Do We Have Good Places to Eat in Gate City?

Over the weekend someone who'd grown up in Gate City, but lived in a nearby town as an adult, gave me a shock. "Apart from McDonalds Gate City doesn't have anywhere to eat any more, do they, except Taco Bell?"

Well.

As an alternative to McDonalds, in the same shopping plaza, there's that Subway where a sponsor of this web site, long dead, used to take me for lunch and discussions of bill reading strategy. I loved that dear old man in a niecely way, and haven't gone in there often without him. I think Subway is too much a big chain, not willing enough to let people forego the sauce and have more cucumber and tomato in their salad, but they used to do good gluten-free salads. 

Now in my personal opinion, our best restaurant--the all-around winner--is technically outside of town, but it's not in any other town and it gets its mail through Gate City. For quality and variety of food, cleanliness of building, period charm and atmosphere, fairness of prices, and a credible attempt at a Real Salad Bar, you drive briskly through Gate City and keep going west till you come to the Hob Nob diner out on Route 58. They used to grill the meat to your taste and have no problem serving just the meat and the veg on a plate. The menu had a nice selection of sandwiches from hamburgers to ostrich meat, side dishes including chili and corn bread, the salad bar, pie and ice cream and milkshakes, and juice as an alternative to soda pop or water. (They served tap water, but tourists used to think it must have been bottled because our local tap water doesn't taste bad--and has, in fact, been filtered and bottled.) They even hired carhops in summer--cute little teenagers who scampered around the parking lot serving customers in the convenience of their cars. Everything was straight out of the 1950s except the ostrich meat (vintage 1970), salad bar (1980), and, unfortunately, the prices. The prices were contemporary, but reasonable. That was before COVID. I've not actually been there post-COVID. That's a hint.

But if you're not driving and want to eat right in the heart of town, as it might be while you're dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles, court, or some county office business, there are options.

Long John Silver's Seafood Shop was trendy in the 1970s. Meh. I have fond memories of eating there with a friend, also now dead. He was not much older than I and my feelings toward him were not niecely. That was before I went gluten-free. Just about everything on that chain restaurant's menu could and should have been gluten-free. Nothing, except the drinks, was gluten-free. Can't fix stupid. I've heard the restaurant's gone, or going, out of business. No loss. 

Hardee's...urgh ick...if they hadn't formed a solid clique of people who actually call themselves a club and get free meal tickets in the mail, that place would have died a long time ago. It's been long enough that I can laugh about it now...When I met the man known to this web site as my Significant Other, about twenty years ago, he asked, in the way of small talk, "What do you do?" I said, "I just got back in town and I'm looking for odd jobs." He said, "I can get you jobs...in construction!" It was a dare; he could tell that what I meant by odd jobs were things like teaching, typing, computer-ing, storekeeping, or tour-guiding. I said, "Yer on." So I signed on with a crew who were remodelling a house in Lee County. It was a delightful job. One day, I forget now why we were in Gate City early in the day, I was riding to or from work with the boss. He tried to maintain good relationships with all the other business owners in Gate City; he ate at all the restaurants in turn when he was in town. That day he wanted to eat at Hardee's. So I went in with him, looked at the menu, saw all the versions of meat and bread on it, and asked if they could do a sandwich without the bread, just put the meat and veg on a plate. They did. It wasn't great; it wasn't bad. I thought no more of it but the next time the boss was in Hardee's, he said, the help had said nasty things about being asked to prepare something different from what they always did prepare, by hand. They didn't want me to come back, he said. So then a few weeks later some other friend or relative wanted to use one of those free coupons at Hardee's. I looked at the menu. They were now advertising that they did special gluten-free meals without bread--for twice the price of the same meat and veg in the sandwich. I am not making this up. I seriously recommend that, while walking past Hardee's, all visitors make sure to spit ostentatiously on the pavement. But the place is still there. 

It should probably be required by law: Before opening a restaurant, the owner must demonstrate the ability to cook and serve anything on the menu "free from" any of its regular ingredients. And thank the customer for letting person try. Food bullies should not be allowed even to eat in restaurants.

