Boston’s Restaurant Industry Meets Lifted Restrictions With Mixed Emotions

May 28, 2021 Admin 0 Comments

Some restaurant owners and workers are eager to get back to pre-pandemic normal, but others aren’t quite ready to abandon masks and distancing

London Restaurants Wonder if This Is It?

May 28, 2021 Admin 0 Comments

Restaurant dining rooms in London have thrown open their doors. It will be a while before they throw caution to the wind

Fed-Up Servers Quit Fabio Trabocchi’s Del Mar After Alleged Mistreatment of a Black Colleague

May 27, 2021 Admin 0 Comments

Workers at the exclusive Spanish D.C. restaurant aired frustrations over claims of racial insensitivity and changes to the tipping system

Mutual Aid May Be Last Year’s Most Enduring Legacy

May 27, 2021 Admin 0 Comments

How mutual aid efforts — like Minneapolis’s Southside Food Share and Phillips Community Free Store — are combating food insecurity on their own terms

I arrived in Minneapolis in July of 2020 to find buildings turned to rubble, people grieving, and a community rebuilding. During my first volunteer shift at Phillips Community Free Store, which was being run out of the Grease Pit Bike shop in South Minneapolis, tables were lined up outside, pop-up tents shading all manner of produce and household items, and a mountain of diapers that were ready to be given away.

People took numbers and those numbers were called when it was their turn to come up to the tables and take what they needed. Cars lined the streets as parents with children in tow waited their turns. It was loud; our “customers” spoke mainly Spanish, Oromo, and Somali and younger members of the families would often translate their words into English.

Those first few months, I learned a lot about what people look for and how they cook their food. I convinced Latinx families that yellow and green summer squash are virtually the same and that both can be tasty. And I watched the way that scarcity can wreak havoc and stoke fear in a community and can be a divisive tool that separates us from one another. We all continued to show up and we grew together and learned not only how to work with each other but also what it means to be in community together.

The free store was just one project in a larger constellation of mutual aid projects that expanded or took root in Minneapolis in 2020. In a city where the history of redlining and the legacy of racism dates back to the early 1900s, the brutal murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer spurred a string of protests that lasted all summer—the nation’s second-largest uprising, after the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The response also resulted in the largest National Guard deployment since World War II and over $500 million in property damage. Target and Cub foods — the largest suppliers for groceries in the area — were both damaged and the community of South Minneapolis was left with very few options for accessing food.

South Minneapolis is full of community gardens, tiny libraries, and neighbors who know one another. It’s a melting pot for First Peoples, East African refugees, African Americans, and Latinx, Hmong, Vietnamese, and white people living at various intersections of marginalization. Before the pandemic, the neighborhood was already home to a number of established mutual aid groups, including Southside Food Share, which began feeding residents at an encampment called the Wall of Forgotten Natives in 2018, and Sisters Camelot, which has been giving out free organic food twice a week for the past 20 years. But after the uprisings, many community members leaped into action to help meet the increasing needs of the community. Now, a year after the uprisings, rates of food insecurity in the Twin Cities have remained high and many mutual aid projects are finding ways to continue their work.

Mutual aid as direct action

Mutual aid at its essence gives communities the opportunity to self-determine and organize in the ways that allow everyone to live a dignified life. Unlike charity, which tends to involve a one-way dynamic — as organizations enter neighborhoods dictating their own agendas — mutual aid is reciprocal, inherently political, self-organized, and egalitarian. It often involves direct action and is rooted in a desire for social transformation. Whether it involves the distribution of seeds and plants, groceries, or medical supplies, mutual aid also takes place outside of systems of governance that silence the marginalized, and it is based on the understanding that communities have the power to dictate the world they want to live in.

At the Phillips Community Free Store, which is run by a collective, we see these principles play out every day. Community members can access fresh food from local farms, food staples like rice and sugar, and essential household items. Alex Gomez, who has been involved from the beginning, told me that the first days after the George Floyd uprising were marked by a collective acknowledgement of the need. “There were people driving around who would notice the tables of food and goods and stop on the side of the road and unload hundreds of dollars [worth] of items from their car for us,” said Gomez.

In its first year, the Phillips Free Store managed to raise over $100,000 to buy food and other costly items such as diapers and menstrual supplies, through a combination of individual donors and fundraisers. The group maintains community accountability by being wholly transparent about their finances through a public Google doc linked to their Instagram account — an important choice considering the public criticism of how some groups that responded to the uprisings handled a large influx of donations.

The free store has used the uprisings as an opportunity to connect community members to local farmers. We purchased items such as eggs directly from local farms, received donations of meat from farms, and, through the LEAFF Program run by the Good Acre, received over 80 cases of free local produce a week from BIPOC farmers. The store has also moved its operations to a local church and scaled down from its original five-day-a-week schedule to just one day a week.

The store provided home delivery to 174 families over the winter and currently has a waiting list of more than 40 people, but it now hopes to continue expanding the service. We are also forming new relationships with more farms and organizations in order to get food directly to more people while bypassing grocery stores. And, unlike many mutual aid groups, the store has also become fiscally sponsored by the Social Good Fund.

As self-organization and determination

Meanwhile Southside Foodshare — a self-described “constantly communicating amorphous blob” — grew from a group of seven people operating one day a week before the pandemic to a group of about 44 people operating five days a week.

The group’s response to the uprisings and the pandemic were fueled by a crew of residents of one South Minneapolis punk house and their friends. They had been feeding people — primarily BIPOC folks — living in homeless encampments for years. But they organized, expanded, and started a pop-up outdoor kitchen in their backyard. The goal was to provide food support to people participating in the Black Lives Matter actions as well as those whose food access had been cut off.

In a recent email conversation, a spokesperson for the group told me, “More and more people got involved, [planning] out everything you might imagine — equipment, safety protocols, menu planning, food sourcing, scheduling, etc. People who had experience cooking at Standing Rock and Line 3 protest camps were in town, and they had invaluable knowledge.”

At the height of the uprising, the group was serving 300 meals a day. Since then, it has joined forces with the Seward Cafe and the group’s members work out of the café’s commercial kitchen four days a week to serve 120 meals a day. It receives food through donations primarily from North Country Food Alliance, a worker-run food sovereignty nonprofit in the Twin Cities Metro Area.

The group has maintained a focus on feeding unhoused people. In 2018, there were about 4,100 people experiencing homelessness in Hennepin County; 49 percent of those people were Black, and 15 percent were Native American, despite being 1 percent of the population. Over the last year, there has been continued violence and frequent evictions of the people in the encampments by the city of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis Police Department.

“Violent evictions displace people, they separate people, and they disconnect people from resources. We have tried to stay connected with our friends and community who are directly experiencing this violence by staying consistent and showing up at new locations people are forced to move to,” the spokesperson told me. They said the group’s relationships with their community members and their ability to marshal resources grew exponentially in that time.

One of the founding principles of mutual aid is that those providing service also stand to benefit equally. So what does it mean for a group who primarily serves unhoused individuals to be run by people with houses? Southside Food Share members asks residents what kinds of food they want to eat, they take into consideration the dental needs of the people with respect to the kinds of foods they cook, and they actively go out to encampments and hand people meals and interact with them face to face.

The group distinguishes itself by rejecting what its members see as “colonialist mentalities of saviorship that often come from religious-based charities and government aid.” They prioritize treating people with respect and care. Whereas soup kitchens and food banks also often involve a time commitment, “we believe that bringing food to people and meeting them where they are at is a way to give them their time back,” said the spokesperson.

As egalitarianism

Before it began collaborating with Southside Food Share, the Seward Cafe closed its doors to transition from being a space run by a primarily white collective to a primarily BIPOC collective with 15–20 members, including east Africans from the community it is situated within.

Kieran, a member of the new collective who didn’t want to share their last name, hopes the café can be a “place where people can get what they need, physically and emotionally.” The café now functions as a free store, giving out food primarily to the East African neighbors in the area and had a soft opening last fall, serving a rotation of different Oromo dishes and featuring a menu that is mostly vegan and far more affordable than it had been.

“In the same way that the uprisings pushed friends and neighbors to become organizers and comrades on an individual level, they also pushed the café’s collective to build a space where a community could live up to its potential,” Kieran told me.

The collective’s members are also committed to ensuring that their work is culturally relevant — which is a distinguishing factor of many mutual aid projects.

