Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

A Peek at Atomic Tiki

Donahue

Skinny and Jeff

We got to take a look inside and sample the wares of the latest endeavor of Skinny McCabe and Jeff Johnson, Atomic Tiki at 1545 Overton Park.

Are Tiki lounges making a comeback? There’s something about the relaxed hula-ing vibe that feels out of step right now.

In any case, the menu makes good on the smokiness and spices of cuisine. Currently on the menu are lobster roll, Island BBQ nachos, meatballs, sliders, queso dip, and  smoked wings. 

Much of menu can be made vegan with the substitution of tofu.

If you happen to stop by the Atomic Tiki, be sure and get a Spiced Milk Punch, a delicious and creamy concoction of rum, vanilla, half and half, and nutmeg.

Also good is the Schifani’s eyes made with Old Dominick toddy, pineapple juice, and angostura.

Jeff has had the space quite a while and had been running pop-ups. The lack of control of the situation began to wear, so he partnered with McCabe.

The Atomic Tiki is set to open early next year.

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Hattie B’s Opening in April

Hattie B’s, the hot chicken Nashville chain, was originally supposed to open this fall. The restaurant has since reset its sights to open early April in the old Curb Market spot on Cooper.

Construction on the space includes new plumbing, HVAC, and electrical. There will be seating for 126, with 60 of that outdoors. There will be parking for 30.

“We are so excited about our Memphis opening in early spring. It’s such an honor for all of us at Hattie B’s to be a part of the community, and we look forward to seeing our many Memphis friends and meeting new hot chicken lovers real soon!,” says Nick Bishop Sr., co-owner, Hattie B’s Hot Chicken.

Categories
News News Blog

Road Project Will Clog I-240 For Months

Road Project Will Clog I-240 For Months

Portions of I-240 will be snarled with traffic for about a year and a half as road crews replace four bridges that cross it, but officials said the situation is better than other options.

State officials announced MemFix 4 here on Thursday. It’s a $54.1 million plan that will replace two bridges on Poplar, one on Park, and another used by Norfolk Southern Railroad. Those bridges, according to the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT), were built in 1968 and “have structural deterioration and deficiencies that need to be addressed.”

“We are using an innovative process to accelerate the much needed replacement of these bridges while minimizing the inconvenience to motorists,” TDOT Commissioner John Schroer said. “It will allow these bridges to be completed in 9 to12 weekends instead of 2 to 3 years.”

That process is called Accelerated Bridge Construction (ABC). It “requires short-term, total road closures to allow crews the space to do their jobs and the freedom to work around the clock. The closures will also allow construction to be finished in months instead of years.”

So, some portions of I-240 will be completely shut down on certain weekends beginning in the the summer of 2018. However, lane closures will begin in January and will continue until the project is complete in June 2019.

For more information, visit the project’s website.

Categories
News News Blog

Greenspace, the Group that Bought the Parks, Took the Confederate Statues Down

Van Turner and his team speaking on the future of Health Sciences Park


Memphis Greenspace is the non-profit that on Wednesday purchased the two city parks where Confederate statues once stood.

Greenspace, headed by Shelby County Commissioner Van Turner, was formed in October with a mission “to start, strengthen and support community involvement surrounding park-based recreation.”


Wednesday evening the sale of the parks for $1,000 each was complete and the parks were officially privately owned and in the hands of Greenspace. The transfer of Health Sciences Park and Memphis Park to the organization made removing the statues a legal action, Turner said in a press conference Thursday morning near the spot where Nathan Bedford Forrest’s equestrian statue once sat.

Forrest and his wife still remain buried where the statue once stood

Removing the statues “liberates the park from the barriers that prevented it from truly being for the public,” he said.

However, the graves of Forrest and his wife still sit in Health Sciences Park, and Turner said they will remain until an agreement is reached with the members of the Forrest family about where to relocate the bodies. Elmwood Cemetery is a strong contender, he said.

Turner also expects lawsuits from the Sons of the Confederate Veterans and other supporters of the statues.

But for now, Turner said the focus should be shifted from the statues and toward the future of the parks and the city.