Taco Bell. What can one say? Taco Bell is writer-friendly; there's actually a literary magazine for people who eat there to use the Internet, the Taco Bell Quarterly. Before glyphosate I liked the food, so now I expect I'd like the food again. Still...it's a big-chain restaurant sitting on the site of a delightful little old house-made-into-a-shop, which I miss. 

You're on Kane Street, passing the Hardee's and Taco Bell, Long John Silver's, Pizza Plus--I'm not sure about the status of Pizza Plus. All they used to offer were combinations of bread and cheese with various meats and vegetables on top. Some of my young relatives liked Pizza Plus and I nibbled on cheese-free bread sticks in there a few times. They had nothing to offer the gluten-free so I can't say I'l miss them if they're gone.

Then you come to a structure that looks like some sort of art, a building-sized concrete sculpture of a big carry-out box--in glen plaid?--with a hot dog, a hamburger, and a box of fries on it. It is an actual building. It's not a restaurant open to the public, but cars roll around it, order fast food on one side, pick up fast food on the other side, and park somewhere nearby while people eat. This is Pal's Restaurant, a locally owned chain. The menu is straight out of the 1950s. The hot dogs, hamburgers, fries, chili, shakes, and sodas are excellent if you like that sort of thing.

If you like that sort of thing but prefer to sit down while you eat it, on the other side of the street is the Campus Drive-In. It's not actually on the high school campus; high schools and colleges were a trendy decorating theme in the 1950s. My opinion is that Pal's and the Hob Nob do 1950s fast food better, but the Campus Drive-In is a local landmark and has its devotees.

Anyway, keep walking; better restaurants are ahead of you. There is a little place that used to be a gas station, on your right, just below the intersection with Jackson Street. They advertise barbecued pork as a specialty. They do other things. I've never gone inside the place but one afternoon, a few years ago, a friend who was a local business booster directed a friend of hers to fill a take-out box with a selection of chicken and vegetable dishes, take it to me, and get a verdict. They passed. 

If you keep walking, on the corner above the intersection of Kane and Jackson Streets you'll see what is now the Maple Tree Cafe. It's a sort of post-COVID makeover of what used to be the Roberts Family Bakery & Cafe where I used to write. If you're in town to meet with your lawyer, and your case does not involve pleading extreme poverty, the Cafe is a good place to have coffee and a snack. The post-COVID influence on the decor started out by building in more healthy distance by having a mini-bookstore in the cafe. Mini-mini...Booksellers are, traditionally, gentlemen and -women. We naturally prefer that you buy books from us but, if another bookseller has a book you want, we'll direct you to per store. 

Across the street is a murky place that attempts to appeal to Northern tourists with an Italian-type name (the place is owned by a woman with an English-type name), dim lighting, and cleaning-fluid-based beverages. For about twenty years those who want to attract more money have been saying that what Gate City needs is a place where alcohol cravers can sit down and drink alcohol with food. I've been saying that we need that almost as badly as we need another episode where a drunk driver runs over a Sunday School picnic. Italian food that requires the look of a Mafia den is probably dreadful. Good Italian food can be enjoyed stone-cold sober in broad daylight.

There is, however, a decent little Mexican place, further up Jackson Street, closer to the courthouse. It's changed hands a few times but I think it's still owned by real Mexicans. Food is cooked fresh, reasonably authentic, with a reasonable range of heat, and sold at quite good prices for that quality of restaurant food. They offer an authentic selection of Mexican cervezas and vinos. 

I, like most people in Gate City, don't really do restaurants. They're not an authentic part of our cultural heritage. Our ancestors raised most of their food on their own farms and cooked and ate it in their own 

homes. When they got tired of their own cooking, they visited friends and relatives and ate food cooked their way. The quality of locally produced food as served by local farmers or their children, even if they use the really old traditional recipes that over-cook, over-salt, and over-grease food, is much, much better than 1950s fast food. So who even needs restaurants, except, as a male client said to me a few years ago, as a place where people of different genders, who are married to other people, can talk at length and everyone can see that all they're doing is talking about business. And of course everyone knows that that tells us nothing about what they do next as they drive off, probably in separate cars, possibly to a motel in Kingsport. And there's a movement in the Baptist church these days for men to practice moral rectitude by not going to lunch alone with women, because of the possibility of going somewhere else after lunch. So we probably don't need any restaurants. 