”The best way we can — and have — differentiated ourselves from the one-directional model is by recognizing that we cannot truly serve the community unless it has tangible agency in how our process is undertaken,” Kieran adds. “I remember finding a great deal on shampoo to give out but hearing from an East African collective member that folks would prefer something better fitted to their hair textures. That meant going with a slightly more expensive option that actually [worked for] those who’d be using it. I think a lot of one-directional work assumes an organization’s knowledge base goes beyond that of the community, whereas in many cases, the opposite is true.”

As social transformation

As food insecurity has begun to receive less public attention, South Minneapolis mutual aid groups have stopped receiving the kinds of large donations that were common early in the pandemic. But that hasn’t stopped them from serving those who are still in need: Community members built a greenhouse last fall at George Floyd Square to keep plants safe from the subzero temperatures; Seward Cafe had a community workday at their garden space and are finding ways to incorporate both the community and farming into their programming. Southside Food Share members are still serving their neighbors at encampments, and the Phillips Free Store is restarting in-person distribution every other week.

Mutual aid is an act of resistance, and we are just some of the people in Minneapolis who have chosen this path. The murder of George Floyd has been an impetus for those of us who believe in making healthy, whole foods more accessible in a country that constantly fails BIPOC people in a myriad of ways. This is mutual aid at its essence. We’re working together to serve one another, listen deeply, and create the world we want to live in. And we are proving that feeding ourselves and finding happiness don’t need to involve the mindless extraction of resources, or the emotional energy or labor of marginalized bodies.

Luz Cruz is a queer Afrolatinx transgender writer, chef, and food justice organizer. Nicole Miles is an illustrator from the Bahamas currently living in the UK.

Can Meat Experts Ben and Brent Recreate Spam?

May 26, 2021 Admin 0 Comments

The Meat Hook butchers try their hand at homemade canned meat

“Quick disclaimer,” says butcher Brent Young in front of a stack of signature blue and yellow Spam cans. “Do not try this at home!”

Ben Turley and Brent Young, of Brooklyn’s the Meat Hook, take on a new experiment in this episode of Prime Time: making their own Spam. But, as they explain, “canning is incredibly dangerous, and the USDA takes it incredibly seriously.” So leave this one to the meat experts, and simply enjoy their process.

They open a can of Spam to start with a taste and texture test, and check out a list of the ingredients. They believe using pork shoulder and pieces of ham can get them close to the taste and texture of the original. They grind cubes of each along with ice, to help the meat bind, to get their mixture. Next, they add salt, sugar, pink curing salt, and sodium tripolyphosphate. Each of these ingredients serves an important purpose, whether it’s to help bind the meat, flavor it, to prevent rancidity, or to keep out botulism spores.

Next comes the canning. Ben and Brent fill five ounce, self-seal cans, with their meat mixture. They bring out a pressure canner (not a pressure cooker, which would be dangerous to use since there is no temperature gage, as Brent clarifies), and add their cans, along with boiling water, to the base. They seal it up and turn on the pressure, and explain that when the canner reads 240-250 PSI, the bacteria that creates botulism will die. They leave the meat in the canner for 60 minutes.

Once the cans have cooled, they open them up to see the results. The two versions look similar to each other, but when they fry them up to compare and contrast, it seems as though the original Spam caramelized much better. “I feel like there’s more sugar in theirs” concludes Brent. “I think we went the long way round to create a breakfast sausage,” says Brent after giving their version a taste. “We’re still nowhere near the salt,” adds Ben. The two give themselves a B to B minus letter grade for their experiment.

“I have to say, I have a whole new appreciation for what Spam is,” says Brent. “This is a really cool thing we created, but it definitely doesn’t compare to Spam.” Ben’s ultimate takeaway: “Spam is Spam, and everything else is something else.”

Need a Bottle of Natural Wine? The Gas Station Has You Covered.

May 26, 2021 Admin 0 Comments

In some cities, the local gas station doubles as a boutique bottle shop, with wines and craft beers by small producers

My dad is the kind of old-school character who arrives four hours ahead of departure time for a domestic flight from Miami to New York. All of his bills are paid via paper check, which he drops off in person. And, naturally, he’s a big believer in going into the gas station to pay the clerk directly before filling his tank with gas, putting zero trust in the card machines out by the pumps. And so, when I was home in Miami a couple of months ago, he didn’t even have to ask before I marched into the Mobil station on the corner of Coral Way and 32nd Avenue to ask the clerk to fill us up at number four.

But when I opened the door, I had to take a beat to marvel at the collection of wines lining the metal racks inside. On shelves, next to six-packs of Corona Light and local plantain chips, were the wines I used to sell at the small, natural-focused New York wine shop I worked at — Subject to Change’s Sleepless Nights, a cab franc from Lo-Fi in Los Alamos, California; Martha Stoumen’s juicy Post Flirtation. I didn’t expect to see these wines in this residential part of Miami, one that’s mostly known for a nearby Hooters and the enduring Cuban restaurant Sergio’s, let alone at Mendez Fuel.

By design, gas stations are there to get us out of a range of tough spots: air when your tires are flat; bathrooms and tampons when you need bathrooms and tampons; crunchy chicharrones when the road snacks you packed are starting to lose their luster; a handy — even if unwieldy — vacuum when your homemade trail mix flies everywhere. And in some cities, the local gas station is the place where you can pick up well-curated craft beer offerings and bottles of wine made by small producers on your way home or to a friend’s place for dinner.

Mendez Fuel is a chain of Miami-based Mobil stations where customers are just as likely to peruse the racks of wine and beer as fill up their tanks. Twelve years ago, Michael Mendez bought the stations from a close friend. He called his brother, Andrew Mendez, to see if he was interested in working on the new project together. The plan was for Andrew to take over the Mobil location on 32 Avenue, since it was a bit far away from the other three, and the least convenient for Michael to get to. At the time, Andrew was just out of college and staying on his parents’ couch. “Yeah, I’m down,” Andrew says he told his brother.

“Just know that we’re starting from the bottom,” Michael said.

About one year into their new project, Andrew started taking over beer orders at the other three Mendez Fuel locations, too. He remembers that there were pretty standard options like Heineken and Stella; the trusty brands you’ll find at any corner store. But after working with a beer rep for a few months who introduced Andrew to slightly less well-known beers like Chimay, Lagunitas, and Blue Moon, the contents of the store’s shelves started to change. “Me being a 24-year-old, I remember thinking it was just so cool, all these new beers,” he says.

In 2012, the year craft beer really began to boom in cities like Miami, Andrew began adding craft brews to the shelves; he started with beers from Funky Buddha, a brewery in Oakland Park, Florida. “Then I started to pick up more distributors to try to figure out who has what and go from there,” he says.

Soon, all four Mendez Fuel locations were craft beer destinations in Miami, and on May 5, 2014, they solidified that status by adding growlers — the air-tight jugs that allow you to easily take draft beer from one place to another. According to Andrew, no one else in the area — gas station or not — was doing growlers at the time. “That really helped,” he says. “Being ahead of the game on that.”

By the end of that year, the craft beer and growler business was flourishing at all Mendez Fuel outposts. Eventually Mendez Fuel even added its own specialty lager to the lineup, a private-label beer that Miami’s The Tank Brewing Co. helped them make. And when the pandemic hit Miami this past year, Andrew says the beverage business only got busier.

In the weeks and months surrounding the first COVID-19 lockdowns, Mendez Fuel was inundated with online beer and wine orders from people stuck at home. At the time, unlike beer, the wine selection was, in Andrew Mendez’s words, pretty basic: Mondavi, Josh, Woodbridge; “nothing crazy,” he says. Around this same time Andrew had started hearing about natural wine from a few friends, and when the requests for wine picked up, he saw an opportunity to give the wine selection at Mendez Fuel a lot more attention. So just like he did with beer all those years ago, Andrew started reaching out to natural wine-focused distributors and seeing what was available. “Today we’re at the point where I had to take away from my craft beer section to make more room for natural wine,” he says.

It speaks to the steady rise in popularity and availability of natural wine across cities in the U.S., driven largely by one woman: Jenny Lefcourt, who started natural wine importer Jenny & François Selections in 2000. But while natural wine has had a developed presence in New York for nearly two decades and has been widely available in Los Angeles and San Francisco for many years now, it’s fairly nascent in other major cities, like Miami, Dallas, Phoenix, and Philadelphia.

