Tag: Four Way Restaurant

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Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

“Soul Bowl” Coming to The Four Way Restaurant

The "Soul Bowl" at Four Way Restaurant (Credit: Glenn Vaulx III)

The Four Way Restaurant will introduce a new item beginning March 10th during Memphis Black Restaurant Week. And I can’t wait.

Get ready for the “Soul Bowl.”

“A lot of people have different bowls at certain restaurants,” says The Four Way owner Patrice Bates Thompson. “Our bowl is going to be cornbread and you’re going to have a hole where you’re going to put in sides. Mine would be mac [and cheese], yams, and cabbage. Inside of a bowl made out of cornbread.”

Sides can be “anything you want.”

But, Thompson says, “I typically don’t like my food to touch. You can’t be that person. Because the sides are going to go in the center of hot cornbread. And they’re going to sit there together.”

The idea of the juice from the sides soaking into the cornbread is driving me crazy. I can already taste it. I’m imagining all the different side items inside of that cornbread bowl, which I also can’t wait to devour.

Thompson would like to leave the “Soul Bowl” on the menu. “I hope we can. I hope people love it and we can. That’s my goal. I don’t want it to be a temporary thing.”

Check it out during Memphis Black Restaurant Week and spread the word.

According its website, Memphis Black Restaurant Week, which will be held March 6th through 12th, will feature more than 25 Black-owned restaurants. The event is “an opportunity for Black-owned restaurants to offer dining deals to bring in new customers and raise awareness. It allows the country to support minority owned eateries.”

The Four Way Restaurant is at 998 Mississippi Boulevard; (901) 507-1519.

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Four Way Restaurant Receives $40,000 Grant

Four Way Restaurant owner Patrice Bates Thompson

The Four Way Soul Food Restaurant has been awarded a $40,000 “Backing Historic Small Restaurants” grant from American Express.

The award was announced April 27th on the Today Show.

According to its web site, American Express (NYSE: AXP), in partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is providing the “Backing Historic Small Restaurants” grant, which is “a more than $1 million investment to preserve historic restaurants in the U. S. as they continue to navigate the pandemic and plan for recovery.”

And, it says, “Through the grant program, small historic restaurant owners will have the opportunity to improve, upgrade, and preserve their physical spaces and online businesses, as well as mitigate existing operating costs. For example restaurants can rehabilitate the exteriors of historic buildings and facades, expand outdoor dining, upgrade their takeout and online ordering systems, or establish a stronger online presence. Updates like these are critical for future success in a post pandemic world.”

Four Way owner Patrice Bates Thompson, who appeared on the Today show, is part of the Bates lineage that has owned the restaurant at 998 Mississippi Boulevard since 2002. Her parents, the late Willie Earl Bates and the late Jo Ellen Bates, bought the restaurant, which originally was opened in 1946 by Clint and Irene Cleaves.  Dr. Martin Luther King is among the many notables who have dined at The Four Way.

Thompson, who was interviewed in the Flyer, says she worked at The Four Way from the time her dad bought  it. “I was office manager at Metropolitan Baptist Church,” she says in the article. “I could walk from my church in five minutes in the next block and work at The Four Way.”

And, according to the story, Bates did whatever she needed to do. “I’d work in the kitchen. I’d work the register. If I had to serve, I’d serve. To be honest, I still do that. Sometimes you’re short handed. You never know when your employees are going to come in and have a chip on their shoulder and not do what they’re supposed to do. I just fill in where I need to. You might come in next week and see me on the line.”

Thompson surprised when she heard on the Today Show that Four Way had won.

“I was extremely excited and I was actually shocked,” she says.

Thompson was interviewed a while back by the show, but not about the grant, which she had applied for. “They told us they wanted to talk to different restaurants and see how we were faring during the pandemic,” she says. And, she says, “I supposed it would be a discussion about how we made adjustments and changed the way we ran our business during the pandemic.”

And, she says, “I just didn’t make the connection. They did a great job keeping the secret.”

