Feature article
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Tipton's Café carries on hamburger history
By Fred Sauceman
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| Tipton's is short on space but long on history. Photo by Larry Smith. |
My grandfather shook the doorknob at Linton’s Café. If it resisted like a locked door should, he’d proceed to the next address. Before alarm systems and sensor lights, that’s what policemen did. As Night Chief in Greeneville, Tennessee, from the 1920s through the ’50s, William F. Royall crisscrossed Main and Depot, making sure the contents of jewelry stores, movie theatres, and soda fountains were secure, the old way, hand to metal.
The entire police force then consisted of three people, Chief Marion Laughters, Ira “Littlebritches” Biddle, and my grandfather, the only person on duty between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. The peace was kept by one man and his German Police dog, who walked the beat with him and barked at disturbances down dark alleys.
Had my grandfather the luxury of law school, he likely would have hung out a shingle downtown. With no college training at all, he knew the legal structure well enough to present cases and dispose of them himself. Most of the time, unless the case was unusual, the city attorney didn’t even bother to enter the courtroom.
At 6’ 2” and ramrod straight, Billy Royall, a former railroad telegrapher, cut a memorable figure on the streets of this tobacco town. So did Linton and Gladys Boswell. One look at them and you knew they relished their own cooking.
Their brick-fronted café began as a tin shop, operated by the Chamberlain family, in 1925. For awhile, a portion of the building was devoted to snips and shaves, until the barbers shelved their clippers, stored away their razor straps, and packed off for the European and Pacific theaters when the U.S. entered World War II.
My grandfather would pull a nickel out of his brushed dress blues to buy a Linton’s hamburger, with lettuce and tomato, or a dime for one with a smothering of Gladys’ homemade coleslaw. Being a frugal cook schooled in Great Depression thriftiness, Gladys always stretched her ground beef with a little bread. Not only did it make the meat go farther and keep the price down, it tasted good. Greenevillians came to expect, even demand, bread-stretched burgers at Linton’s.
The Boswells are dim figures in my mind — by 1965, they had sold the café to Causie and Mary Gentry — but I recall the folded, white paper and tissue hats Linton wore and the peppery hamburgers he and Gladys grilled right beside the steamed up window. My Grandmother Royall, a master at making things last, seasoned and molded hamburgers that very same way.
Despite changes in ownership and the passage of decades, the descendant of Linton’s Café, today’s Tipton’s, perpetuates these unforgettable, sub-two-dollar burgers.
Edna Cutshaw, who owns Tipton’s with her husband Jimmy, at first wasn’t sure I ought to be telling readers her burgers contained bread. But a hamburger like Edna’s is something to be celebrated. It’s an emblem of honor, a way of paying homage to the past, a way of acknowledging the creativity of restaurant owners and home cooks who kept their counters and tables well laden in an age of deprivation and scarcity.
Tipton’s Café is about 10 feet wide. Diners of my grandfather’s height and mine must sit sideways on the counter stools or face forward and approximate a gymnastic split. On the other side, cooking pancakes and frying sausage, Michelle Cutshaw jokes that it’s a “one-butt counter.”
Breakfast business is brisk. Edna says a diner once calculated that she and her family had fried so much bacon, if you laid end to curly end, it’d stretch from the Greene County line well into the city of Miami.
Mornings, a cast iron bucket of scratch-made sausage gravy heats on the periphery of the well-worn grill, replenished often from a 30-year-old cast iron pot in the back, where the gravy’s cooked. When the Cutshaws can get good tomatoes, they slice them for breakfast sides. Fried eggs hang way over the edges of sausage biscuits. Pancakes are sized to order. Tenderloin’s slapped on the grill and substituted for bacon or sausage on the breakfast special for an extra dollar.
Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays are soup bean days, and Thursday’s the busiest, with beef stew. Glazed honey buns are piled under glass on the counter, but on Fridays, diners forgo them for Mable Dean’s banana pudding, buttery and brown-sugared. Mable uses plenty of real bananas and no powdery instant pudding mix. She makes her own custard.
Tipton’s keeps odd hours, opening at 11 p.m., staying open all night, and closing in the middle of the afternoon, mainly to accommodate the city’s police force, at times when the restaurant’s lights are the only ones shining on the otherwise abandoned Depot Street my pioneering grandfather once protected.
Tipton’s Café
127 West Depot Street, Greeneville, Tennessee
423-639-4201
Sample prices: Hamburger, $1.60; cheeseburger, $1.75; tenderloin biscuit, $1.75; two biscuits, gravy, bacon or sausage, and two eggs, $4; beef stew, $3.
Open Monday through Saturday, 11 p.m. to 3 p.m. Closed Saturday nights. Breakfast is served any time. |
Checks accepted but no credit cards
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Food writer Fred Sauceman, the author of “Home and Away: A University Brings Food to the Table,” is the executive assistant to the president for university relations at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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