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“In the shadow of MLK50, the question on our minds is, where do we go from here?” he said.

Health Sciences Park and Memphis Park will remain open to the public and operate as parks. The group will work with the community to plan, envision, and “amplify our new set of expectations.”

Turner said he anticipates the transfer of other city parks to Greenspace in the future in order to assist in making them better and more accessible to the public.

“This is only the beginning,” he continued. “They’re other parks that need to be liberated from mediocrity and return to the people as a unifying asset.”



Categories
Beyond the Arc Sports

Beyond the Arc Podcast #90: Waiting for Gasol Redux

This week on the show, Kevin and Phil talk about:

  • Monday afternoon’s unprecedented media summit with Marc Gasol
  • Did Gasol do the right thing by talking to everyone? Is there a “right” thing for him to do?
  • Why are fans starting to turn on Marc, and are they right?
  • A long discussion of Kevin’s piece about everything Marc had to say
  • Should the Grizzlies tank the rest of the season? Do they have a choice?
  • How many more games will they lose before Mike Conley returns, and how much will that help?

The Beyond the Arc podcast is available on iTunes, so you can subscribe there! It’d be great if you could rate and review the show while you’re there. You can also find and listen to the show on Stitcher and on PlayerFM.

You can call our Google Voice number and leave us a voicemail, and we might talk about your question on the next show: 234-738-3394

You can download the show here or listen below:


Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

War is Peace

There’s been much discussion over the past few days about “banned words” in the wake of reports by the Washington Post and other media outlets that multiple agencies in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), have been told by Trump administration officials that they cannot use certain words and phrases in agency documents.

The words purportedly banned for used in official agency reports being prepared for the 2019 budget were: entitlement, diversity, vulnerable, transgender, fetus, evidence-based, and science-based. Several sources at HHS also told the Post that they’d been told to use “ObamaCare” as opposed to the “Affordable Care Act” and to refer to “marketplaces” where people purchase health insurance as “exchanges.”

“The assertion that HHS has ‘banned words’ is a complete mischaracterization of discussions regarding the budget formulation process,” said HHS spokesman Matt Lloyd to The Hill.

So, in conclusion, we have reports arising from multiple sources in several federal agencies to multiple media outlets saying they’d been given instruction as to what words they could and couldn’t use in government documents, followed by a denial from an official spokesperson that any of it ever happened.

Your call.

This semantic kerfluffle should serve to remind us that whoever controls language controls the message. George Orwell famously illustrated this in his novel 1984, set in a dystopian then-future world, wherein citizens of Oceania were constantly exposed by their government to such slogans as “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.” Thirty-three years after Orwell’s future tome, there is little doubt that a battle is raging in this country to control the message.

It seems quaint to think that until as recently as 1987, licensed broadcasters in the U.S. were required to observe something called the Fairness Doctrine, a policy of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that required broadcast license holders to present controversial issues of public importance in a manner that was — in the FCC’s view — honest and equitable. It was imperfect in its execution, but its intention was to guarantee that U.S. citizens would be able to rely on their broadcast media to present a fair and balanced picture of the news of the day. (“Fair and balanced”? I’ve heard that somewhere.)

National news networks, and even local news and affairs programs, were constrained from the kind of partisan cheerleading that passes for news and analysis these days. Broadcasters were required by law to grant equal time to opposing views. Crazy, right?

Nowadays, if you want both sides of an issue, you have to watch and listen to several news outlets. MSNBC is reliably left of center; CNN is slightly left, but usually makes an attempt to present both sides; Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News has basically disintegrated into state media, wholly in service to the Trump/GOP agenda — even going so far as to suggest this week that the FBI was staging a “coup” by pursuing its investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible Russian connections.

What’s next? Alex Jones as Sean Hannity’s new sidekick? I’m still trying to figure out how being “conservative” has come to mean siding with our arch-enemy, Russia, against our own U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. This is weird and dangerous turf.