Five years ago, natural wines were already starting to hit the shelves at Sunrise Mini Mart — a gas station-convenience store in Austin, Texas’s Crestview neighborhood that Eater Austin named one of the city’s best wine shops. It’s all the work of manager Sam Rozani, who, like Andrew Mendez, started changing up the usual convenience store wares by offering craft beers. But unlike Andrew Mendez, Rozani didn’t start adding natural and organic wines because of word of mouth or customer demand; he just wanted to try some of it himself.

“The thing is that the best place to buy myself natural wine will be my store, because I don’t have to pay retail prices,” says Rozani. He started ordering natural wine in small quantities; he’d buy, say, a half case of wine, open one bottle for himself, and then sell the remaining bottles at Sunrise. This way he’d also be able to speak about the nuances in a bottle of Broc Cellars’ Love Red when a customer came in asking about it. These days, those same customers know to ask Rozani what he’s been drinking lately, confident that he’ll lead them in the right direction.

“I tell them the region I’m really into, or something I recently liked, and they usually say ‘Man, I haven’t had it, I want to try it,’ and that just opens things up,” he says. The same goes for when someone comes in asking for the Bichi pét-nat they saw someone drinking on Instagram. “I’ll say ‘Hey, you know what? I don’t have Bichi right now, but I have something else you might like, it’s from the Canary Islands.”

It makes for a positive customer experience, Rozani says; people know they’ll learn something when they visit one of his four stores. Rozani tried to channel that expertise into the retail website he launched in March 2021 in response to demand from customers who either moved away from Austin during the pandemic, or who wanted to send wine to Austin-based loved ones. Now they can order their wine and beer from Sunrise, without ever setting foot in the gas station.

Just one year into offering natural wine at Mendez Fuel at the location on 32 Avenue, Andrew Mendez has seen a growing following, especially among younger customers. “There’s a consistent flow of people in their late 20s and 30s coming into the gas station looking for natural wine,” he says. Still, he does periodically get gas-seeking customers who come in and are surprised or curious about the seemingly nontraditional wines Mendez Fuel stocks.

Andrew Mendez thinks a personalized feel is what keeps his regular customers returning to a corner Mobil station over going somewhere like Total Wine or Publix for their wine, even with prices $1 or $2 higher than they would be at other retailers. “If I’m in the store, I’m going to try to help you as best as I can,” he says. While by his own admission he’s not an expert, it is Andrew Mendez, officially Mendez Fuel’s vice president of operations, who is doing all the wine buying, so if a customer comes in asking about a bottle, he has the answers. He tells me he’s lucky to have developed a rapport with a number of small natural wine distributors, like Arash Selects, which is open to selling him three bottles so he can see how they move before having to commit to a case.

As those bottles, made in small quantities, sell, and word continues to spread about natural wine, its availability should only continue to expand. The reason Rozani was sold out of that Bichi pét-nat is because these days he’s only able to buy one case versus the five he used to get; the rest go to nearby restaurants or other shops in the area. But just three years ago it was hard to find wines from California winemakers Scribe and Les Lunes, or Maryland’s Old Westminster, outside of New York City. If there’s any indication that these wines are reaching the mainstream, it’s that you can now find them at a gas station — and that’s something worth toasting.

Naya-Cheyenne is a Miami-raised, Brooklyn-based multimedia illustrator and designer.

America Loves Gas Station Snacks. Here Are Some of the Finest by Region

May 26, 2021 Admin 0 Comments

From Buc-ee’s Beaver Nuggets to 7-Eleven Spam musubi

Whether we’re hitting them up during a marathon road trip or just a pit-stop during the weekly commute, gas stations are where America gets what it needs. For your car, that’s a few gallons of unleaded. For the rest of us, it’s something salty, sweet, crunchy, or highly caffeinated. But aside from a few constants (show us a fuel stop without jerky and Red Bull), the snacks, drinks, and often full meals available at gas stations vary greatly depending on where you are in the country; they’re dictated by local tastes, demographics, and plain old corn-fed culinary ingenuity. Here, then, Eater has compiled some of America’s favorite regional gas station indulgences, from gobs in Pennsylvania to breakfast pizza in Iowa to deep-fried burritos in Texas to Spam musubi in Hawai’i. Regardless of what your gas meter says, these are some of the bites worth pulling off the interstate for.

The Northeast

Stewart’s Shops Ice Cream, New York

There are few rituals more peak upstate New York than ending a hot summer day with a cold scoop at Stewart’s. The Saratoga County-based convenience store, with shops throughout upstate New York and Vermont, makes and sells its own superrich ice cream in upstate-y flavors like Adirondack Bear Paw, Crumbs Along the Mohawk, and Kaydeross Kreme. Milkshakes, build-your-own sundaes, and splits are offered too, but a simple scoop in the signature red cup is perfect for a quick fill-up. — Kayla Stewart

Gobs (Whoopie Pies), Pennsylvania

Gobs are a quintessential Pennsylvania snack. Made by the Amish, the riff on a classic Whoopie Pie usually features vanilla icing or marshmallow fluff sandwiched between two cakey chocolate cookies. Look for them wrapped in plastic beside the register at independent gas stations throughout the state. — KS

Wawa Hoagies, Philadelphia

Wawa is so much more than a regional convenience store chain and sometimes-gas station throughout the Northeast. It’s an obsession, a rabid cult of regional pride, the stuff of rap lyrics and heartstring-tugging personal odes, but most notably, a slinger of stuffed-to-the-gills hoagies that are so popular they have their own festival. Fully customizable, Wawa offers classic hoagies like breakfast and deli sandwiches, as well as holiday-specific hoagies. No mere slogan, “gotta have a Wawa” is, for much of the country, a way of life. — KS

The South

Chimichanga (aka the Fried Burrito), Texas

Anyone who has ever driven hours and hours through the vast, desolate expanses of west Texas likely has a strong appreciation for the deep-fried burritos from Allsup’s. The gas station chain’s signs, decked out in a Southwestern motif, are frequently the only thing that break up the monotonous (if occasionally stunning) landscapes of the high plains, serving as a pit stop and fueling station for weary travelers. Deep-fried and served in little paper sleeves, there is nothing fancy about Allsup’s burritos, which are likely mass-produced in a factory somewhere. But somehow, after 10 hours of driving, this combination of basic flour tortillas, lightly spiced beans, and meat that you’ve showered in several packets of hot sauce is pure magic. Pair with a fizzy fountain Coke and a bag of pork rinds, and you’re stuffed enough to make the rest of the drive to Marfa, where legitimately good burritos await. — Amy McCarthy

Klobásník / Klobasniky / Kolaches, Texas

In Texas, there is perhaps no road trip snack more coveted than the fluffy, yeasty kolaches and klobasniky. Sold at roadside bakeries and gas stations like the famed Czech Stop and Little Czech Bakery in West, and Hruska’s in Ellinger, these pastries have roots in Texas dating back to the 1840s, when Czech settlers found themselves in Texas following years of cultural upheaval in Central Europe. With those settlers came sweet kolaches, which look sort of like a yeast roll with a dollop of sweet filling, like cherry preserve or cream cheese, baked right into the center, and savory klobasniky, which involve meats like jalapeno-cheddar sausage wrapped in kolache dough. They’re usually baked in advance and warmed to order — often in a microwave, naturally — and are a prized souvenir for family members and friends waiting at home. Don’t be surprised to see tourists toting home giant boxes of kolaches and klobasniky, and don’t get confused and call a klobasnik a kolache — Texans are exceedingly particular about how these two beloved pastries are defined. — AM

Beaver Nuggets, Texas

Puffcorn pops are good. Puffcorn pops covered in caramel and named for everyone’s favorite amphibious rodent? Even better. The most popular snack at Buc-ee’s — one of the most iconic gas stations in the U.S. — are known here as beaver nuggets. Described by Buc-ee’s fans as “the best damned thing in Texas,” beaver nuggets have a devoted cult following, are sold online, and even used as an ingredient in Texas craft beer. They’re that dam good. — KS

