 |
 |
Staff Picks
Best Biscuit
Rankin’s
I come by my biscuit desires genetically. Through both nature and nurture, my father has instilled in me a honed taste for those Southern breakfast baked goods of flour, butter and milk. He likes them slathered in apple butter, soaked with blackberry juice or drizzled with the drippings from baked apples. I like them fluffy and flaky, baked until the top is the doe-colored, split to reveal the steaming innards that will melt a pat of real butter and fruit jam. For my money, Rankin makes the best biscuit in town. Not greasy like a fast-food offering or as powdery as some other Southern-style diners, Rankin’s biscuits find perfection by landing somewhere between the extremes. It’s the perfect tool for pushing the last of those fried taters onto your fork or mopping up the leavings of country ham. And if you were of a mind, it might even hold a sandwich-style layer of scrambled egg and bacon. However you doctor them, Rankin’s biscuits—in fact, their breakfasts altogether—are perfect examples of what many bakers attempt but few achieve. I might settle for less in a pinch, but I always think of the Rankin’s as the gold standard of biscuits. And if there’s lard in the recipe, I don’t want to know.
(Paige M. Travis)
 Best Reason to Jump off the Vegetarian Bandwagon
Tortilla Mac
When Tortilla Mac opened last year in a tiny, bright red trailer on the corner of State Street and Union, the tacqueria was almost immediately overwhelmed with more lunch traffic than it could handle. The joint was jumpin’ for delicious reasons, and was forced to relocate to a larger space down the street to accommodate its growing fan base. But don’t be intimidated by the sometimes-lengthy line in its new Gay Street digs; owner Harold McLean has got it down to a science, conducting the old-style lunch line with a hustle-and-bustle reminiscent of a Chinatown restaurant in the Big Apple. In terms of selection, Harold and his crack team of burrito artists do offer a wide array of vegetarian items, but the carnivorous fare is what justifies scrapping with the downtown-parking law dawgs and, for some, a lengthier walk. The chipotle pork taco served “pig style,” smothered with jalapeño coleslaw, pico de gallo and corn salsa, pummels any of the Tex-Mex, strip mall offerings; each tasty ingredient fuses into a singular flavor. (For the poseur vegetarians—those of you who don’t count fish as meat—the fish taco is equally splendid with the same presentation.) And, if they’re not too busy and you ask nicely, have them fry a soft flour tortilla into a flaky hard-shell delight.
(Clint Casey)
Best Window Shopping
Reruns
The mannequins don’t change every day, but it doesn’t hurt to check. Through two lengths of windows, the faceless figures point toward Market Square and Union Avenue wearing stylishly and creatively assembled clothes from the stock inside Reruns, the consignment store that’s been tempting women to shop before, after and during work for 18 years now. In early spring the pliable plastic models wore colorful knee-length dresses, their shoulders draped with umbrellas. In other seasons their fashionably thin forms have borne cinematic black and white, combinations of brown and blue, an array of denim skirts and examples of the most au current shades of pink. To view the display window at Reruns is to capture a moment in an ever-changing life-size catalog, one that’s more daring than any mall store—and definitely more inspiring for your own style. To tear a page from their fashion sense, just step inside and see if that model is wearing your size. But don’t wait too long before responding to temptation: those mannequins change their clothes more often than a fickle teenager, and more than one window shopper might have her eye on that outfit that’s calling your name.
(Paige M. Travis)
Best Real Variety Store
Emery 5 & 10
Call it the rectification of names. It happens every year in a bunch of "Best of" categories. The winner isn't what the category describes. This year, one of the most egregious misnomers is in the variety store ballot line, where Target won. Hey, Target is a great store, a top flight chain of... what? It has variety, but so do Wal-Mart and Kmart and some others like that. It's a discount department store, not a variety store, which is a much narrower and smaller genre of retailer. Emery 5 & 10 was known as a dime store when it opened its first doors downtown in 1927. Now, the survivor on Chapman Highway at Moody Avenue is a "variety store," its garrulous owner, Ron Emery, the founder's grandson, insists. And he's right. There are other variety stores in town. J's Mega Mart at 417 S. Gay St. comes to mind quickly. Dollar General and Family Dollar stores come close to fitting the name. So does Big Lots, although the latter is too big and brassy and devoted in large measure to merchandise closeouts.Emery 5 & 10 is the variety store to beat all, even though it's morphing into something more than the old-style variety store. You can rent a motorized lawn aerator there. Or a floor sander. Or a wall sander!Besides the rental component, it crams into its 7,000 square feet soaps, candles, toys, costume jewelry, purses, bags, cards and notepaper, area rugs, kitchen gadgets, imported and domestic garden tools, paints and stains, screws, fasteners and assorted hardware, plumbing and electric supplies, hand tools, and "the best kites in town," Emery says, and then he goes about proving it if you have the interest...and the patience. He sells custom thongs, for chrissakes, bearing personalized photos or sorority Greek lettering on their frontal parts. Now, that's variety. If the front window display hoard looks cluttered because it contains a garden gate strung with fairy lights and a couple of 105 mm howitzer cartridge cases, don't be put off. Variety is as variety does. Emery says it's becoming a "destination." Last year, he says, three bus tours made it a stop in Knoxville, along with such other historic landmarks as the Blount Mansion and the Mabry-Hazen House. He's proud of that, and of his goods. He oughtta be.J's downtown store deserves further mention, because the Korean-American-owned Mega Mart exists in the variety store spirit, with a modicum of groceries, cleaning supplies, slippers and an assortment of novelties, sundries and other non-essentials, all set off by a vast array of wigs, falls and hair-styling stuff, cosmetics, stockings, teddies, hats and durags, du-rags, or doorags. It's spelled several different ways on the product labels—headgear for the hyper-hip, you know. J's qualifies. It's a variety store in the tightest sense of the breed, where Target just doesn’t fit. See for yourselves.