The late, great comedian George Carlin had a blistering routine about the “seven words you can’t say on television.” I urge you to dial it up on your local YouTube and watch it. It’s hilarious and scary good. But again, “forbidden words.” How quaint. One night’s channel surfing will make it clear that there are no words that can’t be spoken on your television.

Oh, sure, Wolf Blitzer still can’t just pop off and rhetorically ask, “How the f**k can Kellyanne Conway say that with a straight face?” (Though that would be refreshing.) According to the FCC, there are still “forbidden words” for licensed broadcasters. But there are no forbidden ideas; no forbidden lies; no FCC policy to monitor fairness or equity or balance. It’s the wild west; every viewer for themselves.

Choose what’s fake. Choose what’s real. Choose your truth. Ignorance is not strength.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1504

Year in Fly 1

Fly on the Wall is such a tiny little column, and so many weird things happen in Memphis, it takes more than one week to run down the best of the worst. Let’s begin.

Listed

Every year, Memphis winds up on a variety of B.S. lists.

This year, Wallethub.com named Memphis as America’s 68th most sinful city, ranked it low on a list of places to celebrate Halloween, but relatively high on a list of places to celebrate Easter.

Tennessee’s most misspelled word, according to Google, is “chaos,” which came as no surprise to Fly on the Wall readers.

Media

There were too many big media stories in 2017 to focus on funny typos.

The Commercial Appeal faced more layoffs and off-site product control. Richard Ransom left Channel 3 for Channel 24.

A controversial FCC ruling made it possible for Sinclair Broadcast to acquire Tribune Media and WREG in the package.

WMC’s longtime consumer advocate, Andy Wise, retired to become a Florida man. Who can forget this classic Wise tweet?

Categories
Cover Feature News

Peggy Brown: Queen of Memphis Soul Food

Peggy Brown was 7 when a pot of coffee fell off a table and severely burned her foot.

“My grandma was so upset,” Brown says. “She made me stay out of the kitchen.” But that didn’t stop her. “As soon as my foot healed, I was back in the kitchen. I got a whipping about being in the kitchen, but that didn’t deter me.”

She’s been in one kitchen or another ever since. Brown, 69, is owner of Peggy’s Healthy Home Cooking on Cleveland Street near Peabody Avenue in Midtown, and she recently opened another thriving restaurant, Peggy’s Homestyle Cooking, on Brooks Road. Brown has a reputation for putting out some of the best and healthiest soul food in town. But the road to success was long and difficult.

Until she had her own restaurants, Brown worked in many Memphis kitchens, including one at The Peabody, where she shared cooking tips with noted chef/journalist Burt Wolf.

“I think God gave us all a gift,” Brown says. “And I think my gift was cooking.”

But, she says, “Let me tell you something. I think the things that you go through in life — God shapes you. You don’t understand at that point in time when it’s all happening, but when you get grown and you look back, all these things served to make you strong. I’m telling you. I have survived stuff that would kill anybody else. Believe me.”

Brown grew up on a farm in Arlington. “My mom was part Indian … white, black, and I don’t know what else. My dad was black as these shoes I got on. When we got old enough, we’d go to the field and pick cotton and chop cotton. The sun didn’t like me. I would welt up and be at home at night crying.”

She made her kitchen debut at the age of 8, because her parents made her “stay at home and cook.”

Brown’s mother and grandmother — her father’s mother who lived with them — did the cooking. “My mom was a good cook, but my grandmother was a great cook. I don’t know what it was, but she could make anything taste good.”

Brown says her grandmother was “what you called a Mississippi cook. That’s old South. Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas. All of it is going to taste similar because the recipes were passed down from one generation to the next generation.”

Cutting out biscuits with an empty jack mackerel can was Brown’s first kitchen duty. “It was like playing with Play-Doh for me.”

She progressed to making the biscuits and, finally, making lunch. “I knew how to make things because my grandmamma made them.”

Brown cooked lunch until she was 15, when her mother and father separated. “They went their separate ways,” she remembers. “And everything just seemed to fall apart. After that, I stayed with my grandmamma. My mom disappeared for about three or four years.