Natchitoches Meat Pies, Louisiana

These Cajun-style meat pies can be found at gas stations throughout Louisiana, but they’re native to the northwest city of Natchitoches (pronounced Nack-a-tish), about 250 miles from New Orleans. Made famous by Steel Magnolias and a 2002 ode to Lasyone’s Meat Pie Restaurant in the New York Times, Natchitoches’s identity has become inseparable from the staple, which were supposedly first sold by 19th-century street vendors. They resemble the Latin American empanada, of course, with their crimped, half-moon shape, but are a bit more buttery. They’re traditionally stuffed with a savory mixture of beef and pork cooked with lots of spices (though they’re not spicy), and deep-fried until golden and crispy. Though the ones from Lasyone’s are the most sought after by non-natives, they can also be found at gas stations in town like the French Market Express on University Parkway. — Clair Lorell

Fried Shrimp Po’ Boy, Louisiana

Gulf seafood is easily within the top 10 reasons to visit the state of Louisiana (unless, of course, you’re a shrimp). Across the state, in gas-station cafes like the Danny & Clydes in Metairie, Buc Stop in Haughton, and the Chevron in Shreveport, hungry drivers can dig into piping hot hoagie rolls bulging with fried fish and shrimp, along with non-seafood meals like chicken and dumplings, and even burgers and fries. — KS

Boudin, Louisiana

The sometimes-smoky sausage with Cajun and Creole roots is generally made with a mix of rice, meat — usually hog — and Southern seasonings, but in Louisiana gas stations you can find it bulging with seafood like crawfish, shrimp, and even alligator, in flavors ranging from mild to hot. The most common style sold is boudin blanc, a “white” variety; throw a little blood into the mix and it’s boudin rouge. Grab some to go, munch it on-site, or snack on a link or two with crackers in the car as you cruise down the Louisiana coast. — KS

Dodge’s Fried Chicken, the Carolinas

Driving south out of Charleston, the red and yellow sign reading “Dodge’s Chicken” tells any driver what they need to know — pull over for some of the best fried poultry in the Lowcountry. Inside, it looks like every other convenience store, except for the four industrial fryers behind the counter and a mountain of crispy chicken and “jojos,” their version of fried potatoes, on display. Travelers and locals line up to go through 400 pieces of chicken on a normal day. The leg-breast-thigh combo for $8.99 can keep anyone satisfied on the drive from Charleston to Savannah. The chicken’s skin has just enough crackle and bite to keep it crisp over the course of the journey, and the meat stays moist, so napkins come in handy. Sure, Dodge’s sells pizza sticks and corn dogs too, but it’s the chicken that keeps customers coming back for more. — Erin Perkins

Boiled Peanuts, the Carolinas

Groundnuts, goober peas, boiled peanuts — call them what you will, these squishy legumes have a rich history in South Carolina dating back to the culinary traditions enslaved Africans brought to the United States. More bean-y than nutty, boiled peanuts remain a favorite at Southern gatherings of any kind, and are a clutch local purchase at gas stations, where their combo of protein, nutrients, and salty goodness make them the ideal roadside snack. Refuel and Whaley’s are perennial options, but you’ll also find boiled peanuts in most chain gas stations throughout the state. — KS

The Midwest

Breakfast Pizza, Iowa

Casey’s General Stores, based in Ankeny, Iowa, operates more than 2,000 convenience stores in 16 Midwestern states, with 23 percent of those stores in Iowa alone. The gas station chain started selling pizza in 1984, dropping an oven into small Iowa towns where bigger pizza chains don’t exist. On September 14, 2001, it started selling breakfast pizzas: a light, airy crust with a choice of cheese sauce or sausage gravy in place of the classic tomato sauce, topped with bacon or sausage, scrambled eggs, and mozzarella and cheddar cheese. — Susan Stapleton

Pasties, Minnesota

When winding a car up the craggy shoreline of Lake Superior’s North Shore, it’s vital to stop for a gas fill-up in the rustic village of Lutsen. Inside Lockport Marketplace, travelers will find everything necessary for a trip in this northern part of the country. Groceries, camp supplies, fresh baked goods, and the best roadside hot-from-the-oven pasties in the state. The savory hand pies are popular around Minnesota’s Iron Range region, as an easily transported and hearty lunch for area miners. Lockport’s include a flaky crust, beef, carrots, potatoes, and the all-important, pungent rutabaga. — Joy Summers

New Glarus Beer, Wisconsin

Midwesterners take “drinking local” seriously, as liquor stores routinely see unwanted beers from other states end up as “shelf turds,” collecting dust. There are exceptions, especially thanks to the wonderful world of government regulation that controls beer distribution. Big Brother’s meddling makes certain beers scarce and coveted, depending on where you live. Beyond that, some folks just aren’t interested in sharing. Case in point: New Glarus Brewing, located about 130 miles northwest of Chicago, which only sells its excellent beer in Wisconsin. That makes their beers, like New Glarus Spotted Cow, popular purchases at local gas stations near the Illinois or Minnesota borders. Beer fans from out of state frequently load up their trunks with beer while filling their tanks — sometimes clandestinely. There’s a well-traveled myth that it’s illegal to import the beer over state lines. — Ashok Selvam

Twin Bings, Iowa

A product of the Palmer Candy Company in Sioux City, Iowa, Twin Bings is a staple of gas station candy shelves throughout Iowa and Nebraska. The treat consists of two round, chewy, cherry-flavored nougats that are bathed in chocolate and chopped peanuts to balance the sweet, cherry center. — KS

Mama Mary’s Hummus, Ohio

When does gas station hummus earn its own Instagram account? When it’s Mama Mary’s, the spreadable sensation at the Sunoco station in Olmsted Falls, Ohio, a suburb just outside Cleveland. Gorgeous trays of sesame-topped hummus in flavors like garlic, jalapeno, and “pickles’’ are indeed worthy of documentation, as evidenced by the thousands of followers who swear by the dips. Owner Khalil Dari opened the station-adjacent Sunoco Cafe a few years back, where his mom, also the chef, began serving gyros and other sandwiches, but it was the hummus that took off. Today you can buy full hummus gift baskets and catering trays from the Sunoco, no top-off required. — Lesley Suter

Shawarma and More, Detroit

Many stations in the metro Detroit area, particularly in Dearborn, are owned by Arab American families, resulting in delightful destinations like Dearborn’s always-packed halal burger stand Taystee’s Burgers — the perfect stop for a beef bacon and cheeseburger before a drive-in movie at the iconic Ford-Wyoming Theater — or Berkley’s Mr. Kabob, a shop known for its shawarma as much as its platters of kafta and kabobs, located inside a Sunoco. At Detroit 75 Kitchen, an Arab American-owned food trailer located beside a busy US Fuel in an industrial area off I-75 makes some of the most miraculous sandwiches, smoked chicken, and, yes, chicken tenders (hot, crisp, moist perfection) with sides of garlic-cilantro fries; it’s become a magnet for hungry Detroiters grabbing a meal on their lunch break. — Brenna Houck

Dot’s Pretzel Sticks, North Dakota

While Dot’s twisted, salt-speckled, thick-to-the-point-of-being-thicc pretzel sticks are not purely a Dakotas phenomenon, they are the defining snack and seemingly major employer of the small and adorable town of Velva, North Dakota. The family-owned company founded by an actual Dot touts its “top-secret coating” as the key to its success, that’s earned it a place on gas station snack shelves throughout the country. — LS

The West

Tri-Tip Sandwiches, Central California

Located off I-5 halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco is Harris Ranch, a massive cattle farm with a famed restaurant, hotel, and quick-serve lunch spot, all serving its namesake beef. The latter, the Harris Ranch Express BBQ, is part Shell station, part carnivore haven, where the gas station checkout counter doubles as a butcher’s display case, and a takeout window puts out excellent Central California-style barbecue, specializing in a regional favorite cut, the tri-tip. There are ribs and pulled pork, but the sliced tri-tip served on a long hoagie roll is what you’re here for. — LS

Ice Cream Sandwiches, Northern California

It’s-It ice cream sandwiches remain one of the Bay Area’s most beloved freezer-case desserts, manufactured in the city of Burlingame and found at gas stations throughout the state. Ice cream flavors like vanilla, strawberry, cappuccino, and Nuggets — vanilla ice cream dipped in chocolate and bits of waffle cone — come sandwiched between two oatmeal cookies, and are sturdy enough not to drip on the upholstery. — KS

Fried Catfish, Seattle

For years, the startlingly excellent hot bar at a 24/7 Shell gas station in Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood was one of the best-kept dining secrets in the city. Word has since gotten out, with local critics and TikTok influencers extolling the many virtues of its fried catfish: delicately breaded with just the right amount of seasoning. The garlic chicken wings and gizzards are good bets, too, best fresh from the fryer, if you can time a fill-up not long after they swap out the trays (the friendly cashiers are usually honest about it). — Gabe Guarente

Spam Musubi, Hawai’i

With a nub of seasoned rice stacked with Spam and wrapped with nori, Spam musubi is a Hawaiian hybrid delicacy. It’s found throughout the islands alongside some of the best gas station fare in the nation, at local chains like Aloha Island Mart, Kuntz Shoppette & Gas Station, and even 7-Eleven. — KS

Kayla Stewart is a freelance food and travel writer based in Harlem with roots in Houston, Texas. Naya-Cheyenne is a Miami-raised, Brooklyn-based multimedia illustrator and designer.