(Barry Henderson)
Best Unpredictable Eerie Nocturnal Scene
Industrial Navigation
It might happen any time of night: 10 p.m., midnight, four in the morning. You first notice a low moan and a weird glow from the direction of the river. Then, shifting back and forth like a furtive glance, a huge spotlight. The moaning grows louder, and louder still. Then it appears, impossibly big, long and black, at a bend in the river. Things aren't clear. It looks like a gigantic Nazi sub with a conning tower toward the back. In the dark it looms large, and larger. It's gigantic. It becomes your entire reality. The bright beam shifts suddenly, suspiciously. When it falls on you, as it will if you're standing on the riverbank, it's suddenly daylight. But then it leaves you suddenly in the dark, and still the immense thing moves, at an unremitting crawl. As its searchlight passes, you see men like tiny soldiers in yellow windows. For once, you recognize the conning tower as a towboat. And you convince yourself that the menacing hulk is one of the several industrial towboats that regularly make the trek from Forks of the River back down the Tennessee to Chattanooga and Alabama, pushing its multi-barge load like a backwards train. It may be at its most dramatic at Sequoyah Park, not only because it's darker than the other places where you see barges occasionally, but because it's also said to be the most dangerous spot for large barges on the whole Tennessee River, with its island hazard, and shallows, and hairpin curve. Sometimes, maybe once or twice a year, it stops abruptly, because it's stuck in the silty bottom. That's when its searchlight begins spinning wildly, frantically, searching the banks as if for some means of escape. It pans the grassy banks, and you instinctively duck, like a fugitive POW. If it's still there at daylight, and it sometimes is, it seems somehow smaller, plainer, meeker. It's just a barge tow, waiting for a lucky shift in the muddy bottom.
(Jack Neely)
Best Restaurant to Close the Book on a Work Week
Pasta Trio
You work harder than anyone in the whole office, and know your company would fall to shambles the moment you decide to leave for greener pastures. And there are few better ways to wind down from a week of office politics and boorish clients than by sampling the Italian fare with a few friends at Pasta Trio. Its cozy atmosphere and soft lighting provide an escape from the daily grind and an alternative to the excruciatingly perky restaurants that plague West Knoxville like locusts. Recently, Pasta Trio actually listened to customer requests and revamped its entire menu, spinning popular nightly specials into standard offerings. So the next time Uncle Tony comes over from Italy, skip the bottomless breadsticks and salad bowl in favor of an Old City restaurant’s rich interpretations of classic ethnic cuisine.
(Clint Casey)
Best Deli/Lunch Spot/Place to Eat Alone that Never Wins
Frussies
Why not? Maybe it's because it's tucked away in South Knoxville at 133 E. Moody Ave. Maybe because it doesn't have a big sign or much drive-by appeal, lost as it is in a tiny strip mall.But Frussie's has great food in an urbane atmosphere. People who lunch there regularly brag on owner James Dicks' preparations and their presentation. He bakes all of his own breads, sub rolls, cakes and cookies. He serves a full menu of hot and cold deli sandwiches, from roast pork to Reubens. He makes his own everything, including the salads and dessert items. He slips a little square of zucchini bread or banana bread into each lunch. And it’s all good eats. Excellent, really. Oh, and the name is a contraction of fussy and frog that relates to a little stuffed amphibian that was a gift to Dicks from his wife. But that's another story. Let's just hear it for Frussie's lunches this time.
(Barry Henderson)
April 29, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 18
© 2004 Metro Pulse
|
|