“My brother was a baby when my mother left. I was a child raising a child. My grandmother was a fantastic cook, but she was also an alcoholic. That’s who my mom left us with — my dad’s mother. She drank like a fish. And half the time I don’t think she knew if we were living or dead. Because the older she got, the more she drank.”

Brown’s mother finally returned, and she had remarried. At that point, Brown says, “Everything — as old people say — went to hell in a handbasket. Nothing was ever the same again. Everything was just different. Basically, we had a stepdad who wanted to be married to our mom, but didn’t want to be bothered with her children. It was just one of those things.”

Brown and her brother continued to live with their grandmother. Their stepfather “was very mean to us. My mom did not allow him to hit us, but, you know, words hurt worse than nicks sometimes. That’s the reason I tell people, ‘You have to be careful what you say to children. You can damage children by talking down to them all the time.’ That’s what he did. He always said, ‘Well, your children ain’t going to be nothing because their dad wasn’t nothing.'”

Brown was raped when she was 15. She refused to have an abortion and gave birth to her first child, Marvin Anderson. After he was born, she took a job washing dishes at the old Shelby Restaurant. But even then, she couldn’t resist the lure of the kitchen. “The frozen pies they would buy, they were just plain old pies to me. I would always take butter and sugar and everything, kind of dress them up and put them in the oven and make them taste good.”

After her stint at Shelby Restaurant, Brown worked at a Chinese restaurant and, later, at a doughnut shop. Then she got a job cooking at Shoney’s, where she “doctored on a lot of things,” including their meatloaf and soup.

Brown left home at 18. “For the longest time, I didn’t speak to my mother. I felt like she should have left that fool and taken her children. She shouldn’t have let us be abused and talked to that way.”

Brown had another son, named David Nelson, who has since passed away. She got married in 1972 and had a daughter, Tina Brown. But after her marriage didn’t work out, she moved to Indiana and began cooking for a division of Ford Motor Company. The company paid for her to take cooking classes at a local college.

But fate — and her family — intervened. “My mom got sick,” Brown says, “and I ended up moving back home.” By then, she had forgiven her mother, influenced by a woman at church who told her “hatred is one of the worst diseases you can have. It’s a disease that can destroy you.”

Then came a career change that would shape the rest of Brown’s life. In the early 1980s, Brown got a job as a cook in the employee cafeteria at The Peabody, where she met Wolf, who was then head chef. “I thought he was the most amazing person I had ever met in my life,” Brown says. “I still do. Because he knew so much about food. I knew things that he didn’t know. And he knew things that I wanted to know.

“He knew about filleting fish. He knew about pork chops. He knew how to marinate meats and everything to make them taste good, make them tender. He just knew so much, but he knew nothing about Southern cuisine. That was not his thing.”

After she got off work, Brown would stay and watch Wolf cook. He asked her what she was doing in the kitchen after hours. Brown said, “I’m up here hanging with the chefs because I want to know what y’all know.”

And before long, that’s what began to happen.

“[Wolf] started showing me things. He’d show me how to cut up this and how to marinate this and what to put in this. And we just started sharing things.”

There was the “turkey fiasco during Thanksgiving time,” Brown remembers. Wolf made “stuffing” for the employee holiday dinner. “I said, ‘Chef, what in the world is this? People in the South don’t eat this.’ It wasn’t anything but just dough. Dough rolls. People in the South eat cornbread dressing.”

Wolf told her to serve it anyway. “So, we wheel all this stuff downstairs to the employee cafeteria. Phones start ringing upstairs. ‘Chef, what’s this mess you sent down here?'”

Wolf, knowing when he was licked, told Brown to make her dressing. She made cornbread stuffing with sage, onions, celery, bell peppers, butter, and margarine. “I had to make my giblet gravy and everything. I don’t know what kind of gravy chef made, but it was a mess.”

She added some turkey meat to her dressing and took a cup to Wolf in his office. “I said, ‘Chef, here you go, dude. This is what you have in the South for Thanksgiving.'”

Wolf ate the dressing and then asked her for another cup, Brown says.

Wolf kept passing along his knowledge to Brown. “If you admire a person for what they know,” she says, “a lot of times they don’t mind teaching you.”