As for the $40,000, Thompson says, “The grant I applied for is in conjunction wth the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the whole initiative is to help legendary restaurants improve the outdoor look of there restaurant. Preserve the outdoors. Either outdoor dining or painting your building or, if need be, removing trash and things of that story.

 “We’re considering outdoor dining. I’m not sure how to do it. We’ve had severe accidents on that corner. We don’t want anybody to risk their lives eating outdoors.

They might do landscaping and freshen up the green-and-tan building, she says. Thompson also would like to maybe add outdoor benches so customers will have a place to sit while waiting for their table.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Willie Earl Bates

Willie Earl Bates, owner of the Four Way Restaurant in South Memphis’ Soulsville, USA community, died from cancer last week. I’m not sure the city of Memphis knows what it has lost.

Willie Earl Bates

In 2001, after 50-plus years in operation under Clint and Irene Cleaves, Bates purchased the tiny but famous restaurant. He had been an executive with Universal Life Insurance, a real estate developer, and, early in life, delivered The Commercial Appeal in a red wagon, of which he was quite proud. The wagon sits outside the restaurant today in a fenced garden courtyard, dedicated to Bates’ mother, the late Magnolia Gossett Bates.

Bates was also proud to be the owner of a restaurant that helped change history — and served some of the best soul food in the world. Clint Cleaves was Mayor E.H. “Boss” Crump’s driver, and Crump told all of his friends that they needed to support the Fourway Grill (as it was known then) and it soon became the first truly desegregated restaurant in Memphis.

It was also a popular gathering spot for civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and others. The Fourway was immensely popular among musicians, hosting the likes of Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Gladys Night & the Pips, Ike & Tina Turner, and practically every artist who ever recorded around the corner at Stax Records.

I’ve been eating at the Four Way every couple of weeks since starting to work at Stax back in 2004. In 2014, I wrote a piece on Bates for Memphis magazine, and when I asked Mr. Bates what he thought about all of the celebrities who had eaten there (including hip-hop superstar Drake, who had just been there weeks earlier), he said: “I had a mother and daughter from Oklahoma in here not too long ago who had come from St. Jude. They had found out about the restaurant, and the little girl wanted to eat here. That was so touching, so satisfying, to know that we were able to make her happy during a time like that.”

That pretty much sums up Willie Earl Bates and why Memphis may not really know what it has lost.

Bates was a successful businessman and could easily have retired long before his death at 76, but he was too intent on making Memphis — and particularly Soulsville — a better place. He worked with numerous nonprofit organizations to help improve life in the community and often donated food to children’s organizations and other causes.

Former Mayor A C Wharton told me, “The Four Way always has been, and continues to be, a gathering place for community leaders. It may seem a bit quirky, but it was a status symbol to enter The Four Way through the back door and dine in the back room. Principals, doctors, lawyers, and accomplished entertainers, and occasionally, a skinny, hungry black Ole Miss law student like me could often be found in the ‘back room’ being served by Miss Dot.” 

Various crews from the Food Network and Travel Channel featured his famous catfish, turkey-and-dressing, yams, peach cobbler, and chitterlings, which Bates always told me never to order, as he made a face and shook his head.

Last year, author Dave Hoekstra published the critically acclaimed The People’s Place: Soul Food Restaurants and Reminiscences from the Civil Rights Era to Today, and the first restaurant he visited was the Four Way. Hoekstra was asked by the New York Times, “If someone wanted to follow your path, but had time to visit only one city, what would it be?” Hoekstra’s answer: “Memphis. I know at least seven or eight soul food restaurants in Memphis. But to get to what we’re getting at in the book, with the whole combination of the food and the civil rights movement, the Four Way holds a special place in my heart — they were so giving with their stories and with their hospitality. Just the whole history of Memphis and the civil rights movement .”

When I wrote my story for Memphis magazine, it was pretty much standard journalism and storytelling. What I didn’t get to include was how much I loved Mr. Bates and what an important friend he was to me. He had a genuine light-show twinkle in his eye every time I saw him. He was one of the kindest people I have ever known. Memphis was lucky to have had him. I’m luckier to have been his friend.