The Great Pink Sugar Cookie Rivalry of Southwestern Utah

May 26, 2021 Admin 0 Comments

Several chains, including Dutchman’s and Swig, offer the bright cookies. The question is: Who baked them first?

My entry into Southern Utah’s frosted cookie feud began innocently enough. After living in Colorado for a good chunk of 2020, the time came for the 13-hour drive back to Los Angeles through mountainous highways that, while scenic, don’t provide many opportunities for roadside delights. It’s a long haul of Subways, Starbucks, and McDonald’s, save for the lower tip of Utah jutting out across Interstate 15, where some come for Dixie State University, or a bit of respite after visiting Zion National Park or, for a junk food-loving first-timer like me, the opportunity to eat at regional chains like Iceberg Drive Inn and Arctic Circle in one fell swoop.

As excited as I was for my first go at fry sauce and “thick shakes,” nothing could have prepared me for the alliance I’d unknowingly choose by way of a legendary local treat just steps from the gas pump at Dutchman’s Market.

With a beige exterior and brown stucco roof that belie the pastel delicacies inside, Dutchman’s Market isn’t any old rest stop. The family-run boutique, bakery, and gas station sells everything from Danish Maileg stuffed toys and cutesy home goods to Doritos and Diet Coke out of its Santa Clara store, just minutes outside the quaint pioneer town of St. George. But, above all, it’s known for homemade cookies, perfect $1.50 drops of award-winning chocolate chip, peanut butter, coconut, oatmeal chocolate chip, and its signature item, a sugar cookie slathered in pink frosting.

Pale pink sugar cookies are a bit of a thing in Utah — a regional treat tiptoeing between the realms of dessert and snack time, particularly when paired with a fountain soda, as they often are. Sometimes served cold, sometimes not, the cookies are surprisingly hefty but rarely dry, and thick, immobile pads of rosy frosting render each one tooth-achingly sweet. They’re undeniably delicious and ubiquitous, but are rarely credited with having originated right here at Dutchman’s.

Disputed origins are practically mandatory for regional foods, as are intensely felt loyalties to different proprietors. Did Teressa Bellissimo or John Young really invent Buffalo wings in upstate New York? Is Cole’s or Philippe the originator of the French dip sandwich in Los Angeles? And if you’re driving through New Haven, are you stopping at Sally’s or Pepe’s for pizza? Utah’s pink sugar cookies — perhaps even to the surprise of those who love them — are no different.

Follow its frosted trail back a few decades and you’ll find a family recipe lovingly tweaked to perfection by Nick Frei, co-owner of Dutchman’s Market with his wife, Liisa. Hand-scooped, pressed, and topped with buttercream frosting, they’re a must-try for those in the know, but the ever-popular pink sugar cookie is also symbolic of what happens when something you create takes on a life of its own. Similar versions can now be found all over the state, with most snackers unaware that it actually originated here, at a self-described tiny little gas station in a tiny little town.

You can thank Swig for that. Known for syrup-spiked “dirty sodas,” the Southwestern soda chain churns out flavor-soaked, glitter-infused sodas like a freaky carbonated Starbucks, popular among many Mormons who enjoy caffeine in the form of cola while religiously abstaining from coffee and tea. Transcendent combinations like the best-selling Raspberry Dream (Dr. Pepper with raspberry puree and coconut cream) have grown a rabid fanbase that’s fueled expansion to 30 locations in Utah and Arizona, but one of their most iconic items isn’t even soda. It’s a pink frosting-slathered sugar cookie that’s uncannily similar to Dutchman’s — because that’s what it’s modeled after.

When prepping its first location back in 2010 (Swig now operates 30 nationwide) founder Nicole Tanner wanted a homemade cookie on the menu, “Not something that looked packaged and processed,” she said. A friend suggested she try Dutchman’s and Tanner loved them all. Swig soon became the Dutchman’s first wholesale client, and the cookie one of Swig’s top sellers.

Then came September 2012, when a drastic flood ravaged Dutchman’s and shut the business down for eight months — putting a sudden halt to the supply of pink frosted cookies.

“It was awful!” said Tanner. “They obviously couldn’t supply our cookies any more and didn’t know when or if they would ever reopen. … We were so sad for them, but had to quickly focus on what we were going to do to keep up with the demand of cookies with our now thriving business. So we went to work creating recipes to match as closely [as possible] to the cookies we were selling so that our customers would continue buying them. After revising them multiple times we felt like we had the perfect cookies for Swig.” Now, the Freis believe someone at Swig had begun baking their own cookies and labeling them the Dutchman’s even before the flood, but it’s tough to prove. (Tanner previously highlighted the cost effectiveness and ease of using the company’s own recipe to St. George News in 2014.)

Tanner soon opened her own bakery, and once Swig had more locations, they expanded to a larger operation in Salt Lake City that bakes and ships all Swig’s cookies. Now, nearly a decade later, Swig’s and Dutchman’s cookies remain — visually at least — identical.

Both Dutchman’s and Swig offer their cookies in bulk for the baby showers, weddings, and events they’re known to be served at, but some locals I spoke with didn’t even seem aware of the cookie’s true origins, perhaps because Dutchman’s and Swig aren’t even the only two in the game. Sodalicious, a regional soda company with a business model so similar to Swig they were in a lawsuit over it for years, also produces their own pink cookie after first selling Dutchman’s, while emerging cookie chain Crumbl permanently affixes them to its rotating weekly menus at 191 stores nationwide. (Quickly becoming a regular presence on TikTok, Crumbl’s version, which goes heavy on the almond flavor, are served in — what else? — an eye-catching light pink box.)

While you can’t trademark a cookie recipe, it’s clear Swig has won the battle for name recognition in the court of public opinion. Search “Dutchman’s Market cookies” on Google, and it’ll yield copycat recipes for the snazzy soda chain: Almost Swig Sugar Cookie Recipe, Original Swig Cookies, Copycat Swig Sugar Cookies.(“The Swig sugar cookie has definitely taken on a name all its own throughout the years from Pinterest recipes to bloggers raving about how they can’t get enough,” says Tanner.) A shelf-stable frosted cookie mix was sold online with Swig branding as recently as 2017, and cookies were once even built into the chain’s original name, Swig n’ Sweets, which is still reflected in Swig’s URL, SwigNSweets.com.

Yet, like most facsimiles, one remains an inferior copy. London Blackburn, 37, began visiting Swig eight years ago and noticed a distinct difference in cookie quality as the business expanded. After moving closer to Dutchman’s Market, Blackburn now gets her sweets and sodas from Liisa and Nick’s shop. “The cookies are not factory made — they have much more of a handmade look to them, the way Swig’s cookies used to look. They were also cheaper,” she says. “I have basically quit going to Swig and I solely go to Dutchman’s now — and so do my friends.”

Jessica Walton, 31, agrees. “I definitely prefer the Dutchman’s cookie versus the Swig cookie now,” she says. “The texture between the cookies aren’t the same. Dutchman’s feels like it’s a homemade treat grandma baked just for you, and Swig’s is manufactured for their many locations across several states and seems to miss that human element.”

