Feature article
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Sycamore celebrates short-order tradition
By Fred Sauceman
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| The Bologna Burger |
“People get us aside and ask us what is a Bologna Burger,” says Gary Hicks, owner of Elizabethton’s Sycamore Restaurant. “They don’t want to say ‘Bologna Burger’ out loud.”
Once they order one, though, the secrecy is over. The Bologna Burger isn’t the Sycamore’s best-selling sandwich. That position’s locked down by the hand-patted hamburger. But the Bologna Burger is undoubtedly the restaurant’s most talked about creation.
Gary didn’t want to call it a bologna sandwich because that implies light bread. Instead, think hamburger with a 3/8-inch hunk of lightly grilled bologna in place of a ground beef patty. Everything else is hamburgeresque: bun, lettuce, tomato, onion, mayonnaise, cheese.
The Sycamore dates to around 1950. Gary has an aerial photograph of the site from 1948, and the restaurant had not yet been constructed. By the early 1950s, though, it was a thriving Tastee-Freez, with walkup windows. Like they still do today, many of the customers came before or after a movie at the Bonnie Kate Theatre, built a few doors down Sycamore Street in 1926.
The front of the Sycamore was enclosed in 1974 to create a small dining area, now with four tables seating 10 people in green metal folding chairs. The original sandstone walls and marble counters remain.
Encased in a trapezoidal cage of glass is a portion of the bottle collection belonging to Gary’s dad, Frank Hicks. Among the soft drink relics are a Pepsi bottle from 1920 and a Royal Crown from 1936. Frank and Gary get the most questions about the stretched Pepsi bottle, like the ones once sold at Woolworth’s.
If you’re lucky enough to have a meal at the Sycamore when Frank’s around, you’ll get a soft drink history tutorial. He recalled for me the days when Orange Crush once had pieces of orange in it. But “heirloom” soft drinks aren’t just window dressing at the Sycamore. The restaurant carries Frostie in all its permutations, Orange Crush and Grape Crush in glass bottles, and glass-bottled Cheerwine.
Milkshakes are hand-dipped, and those of us who prefer a thinner shake can thank the aging mixer that has blades strong enough to cut through the ice cream.
In most kitchens, meatloaf sandwiches are second-class leftovers, but at the Sycamore, the sandwich is first choice. Gary mixes meatloaf just for that purpose. His meatloaf recipe is adapted from an 80-year-old newspaper clipping. He kneads in a little barbecue sauce, and, 15 minutes before it’s done, swabs on a coating of ketchup. To make the sandwich, he knifes off a two-inch slab of meatloaf.
“It’s so thick, most people don’t put much of anything on it, but maybe a little ketchup or mayonnaise,” says Gary.
He and his sister Lori Pierce, along with cousin Cathy Guy, like the contrast between Sycamore’s cold, chunky chicken salad and warm toast. “We pile the salad on,” Gary says. “We don’t smear.”
The Sycamore’s barbecue pork and beef are smoked up the road in Hampton by Jeff Miller at Quarterbacks, although the two restaurants serve different sauces.
Gary’s pork sauce is sweet, and his beef sauce is tangy. Both are tomato-based. “And we don’t do the pour-over thing,” he adds. “We mix the sauce with the meat and marinate it.”
The Sycamore menu is extensive: stovetop to crock pot soup beans with corn muffins, hot dogs cooked one at a time and served in grill-marked buns, and Italian sausage and ground beef lasagna in the colder months.
“The hamburger, though, is our living,” says Gary. “We have our own special blend. It’s not just a patty of meat slapped on a grill. We start out making 80 each morning. They are as fresh as can be. We cut our own lettuce and never buy it in a bag.”
The Sycamore Restaurant, once called a drive-in, quietly celebrates the short order tradition and the American ice cream stand, on a calm side street in downtown Elizabethton, next to the Central Fire Hall. There have been menu additions, but the Sycamore hasn’t felt it necessary to reinvent itself in 1950s retro.
Instead, as the cold drink case testifies, it’s a restaurant that has changed very little since the mid-20th century. It’s a place where vans disgorge gospel groups for a quick road meal, where the Elizabethton Star obituary page is a topic of respectful analysis, where neighborhood children walk up for late afternoon ice cream cones. It’s a place so careful about quality and customer safety that squeeze bottles of ketchup are always kept chilled — handed out only when fry orders dictate.
Back in time need not be gimmicky or contrived. At the Sycamore, the aura of the old days is real.
The Sycamore Restaurant
LOCATION: 213 S. Sycamore St., Elizabethton, Tennessee
HOURS: Open 10 a.m. to 6:45 p.m., Monday through Saturday
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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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