A Pudding-Related Miracle

We had a bit of a scare in Nashville last week. The Elliston Place Soda Shop - "Nashville's oldest continuously operating restaurant in the same location" - announced on Monday that it had failed to renew its lease and was closing its doors immediately. It had been, as its qualifier-laden billing suggests, operating in the same location for a very long time, since 1939. That's practically paleolithic by Nashville standards. The reasons for their closing were the usual things: the recession, rising rents, a dwindling customer base. Elliston Place is a typical Southern meat-and-three, or at least what used to be typical, the type of place where you choose your meat, choose your three vegetables (both macaroni and jello count as vegetables, and are among the only items not cooked in pig fat), and follow it up with a shake or some pie or a bit of banana pudding. Unlike most of the other meat-and-threes in town the atmosphere is more retro diner than grungy cafeteria, with red vinyl stools along the counter, formica tables, mini jukeboxes on the tables, and swirls of neon here and there. Well, here, it looks like this:

The entrees and sides are fair-to-middling - you can certainly get better greens and ham elsewhere - but the banana pudding is superb, and the shakes (I hear) are quite nice.

Those of us who care about this sort of thing were quite upset when we heard the news, but I was especially sad. The first time I ever visited Nashville was with Joey in the summer of 2008, and the Elliston Place Soda Shop was our point of rendezvous. He was driving east from Oklahoma City, heading back to Washington after a visit with the family, and I was driving west, killing time between the end of my year in Philadelphia and the beginning of my year in Northampton, in a gap between leases. Neither of us had ever been to Nashville - we'd driven through many times, but never stopped - and so we decided to meet up and explore the place for a day or two. The Elliston Place Soda Shop was recommended in Roadfood, our compass and sextant on all road trips, so we fixed a time to meet there, Joey performed his Priceline wizardry and found us an amazing deal on a lovely boutique hotel, and we hurtled toward each other down I-40.

I got there first (Joey, typically, got a later start than planned) and wandered around in the August heat for a while, poking around a vintage clothing store, exploring an antiquarian bookshop that I have since learned is run by a reactionary bigot and book thief, and finally giving up and going to get some lunch. I think I had chicken and dumplings, I know I had turnip greens, and when Joey finally arrived he immediately decided to order the most ridiculous thing on the menu: a deep-fried pork chop, with greens and macaroni on the side. We also ordered a bowl of banana pudding and split it, at which point both of us nearly exploded.

Then we explored Nashville. We walked down Music Row, thinking we might find some music there, but all we found were office buildings and recording studios. We went downtown and snickered at the kitschy souvenirs - the confederate flag bikinis, the Elvis snowglobes - and spent a good deal of time poking through the Charlie Daniels Museum (free admission!), where we bought matching Charlie Daniels Christmas bobble-heads ($5 each!) before heading over to the Ernest Tubb Record Shop, where we bought George Jones brand bottled water (it was called "White Lightning," but it really tasted just like water). We went to the Nashville Parthenon, ate cheeseburgers at Brown's Diner (it's not in Roadfood, but it is in Hamburger America, our backup guide when all the Roadfood places were closed), listened to some bad music at the Tin Roof (Joey had read somewhere that it was a good place to spot celebrities - it wasn't), and then the next morning we ate sweet-potato pancakes at the Pancake Pantry, possibly the greatest pancake experience either of us had yet had at that point in our lives.

It was a pretty typical Doyle Brothers City Blitz, the sort of thing we'd done earlier that summer in Berlin and Hamburg and would do again in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Madison a year later. Armed with our guidebooks and laptops we would find the coolest neighborhoods, the most ridiculous food, the quirkiest roadside attractions, and then proceed to wear ourselves out trying to squeeze every ounce of experience out of these places. We would walk and walk and walk, often down streets that hadn't seen pedestrians since the advent of the streetcar, popping into bars here and there, muttering jokes and making each other laugh, always assuming that this was the only time we would ever visit this city, always antsy to see more and eat more in the short time that we had there. Relaxed vacationers we were not.

Of course I did return to Nashville, just the next year, in fact, and I've been living here ever since. Had it not been for that first visit with Joey, however, I would almost certainly not be here now. I only applied for my present job after discovering that it was within commuting distance of Nashville, and I only knew that I would enjoy living in Nashville because Joey and I had been here together and had decided, based on our own idiosyncratic criteria, that it was a pretty good town. In some ways it felt like a joint decision between the two of us: it was cool for me to move to Nashville because it was the kind of place Joey and I approved of. And, of course, he'd come visit and we'd do yet more exploring here.

That first visit to the Elliston Place Soda Shop, in other words, knocked over the first in a long chain of still-falling dominoes. For Christmas the next year, after Kate and I had moved here, I gave Joey an Elliston Place magnet, part of a series of magnets and posters depicting famous Nashville landmarks that I intended to spool out to him on birthdays and Christmases in the years to come. The next one I was planning to give him was from the Pancake Pantry, and then if we ever managed to go together to the Donut Den, I'd give him that one next:

So when we heard that Elliston Place was closing, Kate and I decided to go to there one last time for lunch. The day we chose was absolutely sweltering, much like that August day when I walked around the neighborhood waiting for Joey's car to pull up. Unlike that earlier visit, however, this time there was a line out the door of the restaurant and along the sidewalk. Clearly we were not the only ones hoping for one last bowl of banana pudding. We therefore decided, reluctantly, to get lunch nearby and come back later for dessert, but later the line was still too long and the climate was still too wretched, so we came home, bereft of banana pudding and rather despondent. 

But then a remarkable thing happened. On Thursday it was announced that the owners of the restaurant had come to an agreement with their landlord, and the Elliston Place Soda Shop would remain open for at least another five years. I was giddy with relief. Maybe the crowds of suffering customers outside on the sidewalk had had something to do with it - maybe they'd convinced the landlord that the place could still make money, maybe they'd given the owners just the sort of financial boost they needed to afford a slightly higher rent - or maybe the real estate gods had simply recognized how important this place was to me and decided to intervene (the real estate gods have had a lot to answer for lately and could use some good PR). Somebody said early last week that it'd take some sort of miracle to keep the Elliston Place Soda Shop open. Well, miracles have been performed for lesser things than this.

Now I have decided that I owe it to Nashville, to history, and to my memories of my brother to eat as much banana pudding from the Elliston Place Soda Shop as I can, as frequently as I can, in order to help them make rent in the years to come. I may even tuck into the occasional deep-fried pork chop, and I will tip unreservedly.