Trout omelets, Turkish kebabs and surprising pie: the flavors of East Tennessee, both native and imported, are ever-changing.
Photo Above: Red Meze kebabs, like this chicken one, are always accompanied by rice with orzo.
Photos Courtesy of Fred & Jill Sauceman.
The aromas of yogurt, garlic and roasting eggplant fill the air. Gyro meat slowly roasts on a rotisserie. Coffee is made the old way, in long-handled copper pots.
These are the scenes and scents at Red Meze, a new Turkish restaurant in downtown Johnson City, Tennessee. With exposed brick walls that hold tiles, copper platters, bowls, dolls and other pieces of colorful art, it is one of the most attractive restaurants in the Tri-Cities region.
The menu is varied, but on every visit, we go for the Turkish fare, beginning each time with an appetizer of roasted eggplant served with tomato and yogurt sauce. Then it’s always a kebab—beef or chicken or iskender, slices of gyro meat served over cubes of pita bread and more yogurt and fresh tomato sauce. And rice.
“Customers always ask us why our rice is so good,” Sengul tells us. “We use basmati.” But, Bulent adds, “The way we cook it is a Turkish style.”
Sengul learned the technique from her mother back in Ankara. “We put orzo pasta in our rice and cook it in butter,” she says.
Sengul and Bulent did not know each other back in Turkey. They met online in the U.S. as Bulent was working on a master’s degree in international business at the University of North Alabama in Florence, where he completed a bachelor’s in business management and marketing.
“It’s been a journey,” Bulent says as he and his wife reflect on all the work it took to transform their aging building into a welcoming space. But with the help of customers who have donated Turkish treasures from their basements and the Yamans’ boundless energy, Red Meze has become a major focal point in Johnson City’s downtown revitalization.
Breakfast at Boone Street
Neal Smith learned to appreciate the flavor of trout when he was a young boy, on Sunday fishing trips with his father and grandfather in the waters of Northeast Tennessee. He learned to make omelets as he cooked his way across the country, in a West Virginia ski resort, a Cajun restaurant in Ohio, and a 127-year-old crawfish joint in Oregon.
In his kitchen today, those Tennessee memories and that culinary experience come together as he crafts buttery omelets filled with smoked trout.
For this Stoney Creek native, that kitchen is close to home. It’s inside the Boone Street Market in Jonesborough, where Smith prepares breakfast every Saturday morning.
Boone Street has become a culinary community center for Tennessee’s oldest town. A walk through the market is a refresher course on the region’s food history and traditions and a reminder of the tremendous seasonal variety of food in Appalachia. The offerings there change by the seasons. In the fall, space once occupied by Turkey Craw Beans and Cherokee Purple Tomatoes yields to sweet potatoes and persimmons.
Boone Street Market isn’t large. It doesn’t need to be. In fact, it shouldn’t be. The space, once the site of a gasoline station, matches the mission perfectly. It’s the very antithesis of the mega-market, reminding its grateful patrons that small businesses matter.
For This Former Policeman, Bagels are the Ticket
They arrive squeezed into Spandex, fresh from the gym. They arrive toting laptops and ready to get a head start on the work day. Some breeze in only long enough to get a cup of coffee for the road. Others loaf and linger for half the morning.
In a short time, Wheeler’s Bagels in Johnson City has built a clientele that is as varied as the menu. Expatriate New Yorkers buy bags of Eric Wheeler’s bagels and take them back home as proof that you really can find a good bagel in East Tennessee, a region known for its biscuits.
Wheeler’s Bagels is a place where retired businesspeople gather to analyze world affairs while mothers of former Science Hill High School band members reunite and remember. It’s that kind of place, well-lit and welcoming.
Wheeler had been a police officer in the city of Sebastian, Florida, for 15 years. But before that, he was a scratch baker, having learned the craft when he was 12 years old.
“At most bagel shops, if you get a sesame seed bagel, they only put the sesame seeds on top. I do the top and the bottom, because the way I look at it, if you order a sesame seed bagel and the seeds are only on the top, once you cut it in half, you’ve got half of a sesame seed bagel and half of a plain bagel.”
Stellar Views and Vinegar Pie
It’s one of those dishes that tastes better than it sounds. Vinegar pie. But the Clinch Mountain Lookout Restaurant, in Grainger County, Tennessee, has been serving it for well over half a century.
“Vinegar pie pretty much takes care of the restaurant, and people drive hundreds of miles to get it,” says owner Krystal Scott.
In the recipe, apple cider vinegar takes the place of lemon juice. Scott says that during the Great Depression, lemons were expensive. And in rural, isolated areas, they were scarce. So cooks did what hard times have always forced them to do. They improvised. A vinegar bottle was almost always in the larder. A few tablespoons cost next to nothing.
Vinegar pie belongs to a classification sometimes referred to as “desperation pies.” Another is a mock apple pie, consisting of a filling of mashed and seasoned soda crackers and no apples whatsoever.
The late Anthony Bourdain found vinegar pies on his travels through West Virginia. He preferred to call them “innovation pies,” because of the ingenuity that created them.
Vinegar pie likely reaches further back in American history than the Great Depression. Our guess is that it extends at least as far back as the American Civil War in the 1860s. One writer suggests that vinegar pie may have even been served during the Colonial period.
The view from the restaurant’s parking lot is one of the prettiest in East Tennessee. Sometimes Scott’s grandchildren and their friends will sleep under the stars on the trampoline in summer.
“And the sunrise never looks the same,” she says. “It’s one of the most photographed spots in East Tennessee, about 23 miles from the Kentucky line. We overlook Cherokee Lake, which is 30,300 acres of water. People love the view. They write in our books all the time about being closer to God and feeling like they’re in Heaven.”
Fred and Jill Sauceman study and celebrate the foodways of Appalachia and the South from their home base in Johnson City, Tennessee.
The story above appears in our May/June 2020 issue.
