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Feature article
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Morristown tea room a community labor of love
By Fred Sauceman
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Note: My thanks to Pamela Courtney, a student in my Foodways of Appalachia class, for introducing me to the Timeless Elegance Tea Room.
“When I was still working,” begins Barbie Long. Then she catches herself, realizing what she has just said.
A former human resources manager for a commercial seating company, Barbie’s now working harder than she ever has. But that little slip of the tongue captures her attitude about life in a tea room.
Timeless Elegance Tea Room opened in 2002 in Morristown, Tennessee. The first building held 16 people. The business now occupies the former location of Holmes Shoe Store in the middle of Main Street in this active downtown, and Barbie’s seating capacity has jumped to 56, plus room for conferences upstairs.
Barbie knew the tea room business would involve hard labor right off, when she started tackling the floors.
“They had carpeting, padding, commercial tile, and glue on them,” she says. “Now they’ve been restored to the original wood.”
Timeless Elegance turned into a community project. Friends Wilson and Joan Hann are responsible for the tablecloths from Germany. Barbie’s sister Phyllis Cantrell has added some cross-stitch. Guests have donated vintage hats, linens, and doilies.
One day Barbie was invited to lunch at the home of her friend Ferrol Easter, for Chicken Divan.
“I fell in love with it and asked if I could use the recipe,” says Barbie. “Ferrol, then 86, graciously agreed.”
Served in a ramekin with the broccoli on the bottom, the dish is now a permanent menu fixture, accompanied by a side salad and a cube of frozen cherry salad.
Always on the menu, too, is squash soup, a spiced puree of summer squash. Its buttery color almost matches the restaurant’s yellow walls.
Among the quiches of the day is one packed with hash brown potatoes and ham. Get it on a sampler platter and you’re served a side of curly and bowtie pasta and vegetables, combined with the tea room’s homemade ranch dressing. Chicken salad rounds out the trio.
The chicken salad recipe was another gift from sister Phyllis, but Barbie removed the onions and added fruit — grapes and pineapple — to the shredded chicken.
Portion sizes at Timeless Elegance are substantial. More than once, Barbie has told male customers, “No, honey, we don’t serve those little bitty sandwiches.”
Barbie, a native of Rogersville, traveled throughout Georgia and the Carolinas visiting tea rooms, absorbing ideas. Rather than a variety of teas, she settled on two, a plain iced tea and that very same tea flavored with orange and pineapple juices, creating a blend the color of apricots.
For dessert, peanut butter pie is a mainstay, and there’s a bit of peanut butter in Barbie’s Nutty Buddy pie, patterned after the ice cream. Her chocolate trifle is a layering of chocolate cake, chocolate pudding, whipped topping, and crushed toffee bars.
As my mother discovered recently on her birthday, you don’t have to know Barbie very long before experiencing a warm hug and a kiss on the cheek.
“We have the sweetest people come in here,” says Barbie. “Everyone will visit a place once,” she told my student Pamela Courtney, “but when they come back the second time and they continue to come in, you know you are doing the right thing.”
Timeless Elegance Tea Room
LOCATION: 156 East Main Street
Morristown, Tennessee
PHONE: (423) 318-9292
HOURS: Open Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
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Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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