After Wolf left Memphis to open the Peabody Orlando, Brown stayed at the Memphis hotel another year and then went to work as the chef at Stonebridge Country Club. When the club was sold, the former owner wanted Brown to relocate to a club elsewhere in Tennessee, but she refused. “I wouldn’t because my mama was still sick and I wasn’t going to leave her.”

Brown briefly went to work for a diner, but says she “got tired of the racism.” At that point, she decided to open her own restaurant.

“I kept telling everybody I was going to have my own business and work for myself. I was serious as a heart attack. One of the other girls asked me, ‘Miss Peggy, what are you going to name your place?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, but it’s going to be ‘heavenly’ something ’cause you have to put God first.'”

As for the kind of food she’d serve? Brown says, “I just wanted people to have a good, home-cooked meal. Because everywhere I went to eat food, most of it was out of a can and people can’t cook worth a crap.”

Brown opened her first restaurant in 1996 — Heavenly Hash on Highway 51. She closed it three years later, after her mother died. “When I opened that restaurant,” she says, “it was because I wanted to buy my mom a house. She always wanted her own house. After mom died, it just didn’t have any meaning for me anymore.”

Brown then bought a restaurant in North Memphis and named it Peggy’s Just Heavenly Home Cooking. After a fire struck the restaurant, Brown briefly got out of the business. But it wasn’t long until her daughter asked her to cook at the restaurant where she was working. Brown eventually bought the restaurant, now called Peggy’s Healthy Home Cooking. She serves meatloaf, chicken, and pork chops, but the emphasis is on healthy food, Brown says. And business is good.

Noted songwriter/producer David Porter is a big fan of Brown’s restaurant. “The consistency and the quality of the meals is just something you can be comfortable with,” he says. “You know if it’s good on Monday, it’s going to be good on Tuesday. It’s one of the best soul food restaurants in Memphis.”

Former Memphis Mayor A C Wharton is also a fan. “You might as well forget about the salt and pepper shaker,” he says. “It’s ready to eat. All you need to do is add fork and knife. It reminds you of back home, watching your mama cook in a small pan. And every morsel tastes the same way.”

Of Brown, Wharton says, “She’s always willing to sit down and talk a minute and catch up on the news. Just a lot of good common sense talk. So, it’s just like being home around the kitchen table.”

“I think God allowed me to go through all the hardships and all the hurt and all the pain and anger and stuff that I went through,” Brown says. “I couldn’t understand why it was happening then, but I think I understand it now. Because I feel like God has put me in a place where I was going to meet people that had been through the same things I’ve gone through.

“One day I was praying, talking to the Lord. I talk to God the same way I talk to you. I said, ‘Lord, just let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man. Because [there are] so many hurting people. And I think I know how people feel. Just give me a little house by the side of the road.’

“Well, he didn’t give me a house by the side of the road, but he gave me a restaurant by the side of the road.”

No Cook Banana Pudding from Michael Donahue on Vimeo.

Peggy Brown: Queen of Memphis Soul Food

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Zach Wamp Redux

Tennessee Republicans who, eight years ago, were faced with choosing between candidates for governor, may remember one Zach Wamp, then a U.S. Congressman from Chattanooga, who ran in a stoutly contested Republican gubernatorial primary against Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey and Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam, the ultimate winner of both the GOP primary and the general election.

On Tuesday, with state voters already seriously mulling over the would-be candidates to succeed the term-limited Haslam, Wamp was once again before a local audience, as he had been scores of times in 2010. Only this time, as he addressed members of the Rotary Club of Memphis at Clayborn Temple, Wamp was conspicuously no longer a party man. As he told the Rotarians, “In 2017, I dislike the Republican Party almost as much as I dislike the Democratic Party.”

Jackson Baker

Zach Wamp

Wamp’s appearance was under the auspices of Issue One, a national nonprofit group of which he is co-chair and which espouses a return to nonpartisan voting, the singular issue which Wamp and his cohorts in the movement believe is what the nation’s founders had in mind.

