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Feature article
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Engle’s: A tale of brown salt and survival
By Fred Sauceman
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Engle’s Roadside Restaurant
DIRECTIONS: In Erwin, take the Jackson-Love Highway exit off Interstate 26. Turn left, then right onto Temple Hill Road. Engle’s is two miles on the right.
HOURS: Open weekdays from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. and Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Closed on Sundays.
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This is a story of surviving the coming of an Interstate. Of a holdover from hog-killing days. Of hamburgers. And brown salt.
I thought I had covered Unicoi County’s eateries pretty well. Then I talked with Cynthia Vanhoy, and she spoke of brown salt at Engle’s Roadside Restaurant in Erwin.
Cynthia knows hamburgers. Her mother Jessica has served thousands of them at The Cottage in Johnson City. So when I got a hamburger tip from Cynthia, I knew I should follow it.
True to its name, Engle’s Roadside Restaurant sits on the old route to Asheville. The network of surrounding mountain roads is sketched out in pencil on a hand-drawn map near the cash register at a scale of one inch to 11 miles.
When Interstate 26 opened into North Carolina, restaurant owners in Unicoi County worried about a dropoff in business. The first summer, Roadside orders declined by about eight percent, but the word-of-mouth reputation of its hamburgers, cube steak sandwiches, shrimp, flounder and oysters never suffered. Owner James Engle says business now is even better than it was when Temple Hill Road was the main thoroughfare.
James depends on customer-to-customer advertising, so much so that the restaurant’s trademark ingredient is mentioned nowhere on the menu, nowhere on the walls. James just trusts that word will get around about brown salt, and it has.
“They won’t give you the recipe for that brown salt,” said a diner at a table near us.
“Good stuff, ain’t it?” his companion replied.
“Yeah, the only place you can get it’s here.”
That across-the-table conversation we heard was correct on all counts.
To get brown-salted French fries, you have to request the seasoning. Order a hamburger or cheeseburger unawares, and you’ll be served a patty that’s been sprinkled with brown salt.
It’s a seasoning salt, and it has a history. James’ father Harvey Engle had a talent for seasoning meat. He killed hogs in the late fall and made his own sausage. Harvey’s sausage seasoning recipe survives as Roadside’s brown salt.
“I just put a smooth covering on the hamburgers and don’t overdo it, but some customers say, ‘Put extra brown salt on there,’” James explains. “About 15 years ago, someone put it on French fries by accident, and now about half our orders go out with brown salt.”
The Roadside began as a countertop business in the 1950s. James’ grandparents, Clyde and Ann Engle, who built Unicoi’s Clarence’s Drive-In, ran the Roadside from 1959 to 1963.
“I take a lot of pride in my sandwiches,” James tells me. “If I don’t like it, I don’t serve it. My cousin wanted to take a double cheeseburger to a guy he works with in Columbia, South Carolina, and I told him, ‘You know good and well it won’t taste good all the way to Columbia.’ But I wrapped it in aluminum foil and he took off with it.”
James and his wife Teresa have their own kitchen language. A “chicken bone dinner” is a four-piece meal, meaty in spite of the name. The term serves to differentiate it from the boneless chicken strip dinner.
Roadside dinners come with 1950s-style rolls, split, buttered on each side, and grilled. James says some people just order rolls and dip them into bowls of brown gravy.
Milkshakes are handmade, not machine-mixed. A square of cold custard centers the hot fudge cake.
Learning about the brown salt at Engle’s Roadside Restaurant is like gaining entry to a secret society. It’s a code that unlocks flavor. It’s a password into another age.
--------GoTriCities--------
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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