Hillbillies

Yesterday, I was having a little bit of a crappy day, or I was just a little stressed. Whatever, I was mouthy and just generally pissed off. So this is a bit of a venting session, but one I hope provokes some thought. My rant was probably at least partially fueled by social media and an event created by another local business that keeps popping up on my feed because people I know are “interested” in it. I don’t want to directly call people out here because I prefer to have my confrontations in person where I can really let loose.

Anyway, let’s talk about hillbillies. A couple weeks ago, we had 2 separate customers on the same day tell us that our goodbye shouldn’t be, “Thank you, have a great afternoon!” but rather, “Y’all come back now, y’hear?” Ummm, what?

I am offended not only by people who still, after all these years, assume that people who live in Northern Arkansas, specifically rural Arkansas, are ignorant and backward, but also by people who live here who are ok with the insult. I’m just going to drop a quote here that states more eloquently what I’m trying to say. My apologies if you’re a lover of Dogpatch, The Beverly Hillbillies, and ignoramuses in general.

“Arkansas had long suffered under the pens of yankee scribes, and a theme park populated by make-believe barefoot hillbilly morons was not entirely welcome. The day after Snow made his announcement, two officials with Arkansas’ Publicity and Parks Commission protested that Dogpatch USA would undermine the image of the state. They said the state would gain more from a project more like the Ozark Folk Center which had then just recently received a million dollar federal grant. The two officials said they thought a display of “indigenous folkways and crafts” might better serve to increase long-term tourist interest and create a more favorable image to attract investment.

The news of Dogpatch USA also inspired an angry and insightful response from a Gazette reader in Little Rock. “Perhaps this will draw many tourists to the state; but it will create a poor image of the state and especially the pioneer—the so called Arkansas hillbilly. This same hillbilly is our ancestor who built a state out of a wilderness. Mr. Snow’s project will make Arkansas the laughing stock of the nation. Is this the kind of publicity we want?

“It has taken almost 100 years for the state to ‘live down’ the image created by ‘Three Years in Arkansas’ and ‘A Slow Train Through Arkansas;’ then came Bob Burns with Grandpa Snazzy to bring back the bewhiskered, barefoot, tobacco-chewing, ignorant hillbilly. To further clinch the idea, came the Little Rock Central High School episode of 1957. Now, we have a group of business men who wish to keep this image before the public. Why?

“Where did the Arkansas hillbilly originate? In the mind of a ‘back east’ writer who knew even less about the natives of Arkansas than this writer knows about the inhabitants of Mars … These ignorant hillbillies left us the heritage of integrity, independence and pride. Do we want to trade it for a mess of pottage?”

From “Southern Changes,” the Southern Council 1978-2003

I don’t know for sure why we’ve suffered a resurgence of this kind of thing, but at the risk of sounding xenophobic, it seems to be from business owners who have moved here and want to embrace the culture. I’ll just drop a couple of images. This first one is obviously just cut and pasted from the internet for an event cover, judging by the watermark still on it. I hope you enjoy my Markup edit to erase the business name.

I don’t think you can get the full impact of this next one without the name, so I’ve left it on. Plus I’m not really worried that the owners read my blog, so hopefully I won’t hurt their feelings. I have no illusions that this little post will change the way these business owners are presenting themselves, and by extension our community at large.

So guys, before you start deciding how to present yourself to the world, maybe give a couple thoughts to the culture you’re embracing. This community in the Ozark Hills was built on resiliency, not kitschy ignorance. We’re badasses. We find a way when there isn’t one. We do research. We read books. Hell, we use Google.

I’d like to direct you to one of my favorite Southern culture sources. If you’re a redneck, a hillbilly, a hellraiser, maybe this one is for you. You can subscribe to the Bitter Southerner, but there’s also a podcast and a newsletter that are free.

https://bittersoutherner.com/rednecks-southern-fiction-taylor-brown

Anniversaries and that kind of crap

Apparently I’m feeling nostalgic or something this week. Joe and I will have been married for 12 years on Tuesday. Big Springs (in this permanent location) turns 20 in August. This month marks 14 years that I’ve been running it on my own. First of all, you’d think the imposter syndrome would’ve worn off by now, but alas, it’s still there.

