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Feature article
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Only Pal Barger could pair caviar and MoonPies
By Fred Sauceman
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Sharon’s Hamburgers
LOCATION: 301 W. Center St., Kingsport
PHONE: 423-247-5588
HOURS: Open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day |
From the man whose vanity license plate reads “CAR TAG” comes a hamburger smeared with caviar. Actually, you do your own smearing at Sharon’s Hamburgers on West Center Street in Kingsport. Caviar comes in a glass jar on the side — two ounces of it. More than enough fish eggs to add salt and pop to a Sharon’s hamburger. I covered one thoroughly and still had enough of the precious roe for several middle-of-the-night spoonfuls from the refrigerator at home.
Owned by Pal and Sharon Barger, Sharon’s served barbecue for 19 years before undergoing a hamburger and fries revelation and reopening in August 2008. Founder of the Malcolm Baldrige Award-winning restaurant company that bears his nickname, Pal traces the idea of serving caviar as a burger condiment back to restaurant shows he attended years ago in Chicago. It was there he met Rich Melman, whose Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises conglomerate operates restaurants of various types all over the Windy City and beyond.
“At his first restaurant he had a salad bar with caviar on it,” Pal recalls. “I asked how he could offer something so expensive, and he told me it wasn’t too bad if you buy it in bulk.
“Most people don’t like it, but they talk about it. When we did Skoby’s, we put caviar on the salad bar and got a lot of comments; although, only about one out of every 20 customers took it. It has now become a good talking point at Sharon’s.”
Sharon’s operator Josh Thompson says a member of the Kingsport police force has taken to dipping his fries in caviar.
Joining the unconventional lineup of hamburger toppings are a sauce made from Hatch green chilies grown in New Mexico, a fried egg, and -inch strips of roasted red pepper. For those in search of more mainstream hamburger dressing, all the old standbys are there, too: mustard, mayonnaise, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles. Somewhere in the middle is a holdover from the previous iteration of Sharon’s, the barbecue sauce.
Josh Thompson is well-grounded in the Pal’s way: the clothesline-style ordering technology, the rapid but accurate service, and the tea, which is made by the same method used by every Pal’s restaurant.
A 2005 East Tennessee State University accounting graduate and a native of Gray, Josh, in a previous job, once redid the landscaping at the original Pal’s location on Revere Street in Kingsport. With the transformation of Sharon’s, Josh caught the hamburger contagion from Pal’s CEO Thom Crosby.
“Thom has always had a passion for a great burger,” says Josh. “We grind meat fresh twice a day, for lunch and dinner, and the burgers are made to order. It’s the searing of the meat on that grill that creates the great taste.”
Pal and Sharon redesigned the interior in tints and tones of black and gray and dominant splashes of white for brightness and a clean look. They employed Johnson City’s Creative Energy Group to insert photographs of Sharon’s hamburgers into the two-dimensional hands of Elvis Presley, Ronald Reagan, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra and John Wayne and posted the doctored images on the walls.
With every hamburger order comes a mini MoonPie. “That was Pal’s idea, too,” says Josh. MoonPies are shipped directly to Kingsport from the Chattanooga plant where they’re made.
“We got a deal on MoonPies,” Josh tells me. “They don’t get any fresher.”
The ingenious and inventive Pal Barger is the only person I know who could figure a way to pair caviar and MoonPies on the same serving tray.
--------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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