But we have them. Lots of people like to cook, have been told they could open a restaurant, have opened one, and have found themselves fighting like cornered rats to keep the places open. Surely, they tell themselves, there must be some way to make their dream of earning a living by cooking pay...

So, back in the 1960s, the restaurant owners of then kicked, screamed, clawed, and bit when Route 23 was being rammed through the mountains. It would make it easy for people just to roll on into Kingsport and never shop or eat in Gate City, they wailed. 

(Route 23 is still here. Most of the restaurant owners of then had retired from thirty or forty years of working and saving to open their restaurants, and aren't even remembered any more, though I do remember vividly where the Mill House and Liberty Bell restaurants used to be. When I rented a store space on Jackson Street, in between two later owners' use of it, that store space was where the Mill House used to be. (I had lunch in the Mill House, the first time I ever ate lunch in a restaurant alone, on grade eight's "career day." I don't remember what I ate.) I remember when most of the restaurants that now exist came to town. The Campus Drive-In and the Hob Nob have been around longer than I have. Pal's existed before I was born, in Kingsport, but opened the branches in the giant glen plaid boxes only in the 1980s.)

Then in 1980 the first effort was made to shut down the Friday Market. People were coming to town to trade there and were ignoring the restaurants and the regular stores, the restaurant owners of then screamed. The market was declared closed. People announced a real boycott of Gate City's restaurants and regular stores. The market reopened in time for strawberries to be sold.

Nobody messed with the Friday Market again during the next forty years, but while writing in the Cafe I learned that the restaurant owners still resented it. They wanted something else to be done with the space, something good enough to make people forget the Friday Market. 

Hello? Gate City is a farm and market town. It made an heroic effort to be a factory town, a hundred years ago, and you can still see where one of the factories used to be, but they're all long gone. If and whenever the Friday Market goes, I said, Gate City will become...not quite so much of an historical curiosity as Bray, because we'll still have the courthouse with the adjacent law offices, but similar to Bray. Which is still an interesting place on a tourist's itinerary, but which will never be mistaken for an actual town.

COVID happened. Friday Market traffic dropped. Efforts to recover from COVID began. The Weber City Fire Department, which is technically in a different town but I've never seen a tourist notice the difference, bought a shopping plaza and opened a bigger farm-and-flea market. Friday Market vendors moved. (Except for me, of course. I thought seriously about renting a place in Weber City to store my merchandise, but nobody really seemed to need the money and in any case the people I knew who had suitable places weren't what you could call close to the market, at least not in terms of carrying unsold merchandise after six or eight hours in the sun.) 

The restaurant owners, and "boutique-y" store owners, pounced. Mrs. Roberts, of the Cafe, had gone to a "splash park" in Tennessee with her grandchildren and thought that would be a wonderful way to fill up the space where our own Friday Market belonged. In town council meetings people demanded that a couple of food trucks that had started rolling around town be subjected to extra licensing fees, to make sure they weren't at any possible financial advantage over the restaurant owners. I've even heard wild talk about free drinks or free children's meals being offered to splash park patrons to entice them into our restaurants. 

Well, y'know what? I had already explained to Mrs. Roberts, at length and in detail, why attacking the Friday Market was just wrong, unbefitting a good Carson Republican like herself, and also doomed. I had, meanwhile, been working on other plans. An open-air market is not actually good for books. I think Gate City needs its Friday Market, and will have its Friday Market. I always had thought I, personally, needed a different kind of venue. People had said "If you don't want to take out a loan and make a big investment, just take a few books into Friday Market," and when better alternatives were not available I did, but I never once intended to stay there for long. 