Being married to a self-employed person can’t be easy. Even being a partner to someone who works at a small business has got to be challenging. Our hours are irregular and time off is not only unpaid but sporadic. You get dragged in to crazy projects (Joe helped me install new vinyl flooring in the bathroom here last week when it was over 100 degrees outside plus hundreds of tasks over the years, and John Thomas has had to put in lights, water heaters, and god knows what else). Thank you.

One day last week Joe made dinner for me. He actually told me I should blog about it, so I am. He lit the grill, made us hot dogs with toasted buns, canned baked beans, chips and French onion dip. It was glorious.

I haven’t decided yet how I want to celebrate Big Springs’s anniversary. I think I realized that it doesn’t matter how I mark the occasion, even if it’s just this silly little blog post.

Recipes or nah?

Some of my friends who also happen to also own a restaurant were eating here the other day when one of the front of the house girls popped her head around the corner and asked me what was in the white chocolate chip cookies because someone was asking. I smarted off “white chocolate chips.” My friends laughed, and Denver said it doesn’t bother him to tell people what’s in the food he creates. Someone asked him not long ago what was in his steak sauce, he started rattling off ingredients, and they stopped him because whoever asked just wanted to know because it was the worst steak sauce he’d ever eaten.

So, this gave me two things to ponder on:

1. Don’t be a jerk. Good grief, food is subjective. You don’t have to let someone know that their flavor choices don’t appeal to you. You could… just ask for a different sauce. For instance here, if you don’t care for the side you ordered, we really want to get you something different you’ll like.

2. Giving out recipes that I create isn’t something I generally do. Yeah, I’ll list ingredients for you, but I probably won’t write out my procedure for making something.

So let’s talk about restaurant magic. I honestly think one of the things restaurant patrons treasure about the places they love to eat is the aura of something special happening. I would draw an analogy between cooking for a living and playing sports or being a musician. Maybe some innate talent is required, but anybody doing either of those things successfully is going to tell you that it’s practice. It’s buckling in and doing the same things over and over that make you good at them. Restaurant cooking is the same way, even recipe development. It’s a matter of practice.

Now I will say that the kitchen setup, even in a small place like mine or my friends’ place from above gives us a definite advantage over a home cook. Our stove burners heat more evenly, we have a big old flat-top, we’ve got bad-ass knives and 20 cutting boards, and countless gadgets that make tasks we do every day just a little better. Y’all didn’t think I shredded all those carrots by hand, did you? Well, I used to, but our volume is bigger now and so I have an actual little electric shredder, kind of like a salad shooter from the 80’s. So cool.

Anyway, I think people come to a restuarant, at least partially, for the magic. When they ask me for a recipe, I smile and tell them the secret ingredient is love. Y’all know that’s a big fat lie, the secret ingredient is practice. In August, I’ll have been practicing cooking in this building for 20 years. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.

An afterthought: I realized that when I’m taking notes and writing a recipe out for myself, I never write the instructions. It’s just an ingredients list. If you leave this for someone else to follow, they will most likely not get the results they were expecting. I had to be gone a couple weeks ago so I thought surely someone here could mix up a batch of chocolate chip cookies. Which it turns out, they can, if you include the instructions in your recipe. Shout out to all those ladies with food blogs who write umpteen pages about how to cook stuff.

We're in a Panorama, or Something

A year into this new way of doing things, and we’re still feeling our way around. A lot has changed, but I sense a glimmer of hope, so I thought I’d go back and review what we’ve done, what has worked, and what hasn’t.

Let’s face it, Big Springs is not a fine dining establishment. We’re a BBQ joint and smokehouse, and we have a lot of fun doing it. Last summer, we didn’t have indoor seating, we ran strictly a fast casual counter with outdoor seating, no full table service. In August, we transitioned to the limited indoor seating mandated by the Arkansas Department of Health: seated tables 6 feet apart. This put our indoor seating for the winter at about 25 people maximum at 5 tables. We turned our small dining room where social distancing wasn’t possible into a retail room with our dessert case and order counter. Rather than being seated with a menu, our customers look at a menu on the wall, order at the counter, and then grab a table. We wait on them like usual after that. We did get these cool chalk boards and chalk pens for the menus.

