Meat and Three in Tennessee

Do you know there is a website (www.meatandthree.com) that extols the virtues of that southern phenomenon they call a “meat ‘n three”? Well this website refers to a meat and three as “a place that serves old-fashioned, down-home cooking like Grandma or Mom used to make.” Now you know me, I’m almost always willing to take the long road home if it I think there is a chance for a good meal. But last Thursday I had to hotfoot it straight up the interstate from Nashville so I could make it home in time for Addy’s 3rd grade school play. 

Just about three stomach rumbles south of the Kentucky line, an intriguing sign showed up across the road from the lotto, liquor and fireworks place I stopped for gas. It contained a magical combination of words and phrases: “Exit 123 BBQ, Home Cooking and Catering” (name changed to avoid future litigation). Now normally I would have sense enough to steer clear of a restaurant that included an interstate highway exit number its name, but I was so hungry that I had begun to pick two week old bits of broken pretzel out of the cracks in the seat.

Because of the Mid-South’s recent ice storm, the lot was jammed with tree trimming trucks from somewhere in Ohio; I thought this could be a good sign. Maybe not. Two feet in the door and I wanted to turn and run. The place looked clean, but it had an almost overwhelming perfume of Pine-Sol, fried fish and cigarette smoke. Too late, smiling Miss Daisy at the register had already made eye contact and my Midwestern upbringing overcame my natural fight or flight response. I began to get that feeling you have when you've just swallowed a bad oyster – not sick yet, but knowing it could be a long night.

It was a big threadbare room with a folding vinyl curtain covering a nook with long tables along one side so the local “Benevolent order of Muskrats” could have their Monday-at-noon meetings in private. The walls had been scrubbed so many times that the paint was worn off of everywhere a greasy hand might have landed since they re-decorated just before Nixon visited town in 1971.

The huge dripping salad bar nicely separated the smoking and non-smoking areas. Its rusty pile of iceberg lettuce effectively absorbed the odor of chainsaw fuel from the large group of hard smoking, itinerant tree trimmers watching "ultimate kick-boxing" on 5 overhead TV’s. But the sound of it’s chugging compressor could not overcome the trimmer’s “outside voices” as the chatted up the crews that had invaded other area joints on their radio phones. 

Note to self… do not take food recommendations from a waitperson that has to work halfway down the menu just to find an item that has not somehow left her psychically scarred. “Oh no, I don’t eat catfish their faces remind me of my aunt Shirley. Chicken and dumplings – that’s all I could eat after my gallbladder surgery, pepper steak – my Dad butchered my pet steer to make a big batch of it when I was a kid, red beans – that’s all my ex-husband would eat, collard greens…”I should have just gotten up and walked around the room to see what everyone else was having.

It was all downhill from there. I let her talk me into a heap of mediocre barbecue (greasy slabs of un-smoked, gray-steamed ribs barely browned under the broiler) with a full complement of beige to slate colored side dishes. Since when are Jell-O or macaroni and cheese a vegetable? I think it just has to be green Jell-O.

Maybe it was some leftover “War of Northern Aggression” tactic to lure Yankees of off the interstate and make then too sick too fight, but I knew it was only a matter of time – nobody bats a thousand.