The main difference seems to be just that. Liisa believes the Dutchman’s bakers’ institutional knowledge — when to add more flour, how to shift the recipe if it’s humid — is a key, unquantifiable ingredient to their pink sugar cookie. Churned out in a kitchen so small it would take “about 30 seconds” to tour, Nick and the bakers still manage to make upward of 25,000 cookies during a big week, prioritizing quality above all else. (The Freis currently provide wholesale Dutchman’s cookies to nearly two dozen other locations in Utah, Idaho, and Nevada, with Nick driving to Salt Lake City weekly to exchange cookies with other business owners in a parking lot, like some pink-frosted drug deal.)

“Some of our vendors who, well, [previously] sold our cookies wanted us to decrease the cost by using margarine or whatever, and we just never would do that. I think just being consistent [with] using fresh and good ingredients has kept us in the game,” Liisa says. When asked to describe its flavor, she struggles, but contends, “It’s just probably the best sugar cookie you’ll ever taste.”

Though they admit it sounds cheesy, the Freis credit “love” as a magic ingredient, indicative of the strength of their community, which rallied behind them when Dutchman’s closed for eight months following that massive flood in 2012, and continue to do so today. “We have people who got cookies here as kids, and now they bring their kids,” she says, after 35 years in the business. “We’ve been around so long.”

Dutchman’s may not get the credit for inventing this iconic regional treat, but they undoubtedly deserve it. The Freis take a homespun approach that’s hard for a larger chain to replicate. While Swig’s cookie is an accessory, at Dutchman’s, it’s the main show, the type of local gem that makes a road trip memorable, an origin story resonate, and those last few hours of a long drive a whole lot easier. I’ve had both, and can say irrefutably that Dutchman’s cookies are better, not just on taste, but for quality in what they stand for: a legacy persevering beyond the gas pump in Santa Clara, Utah, as a soda chain sells copies up and down I-15.

Carlye Wisel is a theme park journalist and expert who reports about things like how Butterbeer was invented and Disney’s secret food lab on her podcast, Very Amusing With Carlye Wisel. Louiie Victa is a chef, recipe developer, food photographer, and stylist living in Las Vegas.
Fact checked by Andrea López-Cruzado

I Found the Formula for Road Trip Bliss, and It’s Gardetto’s and Sour Punch Straws

May 26, 2021 Admin 0 Comments

This promising, punishing combination is the ultimate gas station snack

Like Starbucks and national pharmacy chains, fast-food restaurants and suburban model homes, gas stations, by and large, share a quality of near-universal uniformity. You only need to step into them a few times before you know intuitively where everything is: there’s the cash register, the refrigerated drinks, the all-important bathroom. For drivers and travelers on the road, the relationship with this space — a familiarity built up five minutes at a time, stop by stop — is a necessity and a banality. It’s a fact of life, in the same vein as death and taxes.

But gas stations, for all their mundanity, still carry a whiff of possibility. (Or is that just the smell of petrol fumes?) You can thank the idea of the road trip for that, and all the senses of nostalgia, adventure, and boundlessness that it engenders. Cast under the warm glow of the Great American Road Trip™, gas stations become a supporting player. Not just a waypoint to take a piss and fill up the tank, but to refuel in all senses of the word. Here, there are unexpected pleasures to be found, whether in the kinds of people you come across, the idiosyncratic souvenirs you might find next to the Band-Aids, or the bounty that awaits in the second-most important spot in a gas station.

I’m talking about the snack aisle, of course. That’s where the magic happens, especially when you’re just setting out on your journey. There’s always so much packed onto the shelves, an entire universe of snacking, despite the limited space inherent in the phrase “gas station mini mart.” Chips and pretzels, cookies and crackers, nuts and bars, jerky and fruit leathers, the gum and mints that provide some semblance of freshening up during hours on the road. It can be a place of similitude across city and state lines, or a site of discovery, depending on whether the gas station stocks regional specialties.

For me, the sameness of the offerings — unsurprising, comforting, guaranteed — while on a journey to somewhere new is half of the appeal. Having grown up in car country and logged a cumulative total of a couple hundred thousand miles (at least) in 20-plus years’ worth of family road trips, I know exactly which snacks to reach for each time I find myself in a gas station.

And now I pass along this arcane knowledge, a time-tested combo, on to you: Gardetto’s and Sour Punch Straws, never one without the other. The Gardetto’s, a proudly Chex-less medley of rye toasts, pretzels, and miniature breadsticks, provides crunch and the salty-savory umami that is a telltale gift of MSG; the Sour Punch Straws (think that puckering, baby-shaped candy in tubular form) offer a vigorous chewiness and bright, mouth-puckering tartness tempered by sweet corn syrup. Consumed separately, in one mindless stream of hand-to-mouth coordination, the onslaught of salt and sugary acid, respectively, is too much. But eaten in alternating mouthfuls, they somehow balance each other out, creating a particular kind of gustatory harmony only achievable through the mad-scientist melding of artificial flavors and preservatives fine-tuned to the nth degree.

Pure junk, pure treasure. Even though I know with certainty that this combination will leave me feeling terrible in approximately 20 minutes, teeth squeaking from the straws’ corrosive cocktail of sugar and citric acid, body weighed down by no less than five servings of flour, oil, and seasoned-by-the-heavens rye chips (those elusive gems of the pack).

But you take the bad with the good. That’s the promise of the gas station: mostly nondescript, sometimes shitty, but not without the odd high here or there. I was reminded of this recently when I went to a nearby gas station in search of my signature Gardetto’s and Sour Punch Straws. One glance and I knew where to go for my snacks: in one aisle, the last pack of Gardetto’s; on the other side, my favorite blue raspberry Sour Punch Straws, the only flavor offered. I paid at the counter, through a plexiglass divider that went nearly all the way up to the ceiling. The cashier, a man my dad’s age, face obscured by a mask, watched me struggle to open the plastic bag for my purchase. My usual method of surreptitiously licking my thumb to better separate the pressed folds of the bag, now incredibly unsanitary in hindsight, was rendered off-limits in COVID times.

“Want to know a trick to open it?” he asked me, just when I had managed to finally get the bag unfolded.

He took out another bag, pressed flat from the pack, and showed me the seam along the right. Just slide your finger under that line, and the bag should open, no spit required. “I learned that from TikTok,” he said, sounding pleased with himself. “You know those hacks? At least that’s something I learned from them.”

I couldn’t help but laugh, caught off guard by the pleasure of this encounter, the first one I had shared with a stranger in a long time. We wished each other a good day as I left the store, snacks and newly acquired knowledge in hand; I think we enjoyed the exchange, a rarity among interactions between retail workers and customers, typically full of automatic niceties. The unexpected delight of our conversation followed me all the way home, where I opened the bag of Gardetto’s and a pack of sour straws. They tasted just as I remembered. Maybe even a little better. At the gas station, you always find what you’re looking for, and then you find what you didn’t know you needed.

Naya-Cheyenne is a Miami-raised, Brooklyn-based multimedia illustrator and designer.

America’s Forgotten Filling Stations

May 26, 2021 Admin 0 Comments

For the first half of the 20th century, hungry travelers couldn’t do better than a roadside tea room

If you happened to be traveling from Washington, D.C. to Richmond, Virginia in 1935, you’d likely find yourself cruising down Route 1, the forebear of Interstate 95. With the Great Depression receding in your rearview mirror, the trip is really an excuse to put some miles on your new Plymouth PE Deluxe, just like the one Chrysler showed off at Chicago’s Century of Progress exposition. Cars of the era average about 14 mpg, but 20 miles out, you notice you’re running low on gas, around Ashland, a 19th-century resort town that’s home to Randolph-Macon College. The car isn’t the only one on empty; your driving party is famished too. Just past Route 54, you spot an Esso gas station sign and pull into Ella Cinders Tea Room, likely named for the newspaper comic strip launched 10 years earlier. Lucky for you, it’s Sunday, when the restaurant offers 75-cent dinners of fried chicken or Smithfield ham.

For half a century beginning around the 1910s, tea rooms popped up across America on the shoulders of the nation’s rapidly expanding roadways. When the Virginia General Assembly included the 110-mile stretch of Route 1 between Richmond and Washington (then called the Richmond-Washington Highway) in the first state highway system in 1918, much of it was still gravel and soil, and when it rained, horses would have to pull cars through the mud. But the State Highway Commission (with help from prisoners sentenced to hard labor on Virginia’s convict road force) fully paved Route 1 by 1927 and widened it to four lanes in the early 1930s, just as registered motor vehicles in Virginia approached half a million — bringing plenty of business to Ella Cinders’ gas pumps and restaurant.