As Wamp remembers it, the years of the 1990s, during which Democratic President Bill Clinton and Republican House of Representatives Speakers horse-traded back and forth on measures such as one calling for a balanced-budget, constituted the last hurrah of the two-party system. After that, things became more tribal in Washington, with members hunkering down within their respective parties and spending half their time raising money. They ceased even getting to know members of the opposing party; still less were they inclined to make common cause with them, as Wamp remembers doing in working out TVA matters along with then-Vice President Al Gore.

The result, Wamp said, has been an increasing tendency to put party ahead of country, a sea change that has left the country’s voters dissatisfied and unrepresented and that accounted for the success of the outlier candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in 2016.

Hence the call of Wamp’s group — and like-minded groups such as No Labels — for a new nonpartisan politics and non-affiliated candidates, the core of whom would come, not from aging baby boomers like himself, but from millenials, some 71 percent of whom are professed independents. To boost that possibility, Issue One has scheduled a two-day event, entitled “Restoring the Founders’ America,” for next spring in Philadelphia.

Wamp may be correct about the fact of ongoing alienation from politics-as-usual, especially among the young, and his organization may also be onto something with its call for independent citizen-candidacies. But, as he acknowledged, the current system — especially in the wake of the “Citizens United” Supreme Court ruling — is held fast to its moorings by lavishly committed special-interest money, and the only real way to change that is by changing the Court, which requires in its turn the kind of altered voting pattern Wamp advocates.

It’s a chicken-egg question, but Wamp and those like him who would be mentors to a new electorate still believe they can redeem the process. Right on, we say.

Categories
News The Fly-By

A Lot to Think About

Among those surveyed, a clear winner emerged among the three concept plans for a new Memphis Zoo parking lot that is promised to end parking on the Overton Park Greensward.

In early November, local designers at Powers Hill Design submitted the three plans to the advisory group plotting the project and to the public, which had its say on them via an online survey.

All of the plans — Concept X, Concept Y, and Concept Z — added the minimum 415 parking spaces for the zoo mandated by the Memphis City Council. They all also expanded current zoo lots, included a “ring road” to help with traffic flow, and preserve the park’s trees.

“Concept Z”

None of the plans encroach past the current ridgeline that separates the zoo lot from the Greensward. They all, too, include a green buffer to further separate the 12-acre park field from the parking lot.

The main difference in the plans is the layout of the parking spaces. But they also differ in access points and amenities for pedestrians.

Close to half — 42 percent — of the nearly 4,500 people who took the survey voted for Concept Z. Asked why, those surveyed said they just liked its overall design. That design expands current zoo lots with its southern-most “ring road” reaching almost to the park’s Formal Gardens.

The main difference between Concept Z and the others is that it reconfigures the main zoo lot into a sort of hand fan shape, or maybe the shape of half a wagon wheel. The spaces in the concept roughly face north and south. The other plans keep the familiar bookshelf design with spaces aligned generally east to west.

Concept Z also easily has more pedestrian walkways than the other plans. It has pedestrian entry points from McLean, along Prentiss Place, and an entrance from the Greensward.

The survey feedback will be studied by the Powers Hill team, which will incorporate the notes into an updated concept proposal. That concept will be presented to the advisory group and to the public for another round of online feedback.

The survey yielded some other interesting facts. Most who took it said they mostly visit Overton Park for the zoo and, to a lesser degree, the park itself, and its anchors like the Levitt Shell and the Brooks Museum of Art. When they visit the zoo, most (95 percent) parked in the main lot, instead of on streets or in the park.

They don’t live around the park, and they drive to it (versus walk or bike) when they go. They enter, mostly, at the signaled entrance at Poplar and Tucker.

Most of those surveyed said they want better traffic circulation and better access for cyclists and pedestrians. They want to preserve existing trees and to improve landscaping. They want better lighting, bike racks, better signage, and more.

While most of the respondents were from ZIP codes around the park, voices were heard from all over Memphis, Fayette and Tipton Counties in Tennessee, Marshal, Tate, and DeSoto Counties in Mississippi, and Crittenden County in Arkansas.