Feature article
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Zarzour’s: Lebanese family’s café is pure Southern
By Fred Sauceman
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Shirley Fuller, whose grandfather opened Zarzour’s in 1918, stirs a pot of roast beef hash.
Zarzour’s Café
LOCATION: 1627 Rossville Ave., Chattanooga, Tennessee
PHONE: 423-266-0424
DIRECTIONS: Head away from the river on Market Street to Main. Turn left on Main. Go two blocks. You’ll see a fire station and a red sculpture. Turn right at the sculpture. Zarzour’s is a block and a half on the right. |
Knowing the history and the background, you’d expect stuffed grape leaves and meat-and-wheat kibbi at Zarzour’s Café in Chattanooga. What you’ll get, though, are turnip greens and cornbread.
Chattanooga’s oldest restaurant celebrates 90 years in business this year, all that time in the same family.
The year 1918 was a fateful one for the Zarzour family. From their home in Beirut, Lebanon, they ventured to Syria, pack-peddled in Birmingham, Alabama, and settled in Chattanooga, where Charlie Zarzour’s wife Nazera bought a house for the family.
That year, history’s deadliest epidemic was sweeping the world. Influenza killed Nazera, leaving Charlie with five children, the youngest in diapers. Charlie never remarried and raised the family himself.
He converted the house to a business, first selling beer, Coca-Cola and hamburgers. Then came beef stew and chili.
Charlie’s naturalization certificate holds a place of honor on the wall at Zarzour’s today. Dated Nov. 13, 1946, it describes Charlie as having a “sallow” complexion and notes a scar on the bridge of his nose between his eyebrows and one on his tongue.
Despite the blunt description, Charlie’s granddaughter Shirley Fuller says her grandfather was “a wonderful, happy man who loved everybody, and everybody loved him.”
Cooking for 30 years has taken its toll on Shirley’s back, she says, but she still makes banana pudding, strawberry shortcake, lemon ice box pie, and in the summer, fresh peach ice cream. Shirley runs Zarzour’s with her son Joe and daughter-in-law Shannon.
Joe was road manager for the group Alabama for six and a half years, and their double platinum RCA album “Feels So Right” is mounted on the wall near Joe’s great-grandfather’s naturalization certificate.
Shirley’s Uncle George and Aunt Rose ran Zarzour’s from the 1950s until 1979. George carved out a Ham radio shop in the diminutive building, and Shirley still remembers his call letters, W4NEW.
“Aunt Rose taught me how to make chili and stew,” Shirley remembers. “The chili is very unusual. It has no tomatoes in it.
“What we sell the most of, every day, is turnip greens and pinto beans.”
And butter beans. Shirley says they’re the “big, old-fashioned butter beans, not the little limas.”
Tiffany Dare tends a pot of roast beef hash as it simmers on the stove in the tiny bedroom-turned-kitchen, while cast iron skillets of Mary Smith’s cornbread bake in the oven. Baked spaghetti topped with cheese is a Tuesday specialty.
Although Zarzour family members stuff Lebanese cabbage rolls at home, the restaurant menu is pure Southern. Diane and Taylor Dillard of Hixson eat at Zarzour’s upwards of five times a week, including salmon croquette day, Wednesday and fried flounder on Friday.
Shirley recalls her wedding reception, which was held in the restaurant, and points out her favorite picture, of her grandfather, her father Abe Zarzour and his two brothers on the corner of Main and Market in Chattanooga where Abe ran a luncheonette. Beside them is a popcorn machine with boxes of fruit outside on the sidewalk for Christmastime.
Known as the “mayor of Main Street,” Abe, like the rest of his family, enthusiastically embraced American culture.
“Daddy was a baseball man,” Shirley says. “He played semi-pro baseball and scouted for some of the major league teams.”
A picture of knuckleballing pitcher Phil Niekro, a friend of Abe’s, hangs on the restaurant wall.
“People, when they come through that door, feel the warmth in here,” Shirley tells me. “There’s so much history here. To have a place that has stayed in the same family, on the same spot, for that long is most unusual now.”
In fact, Zarzour’s may very well be in contention for the title of Tennessee’s oldest restaurant in continuous operation by the same family.
--------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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