Tea rooms declared themselves with roadside signs, advertised in early guidebooks, and occasionally employed eye-catching mimetic designs like a giant steam-spouting rooftop coffee pot. Some of these restaurants also operated as inns or offered outdoor sleeping porches in the summers. Many sold folksy home decor and souvenirs, too. There were tea rooms at various price levels — “Look at the prices and watch the Fords go by,” wrote one customer in an early guest book — though not all welcomed any traveler. Black motorists, excluded from segregated eating places, were forced to rely on guides like the Green Book, which advertised hospitable tea rooms run by Black proprietors, like Bagley’s in Sheepshead Bay, New York, and the Black Beauty Tea Room in Mount Olive, North Carolina.

The Ashland Museum

Among the many flavors of tea room, the most convenient to drivers of the era was the combination tea room and gas station, like Ella Cinders. By the early 1900s, gas pumps became a new moneymaker for small businesses. A number of companies had turned Fort Wayne, Indiana, into the gas pump capital of the world, mostly supplying pumps to general and hardware stores before dedicated filling stations became the norm. Other roadside businesses snapped up pumps too, and soon tea room filling stations could be found between major hub cities from Kentucky to Maine, Missouri to Alberta, long before any modern conception of the gas station as a culinary destination. Swan’s Service Station and Canary Tea Room in Pembroke, New Hampshire, served waffles and Sunday specials of lobster and steak. At the Green Shutter Tea Room in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, drivers could enjoy a luxurious club sandwich. Other fancifully named examples included the Gypsy Tea Room and Gas Station, Walker’s Jack O’Lantern Log Cabin Tea Room and Service Station, the Bungalow Tea Room, the Bird of Paradise Tea Room, and the Chase-Em-In Tea Room.

Only rarely did any of these actually serve tea.

“‘Tea room’ is a somewhat confusing name for these places,” says Jan Whitaker, restaurant historian and author of Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn: A Social History of the Tea Room Craze in America. These eateries would more likely serve lunch and dinner than the European-style midafternoon snack. They might serve lobster and fried clams by the ocean, and barbecue in the Midwest. Desserts were top sellers, especially ice cream, once electricity and refrigeration became widespread. In the 1930s, The Alamo tea room in Moberly, Missouri, served four-course Thanksgiving dinners, entertained dancers with a live band (“No Cover Charge — No Stags” read one advert), and threw popular New Year’s Eve parties.

“There was very little money to be made in afternoon tea,” Whitaker explains. “What ‘tea room’ really conveyed is: Women are welcome here.”

Kipp Teague

Universal Images Group via Getty Images

“Before the rise of tea rooms in this country, the world of restaurants consisted of hotels, bar-restaurants, and working-class saloons. These were largely male preserves, and primarily only the finer restaurants reserved small, private dining rooms for female clients,” writes Cynthia Brandimarte, formerly of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, in her Winterthur Portfolio essay, “To Make the Whole World Homelike: Gender, Space, and America’s Tea Room Movement.”

Taking inspiration from a European trend, tea rooms began popping up all over American cities in the 1910s and ’20s, creating social spaces for women and serving the nation’s growing demographic of working women. Then came Prohibition, which took a toll on masculine eating domains that made most of their money off booze, even as it buoyed purveyors of nonalcoholic beverages, like soda fountains and cafeterias. Tea rooms served teetotaling customers of both genders, but they were especially appealing to women who’d campaigned for temperance.

Just as tea rooms were taking off in the big cities, the country witnessed the lightning-fast evolution of the automobile from a curiosity to a staple of middle-class life. Between 1911 and 1925, the number of cars in the world jumped from about 600,000 to 17.5 million. More and more, those cars were ferrying, or being driven by, women — women who, in an era where they were often not welcome in restaurant dining rooms without the presence of a man, needed a place to stop and eat.

Getty Images

According to historian Margaret Walsh of the University of Nottingham, in the earliest days of automotives, there were real questions about how gender roles would map onto car use. Beyond a few famous pioneers like Emily Post and Edith Wharton, it was unclear to manufacturers whether women would engage with dirty, hand-cranked cars at all. Men like C.H. Claudy, automotive columnist for Woman’s Home Companion, argued that slower, cleaner electric cars were better fit for women. In 1907 he described the electric car as a “modern baby carriage,” a machine a woman “can run herself, with no loss of dignity, for making calls, for shopping, for a pleasurable ride, for the paying back of some small social debt.”

But makers of gas-powered cars had a vested interest in making them more appealing to female customers. After self-starters spread in the 1920s, General Motors introduced the idea of the two-car family in 1929, implying the company believed women should have their own cars. “Rural women, in particular, welcomed the possibility of relieving their isolation by driving into town to shop, to sell their farm produce, or to attend farm clubs,” Walsh writes. “Being more familiar with teams and buggies, they were less daunted by the prospect of driving than their urban counterparts, who were more used to walking or taking public transit.”

Inspired by the tea room trend of the big cities, rural entrepreneurs began applying the term tea room to their own businesses — many of them gas stations — in hopes of capturing the new influx of so-called urban “autoists” who spent summer weekends driving around the countryside shopping for antiques or traveling to resort towns. Many male customers enjoyed meals at tea rooms (one tea room even offered a special meal service for male chauffeurs), but the tea room branding would help bring in mixed parties. “Restaurants that were associated with gas stations could be crummy. Calling it a tea room suggested it was better than average,” Whitaker says. “There were a lot of rough, dirty places. Women, especially if they were middle class and had a car, they just wouldn’t tolerate a dirty lunchroom.”

To convince motorists they were nice, cozy places to eat, proprietors made their tea rooms look like homes, often converting old houses and other residential buildings. They deployed roaring hearths, mantels decorated with handicrafts and pottery, oak furniture, handwoven table runners and rag rugs, and Arts and Crafts-style decorations — even selling pieces of decor as souvenirs right out from under guests.

This domestic atmosphere facilitated arguably the most subversive thing about these businesses: They didn’t just cater to women, but were often run by women, too. Whether they were wives looking for additional income, school teachers on summer break, or church members raising funds, rural women used tea rooms as rare avenues of economic opportunity. Whitaker says it’s unlikely that many, if any, female tea room proprietors operated the gas pumps on their own, but they could work alongside husbands, male relatives, and employees.

The tea room’s homey disguise helped these women meet cultural expectations that they remain in the domestic sphere, just as Mobil and Shell designed gas stations that mimicked residential buildings in order to blend in with their surroundings (whether that was a bungalow, ranch, or Tudor revival). Popular women’s magazines like Good Housekeeping, House Beautiful, and Woman’s Home Companion coached women everywhere across the cultural-commercial tightrope. They acted as economics textbooks, providing guidance on negotiating leases, calculating capital, and managing kitchen staff.

Guilford Historical Society

From the collections of The Henry Ford

Some magazines specifically targeted rural readers, like one 1922 Woman’s Home Companion piece titled, “Do You Own a Barn, an Old Mill or a Tumble Down House?” that encouraged women to convert rundown country buildings into tea rooms. Worn-out rural structures not only provided cheap accommodation to fledgling businesses; they also played into a larger cultural craving for bucolic fantasy.

The rustic, old-fashioned home was like catnip to pearl-clutching proponents of the trending “Country Life” movement, who feared the destruction of the traditional home environment in cities (ever since Modern Times there’s been a longing for “simpler times”). Reformers — including President Theodore Roosevelt, who convened a commission on the subject — hoped that improving rural lifestyles would keep country folks from abandoning rural drudgery for the big cities. Country-lifers were happy to throw a few bucks toward “yokel” entrepreneurs running tea rooms to keep them from deserting the heartland — so those business owners played up the country homemaker act to bring in business. As another Woman’s Home Companion article in 1922 explained, “The more a tea house can absent itself from a commercial and grasping atmosphere — that ‘we-want-nothing-from-you-but-money’ spirit — the more successful a foundation will it build for itself.”

While quaint fantasies might seem antithetical to progressive automotive trends, many in the Country Life movement supported modernizing roads to keep country folks happy. Reformers worked in parallel with the auto enthusiasts of the Good Roads movement who lobbied for expanding the road network. Tea rooms appealed to both efforts, revitalizing rundown country buildings, generating economic opportunity, and inspiring city visitors with romantic visions of homespun country life.