When Mrs. Roberts had bought, and rented to me, the space where the Mill House Restaurant used to be, she said, "You'll find out"...what she meant was why I wouldn't make money there, although as it turned out I did. Now I say to her, "You'll find out." The splash park will be fun for a year or two. It will be little used, since local people don't need to go into town and splash in the same water other people are using when we want to cool off. It will lose money. The expensive gadgets will break down. The town council will end up reopening the Friday Market as one of several steps it will be taking to pay for the splash park. It will all cost me absolutely nothing, and I hope those who will be involved with it will enjoy it.

I think Providence has actually provided them with an opportunity for a safe and salutary learning experience, while most of the people who were earning significant parts of their incomes in the Friday Market have an opportunity to work in a bigger market with more traffic.

But if the splash park won't boost Gate City's restaurants very far, what will?

"Try to keep the customers they've got," the out-of-towner said. "That convenience store" (that we had passed) "is next to where the power company's headquarters used to be. In the morning you used to see all the company trucks stop at that store while the men went in for coffee. Now, of course, APCo has moved their headquarters to Kingsport. But those men don't stop there any more for coffee even when they're in town."

"They can get coffee closer to their headquarters in Kingsport?" I guessed.

"They go to a gas station in Weber City. Because X never liked cleaning the bathrooms. When the COVID mess started, she was the first to ask, 'Can we close the bathrooms?' They kept the bathrooms open but X wanted to keep them locked in the morning and make people ask for a key. Wanted to lock them up, a few hours ahead of closing time, after the last cleaning and not give people the key. I've seen her not let old people who could hardly walk, even after they had walked all the way to the bathroom and then back to the counter, into the bathrooms. Well, maybe they would have left a mess in the bathroom. Maybe they went out and made a mess in the parking lot. And you know they would not come back. Probably not come back to other places in Gate City, either."

"I have never minded asking for a restroom key," I said, "but I know some people do."

"Those linemen wouldn't ask a young lady about anything like that. And what they do, first thing in the morning, is go to the bathroom, wash their hands, then get their coffee and snacks for breakfast. So X just got rid of them, and who knows how many other customers. Now she complains because traffic is slowing down at the store."

"That is not the only problem that store has," I observed. "Maybe they needed to do some remodelling, but they went too far. They've tried to become 'upscale.' A convenience store is by nature downscale, and I don't see anybody actually buying the fancy snacks they have put in place of the old favorite junk food people looked for. I don't see people paying the 20 to 50 percent surcharge they've put on to all the old favorite convenience things they still sell, either." 

We got into quite a discussion of things some stores and restaurants in Gate City could try if they wanted to keep the customers they have.

1. Always have a restroom open to the public. Unless there is a specific temporary need to keep undesirable persons out of the restroom, let it be locked only when it's in use.

2. If you want to be a storekeeper, you have to sweep and mop the floor all day because people are too lazy to wipe their feet, and clean the bathroom when men leave spots on the seat and/or the floor, and put things back on the shelves where slobs fail to put them back in their places, AND say "Thank you, Sir" and "Thank you, Ma'am" whenever people pay for things. Deal with it. 

3. Absolutely no gossip. People drive to Kingsport to buy things even when the same things are available at a better price in Gate City, just to avoid seeing people who they know will gossip about them after they've left the store. 

4. Respect and appreciate all the customers--especially the ones who are poor, or old, or confused, or funny-looking. Some of these businesses have employees who've talked back to me because I'm not rich or because I walked into town rather than driving. B'y h...I can at least give them what they've paid for. Some people can't. What store employees need to know is that comfortably retired gentlemen like this former resident of our town, and arguably overeducated idle writers like myself, and our rich friends from the city, also notice things like, say, a certain bleach-blonde Lee County wench calling one of my former teachers, who happened to have grown old while Black, "honey" instead of "Ma'am." We notice. And we want to pull every yellow hair out of your head by its black or white roots. And we for sure do not want to support your store. That kind of thing has in fact been mentioned when I've asked rich friends from Washington to visit Gate City and they've declined.

