season and those who were wise enough to get off crowded Interstate 40 and find their way to DeValls Bluff.

In Marianna, meanwhile, Jones Bar-B-Q Diner, the winner of the James Beard Foundations American Classics Award, can be found in an old house in a residential area. Jones has been around since at least the early 1900s. While its hard to determine the exact year it opened, there are some historians who believe its the oldest continuously operated black-owned restaurant in the South.

Up in the far northeast part of the state, youll find five or six good barbecue joints in Blytheville, a fact that led me to proclaim it the Barbecue Capital of Arkansas.

Yes, the Delta is a place apart. To me, the Grady Fish Fry represents all that is good about the Deltaa sense of history, community, continuity and place. Good friends, good food and helping others.

I checked my old calendars and was able to determine that this was the eighteenth time in the past nineteen years that Ive been in Grady on the third Thursday in August. The only fish fry I missed during that stretch was a decade ago. I was Governor Mike Huckabees representative on the board of the Delta Regional Authority (DRA) at the time, and we were interviewing candidates in a Memphis hotel that day for the job of DRA chief operating officer.

The fish fry is like something out of a movie about the Souththe convicts in their prison whites waiting tables, the prison band playing, the politicians making the rounds. If you have any doubt that the South still lives, all you have to do is show up at Ned Hardins pecan grove on the third Thursday night in August one year, and all doubts will be erased. They start serving the fish at 4:00 p.m. and stop at 8:00 p.m. In between, hundreds of people make their way through the lines, loading their paper plates and watching the amazing hushpuppy machine (constructed years ago from salvaged farm equipment) drop batter into the hot grease, two hushpuppies at a time.

Kat has done a real service by capturing so many Delta restaurants, events and traditions, many of which likely wont exist a decade from now. The economic trends, unfortunately, are working against these places. I see nothing on the horizon that leads me to believe that the population shift in this state from the east and the south to the north and the west will slow anytime soon. Most Delta counties have been losing population since the end of World War II, when the mechanization of agriculture meant that thousands of sharecroppers and tenant farmers were no longer required. Monroe County, which includes Brinkley and Clarendon, lost a larger percentage of its population between the 2000 census and the 2010 census than any county in Arkansas20.5 percent. This trend is not confined to the Arkansas Delta, mind you. Rural America now accounts for just 16.0 percent of the nations population.