Ye Green Lantern Shoppe in Gorham, Maine, for instance, advertised “rustic shelters in which to rest and lunch,” in addition to tea room refreshments and automobile supplies, while Ye Olde Common Tea Room in Lancaster, Massachusetts, offered “18 acres of land reserved for camping and parking,” a “Gulf refining company filling station,” and “Supreme oil and supplies,” finishing off the ad noting in folksy twang, “house open the year ‘round.”

weirsbeach.com

Urban tea rooms became stale during the late ’50s, unable to attract younger crowds. Even as post-war America became a playground for roadsters, rural tea rooms faded away along with their urban counterparts. They ceded their customers to streamlined fast-food chains like McDonald’s and A&W, which could keep up with the pace of modern travelers. Other than rare examples like The Coffee Pot in Roanoke, Virginia, which survived by transforming into a roadhouse (and music venue that’s seen the likes of Willie Nelson), filling station tea rooms disappeared too. Over the years the buildings fell prey to natural disasters, disuse, and economic turnover. Now there’s little evidence of their existence beyond a few weathered photos.

Today’s American tea rooms mostly take inspiration from a fantasy of British aristocracy, serving afternoon scones and sweets in posh environments. The unique American tea room tradition of the ’20s and ’30s, with fried chicken dinners, sleeping porches, and gas pumps, seems bizarre now. Like the cars they serviced, tea room filling stations weren’t neat, but they were backdrops for the period’s turbulent evolution of culinary and cultural norms.

In some ways these spaces remained exclusive, with segregation and class determining where some customers could and couldn’t eat. But in other ways tea room filling stations were places of cultural exchange, full of Walt Whitman-esque contradictions: modern and quaint, masculine and feminine, fast and slow, business and home, rural and urban. They invited drivers to hit the road, provided chances for women to dine and work alongside men, and helped the American culture speed up — ironically, making their own offerings seem outdated, even absurd in a modern, mobile culture. They created demands that would be their undoing.

Not long after your stop for gas in Ashland, Virginia, in 1935, the Ella Cinders Tea Room would begin to drift away from its original concept. A postcard in 1947 shows the tea room had nixed the gas pumps (or at least stopped advertising them). Turns out that was the wrong direction to go. Sometime later, the building was torn down, and today the site is an AutoZone. It doesn’t serve tea.

Fact checked by Kelsey Lannin

Filling Up

May 26, 2021 Admin 0 Comments

A celebration of eating at America’s gas stations, with all the sweet, salty, crunchy, and caffeinated things you need to top off your tank

There are few places in America where our needs and wants collide in such effortless fashion as the get-it-all, do-it-all gas station. Your car needs things: fuel, for one, or air, or wiper fluid. We, then, typically want things: Hot Cheetos or sour Skittles or nachos or coffee (both want and need) or a hubcap-sized diner breakfast or some tacos to go. (OK, you probably really need that bathroom.) In and among the fluorescent-lit pump lines, gleaming aisles, and adjoining dining rooms of the great American gas station, we — and our vehicles — can truly have it all.

The utilitarian glory of fuel stops is nothing new, but there’s a good chance you and your stomach (and upholstery) experienced it more than usual over the past year. With air travel curtailed due to COVID-19, car trips were the preferred mode of transportation for 97 percent of Americans last summer, and this year nearly 70 percent of American travelers are still planning to stick to the road. That means a lot more chances to wander the Chevrons and Texacos and Shells and Mobils and BPs and all the micro-regional stations of this country, exploring the wonderful ways the mini-marts and adjacent (and surprisingly ambitious) eateries keep our literal and metaphorical tanks full.

Gas station eats provide a unique window into a region and a community, reflecting local tastes (Salmon jerky in the Pacific Northwest! Boiled peanuts in the South! Wawa!), demographics, and immigration patterns. Gas stations have historically been a valuable entrepreneurial foothold for immigrants in America, and today you’ll find some of the best sharska saag, tamales, lamb kabobs, and dak bulgogi sold alongside lotto tickets and 5 Hour Energies at gas stations nationwide. The parking lots, too, are their own kind of commercial real estate, hosting taco trucks and food carts for the steady stream of customers on their way to, or from, somewhere.

So as many of us get ready to pack up the wagon for the big, shiny, escape-filled (and hopefully vaccinated) summer we all deserve, let’s take a moment to celebrate the edible delights of the rarely lauded but undeniably clutch American gas station, there whenever and wherever we need it — with everything we want and more.

The United States of Gas Station Snacks

From Buc-ee’s Beaver Nuggets to 7-Eleven Spam musubi, these are some of the best bites worth pulling off the interstate for.

The Touchscreen Sacrament of Wawa

The cult of Wawa extends far beyond what’s usual for a regional chain. But for me, what makes it truly great is how it represents the best of what Philadelphia has to offer.

A Safe Place to Fill Up

Before Black motorists could freely travel across the American South, Black-owned gas stations offering food and respite acted as safe harbors.

Tea Rooms Were the Original Truck Stops

For the first half of the 20th century, hungry travelers couldn’t do better than a roadside tea room, which created a social space between major cities for America’s pioneering female drivers.

The Teenage Wasteland of Cumberland Farms

As a teenager, there was no better way to “look cool” than by casually drinking coffee. In Massachusetts, that meant iced coffee from the state’s favorite chain gas station.

Behold, America’s Chip Nexus

Thanks to its geographic location in the middle of lower Pennsylvania, Breezewood’s gas stations offer a wide array of the best potato chips the country has to offer.

Sometimes the Best Wine Shop Is a Gas Station

In many cities, the local pump stop is the place where you can pick up bottles made by small producers.

Pure Junk, Pure Pleasure

I found the formula for road trip bliss and its alternating bites of Gardettos and Sour Punch Straws.

The American Dream in the Back of a Sunoco

Thousands of restaurants in gas stations and truck stops are owned by immigrants selling the kinds of comfort foods they wish they could find outside their own homes.

All the Jerky, Ranked

From Urban Cowboy to Slant Shack, from mushroom to beef, which brand reigns supreme?

Musubi With a Side of Petrol

The superiority of Hawai’i’s gas station fare has a lot to do with the state’s close ties to Japan, where convenience store snacking is an art unto itself.

Gridlock and Gorditas On Austin’s Taco Mile

Austin’s best Mexican and Central American street food can be found along Rundberg’s Taco Mile. But why don’t more people know about it?

Yosemite’s Cool, But Have You Seen the Gas Station?

At a gas station on the way to California’s most famous national park, Whoa Nellie Deli makes food far more ambitious than it needs to be, with views that are even better.

The Pink Cookie Rivalry of Southwestern Utah

Several chains, including Dutchman’s and Swig, offer the pastel, sprinkle-topped cookies. The question is: Who baked them first?

An Oasis of Beer and Diesel

Panamint Springs Resort offers the only fuel, lodging, and food within the 65-mile long Panamint Valley. So who ends up there?

Editorial lead: Lesley Suter
Creative director: Brittany Holloway-Brown
Contributors: Martha Cheng, Patty Diez, Krista Diamond, Terrence Doyle, Farley Elliott, Missy Frederick, Amethyst Ganaway, Trisha Gopal, Ryan Sutton, Trey Gutierrez, Carlye Wisel, Jenny G. Zhang, Nicholas Mancall-Bitel, Meghan McCarron, Kayla Stewart, Gabe Guarente, Clair Lorell, Amy McCarthy, Erin Perkins, Ashok Selvam, Susan Stapleton, Joy Summers, Brenna Houck
Illustrators: Naya-Cheyenne, Darya Shnykina
Photographers: Sam Angel, Natalie Behring, Shelby Holte, Michelle Mishina, Louiie Victa, Rosa María Zamarrón
Editors: Nicole Adlman, Monica Burton, Hillary Dixler Canavan, Nadia Chaudhury, Madeleine Davies, Erin DeJesus, Brenna Houck, Rebecca Flint Marx, Jesse Sparks, Matt Buchanan
Copy editor: Kim Eggleston
Fact checkers: Kelsey Lannin, Andrea López-Cruzado, Hanna Merzbach
Engagement editor: Esra Erol
Project manager: Ellie Krupnick
Special thanks to: Terri Ciccone, James Park, Graham MacAree, Milly McGuinness, Amanda Kludt