You see somebody wandering around like a person who needs thick glasses and has misplaced the said glasses, muttering to himself, bumping into things, obviously no more aware that the prison pants fad is over than that it ever existed, but just not fitting into his clothes in the normal way, and finally stumbling into the bathroom, just too late by the look and smell of things...his name is "Sir" to you. And you thank him when he pays for a cup of coffee. And you shut your wretched yap-hole after he leaves, and keep it shut during and after the thorough cleaning the bathroom requires. Because in a place like Gate City you know that that wretched creature is somebody's grandfather, and he probably used to be a teacher or fire fighter or some such thing, too. Extreme respect.

5. In theory it's nice if you happen to "like" a customer. In reality it's not appropriate. The United States is a democratic republic where you, the store employee,  are considered the social equal of anyone else who is working for the minimum hourly wage at your age. At school you can sit beside people who have professional skills and own their own businesses. In social settings you can eat or play sports or watch birds with people who may even be rich. Your job, however, is not a social setting. On your job you need to focus on your work and not waste mental energy on emotional feelings about customers. Some customers, myself for one, don't want to receive special favors or attentions in a place of business. The ideal is not that you "like" customers, but that you wait on all customers, whether you "like" them or not, with equal honesty and civility. 

6. So, don't bother your head about who is buying what and why and for whom. If you think a product is bad, which is what I think about cleaning-fluid-based beverages, you shouldn't sell it. If you sell it, don't ask questions about people who are trying to help your business by buying it.

7. If you don't have wheelchair-using customers, hire a wheelchair consultant to show you why, and fix the problem right away. Wheelchair users should be able to understand that older stores have oldfashioned charm that should not be lost, even when it involves stairs...and store employees should be working to equalize the situation. If your store has lovely historic staircases and some of your customers love shopping on the upstairs and downstairs levels, for example, you might make those levels virtually available to wheelchair users via videos they can watch on the street level, sending you up or down to bring out whatever interests them for inspection.

8. Discrimination is not your friend. We are not a big enough town that anyone should even want to start excluding anyone else. "Oh, but isn't it nice to keep a store or a row or a whole neighborhood 'upscale' so that nobody really minds paying a little more...?" No. It is not. The nature of a business does tend to attract some types of people more than others. Bookstores don't attract a lot of coal miners but a good bookstore should be a place where a determined coal miner can educate himself to qualify for a different kind of job. A good hardware store should be a place where a rich lady feels secure enough to walk in and ask for PVC pipe, or a plumber's tool, or a plumber.  And a good town is walkable enough that, if people ride into town in a car and need to leave that car at the mechanic's garage for a few hours, they can still visit all the little "boutique" shops they wanted to visit.

9. Asking for protection from competing entrepreneurs is an indication that you don't deserve it. From the downtown merchants who feared competition from the Friday Market I heard, "But an open-air market attracts a different kind of people...they don't walk around town..." This is false. I worked the Friday Market, and I know. People buy food from a food truck rather than a big-chain restaurant because they don't like the big chains. They buy food from a food truck rather than a real, locally owned restaurant because the food truck owner has made sure to offer better deals on something or other. If you panic, "That food truck is going to destroy my business," you're locking into refusal to meet your customers where they are and offer them an equally good deal, so you can't keep a loyal customer base and probably won't keep a business. Getting rid of a modest, friendly, lovable Mennonite bakery truck will attract the attention of an unscrupulous foreign-owned ethnic restaurant chain, which will bury you. If you accept your restaurant's limitations and offer good deals on good food, on the other hand, you'll keep a loyal customer base. The food truck will take a few sales because it's offering something new and different, but then after a while your customers will want to see you and eat your food again. The food truck will probably build up a route that brings it here only weekly, or fortnightly, so there'll be business for all. 

10. No matter how righteous you feel about losing a customer, the bottom line is that Gate City loses customers because too many of us would rather feel righteous about losing customers than try to see their point of view and keep customers. Any customer you lose has relatives. Even if those relatives see your point of view at the time, they'll see the ex-customer's point of view, too. A lot of people stopped eating at Hardee's after that little display of stupidity on the menu. If you want customers, instead of going into ego defense mode about a request that you do something differently, take pride in being able to accommodate every customer's tastes or needs. Find topics other than religion or politics to talk about with people who disagree with you, too. And make peace with the grandchildren of your least favorite primary school teacher.