I’d like to update you that this is the ideal setup and that I love it so much, but I’m still pretty ambivalent about it. I think that if people are going to be buying a fifteen dollar dinner, that they don’t want to order at the counter. They want a menu they can hold in their hand, they want to discuss their choices at length, they don’t want to feel rushed. We’re working on that, but aren’t sure when we’ll get to increase our capacity, so we don’t know when we’ll change. Add to that, food prices are still a little volatile and availability is pretty sketch, and it’s hard to invest in a big print job right now. The chalkboard menu is easily changed. I still have about 50 paper menus from last fall that we had to change and so are useless now, bound for the recycling bin.

Anyway, that’s our spring time update for today. We’re surviving by constantly changing and adjusting. Our prices, our format, our staff, and our outlook are fluid, and that’s the way it has to be right now. I’m cool with it.

World War C

Self-Isolation, Phase 1, Day four thousand nine hundred seventy three…

Just kidding, it’s only been a few weeks since Arkansas’s governor ordered all restaurant dining rooms to shut down, which was about a day after we had already closed the dine-in portion of our business. I’ve talked to lots of people in foodservice about where we all think we’re going after things open back up, and whether or not our business models are sustainable. Formats like Western Sizzlin’s buffet look to be relics of the not-so-distant past, while counter-service might be the wave of the future.

Small, funky places like ours are in a dangerous limbo. Big Springs is a kind of fusion of my history, weird new ways to present things, and marketable food. While we consider ourselves artisans, we still need to get paid for our crafts, so here is my thought process on what might be sustainable for us going forward, and why.

April is almost never a profitable month for me. Our location near the Buffalo National River and on the route to Branson means that around 60% of our trade comes from tourists of some kind. A lot of those people are what I call “semi-regulars” in that they come back several times a year but don’t live in the area. Some of them own property here and come stay quite a bit. The other 40% are the people who really support us, who come back every week, and who live or work within 30 miles of us. April is such an in-between month, with spring break falling in March and the summer season beginning in May, that it falls through the business numbers cracks. And falls, and falls. The first week of the mandatory shut down, we operated take-out only. I could do this with me plus one or maybe two other people working. We installed a take-out window on our patio (which we’d been planning to do anyway). We compared our numbers to for that week to the same week last year. We took in about 30% of what we did the year before. Not 30% less, I mean 70% less. Devastating. That’s why I decided to close until dining rooms could open up again.

Now it’s nearly a month later, and social distancing is still necessary. I’ve been spending a whole lot of time staring into space trying to figure out how a small restaurant can operate without wait staff. Our model with our take-out deli style offerings already gives us a little of a leg up over others that exclusively concentrate on the dine-in experience. But how many of our regulars will go for it? I suspect that not many of them. The National Park is still shut down. Branson shows are closed. Recreational lodging is prohibited. How do I draw more than twice as many in when I can’t even offer them what they really want?

What is it that they really want, anyway? This is hard for me to express in a pithy little catch-phrase. So I won’t even try. Our regulars come in for a good meal that they didn’t prepare themselves, for a break from cooking, cleaning, watching tv over a quick meal. They come in to see their friends and neighbors. Eating out is entertainment. It’s a little bit of gossip. It’s more being part of something. How do we give people that when they’re supposed to be staying away from each other? It’s going to be a challenge, but I’m going to try.

So. My current tentative plan is to re-open for take-out and deli sales on May 8. We will have a self-service outdoor seating area, with all tables appropriately separated. I think this outdoor space will be just as fun and funky as our dine-in space has evolved to be. All serve-ware will be disposable. Disinfectant wipes will be provided for tables and door handles, hand sanitizer as well. We will remove the tables from our front dining room to provide more room for people to come in for retail purchases, and expand those offerings. Our volume of things like salads and burgers is going to be reduced, so we will offer sales of some of the ingredients that go into making those things. I’ve got more retail refrigerator space already ordered. Our hours will drastically change, with mainly weekend service.

Who knows, we may kind of turn into a diner, with counter service. We plan to roll with the punches, and continue to make our living here. We will be smart about it, and look at our numbers every day. How much money did we take in? Is everyone getting paid enough? Is this sustainable?