The Village Idiot: New restaurant always creates a stir
The big topic of conversation at the Liar’s Table in the Big Pig Family Diner was the news that an Applebee’s was opening a half hour away in Trout Creek. The Big Pig is the only restaurant to speak of in a 20-mile radius around our farm. They’re open from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day. As long as you’re in the door by 7, they’ll feed you. They’ll sweep the floor around you and fill up the ketchup dispensers while you eat, but out here in the winter that’s as good as a cruise ship floor show. And you’ll get just as sick. I’m starting to think some people show up at 6:55 p.m. on purpose, just to watch them start turning the chairs on to the tabletops.
In the morning the old timers sit at the Liar’s Table (named for obvious reasons) to tease one another and spread the gossip. No order is ever written down, no check will ever come; when you’ve drunk about as much coffee as you can stand, you tell Ruth Ann what you had and she rings you up. Someone will take your place at the table the moment you get up.
The Big Pig serves big food to big people. The breakfast special is a five-egg omelet with a side of sausage. The sausage is the size of a hamburger. You get two. I’m 5 foot 11 and weigh 200 pounds. When I go to the Pig I feel anorexic. Often I am the smallest person there, and that includes women and children. That feeling won’t last long if I keep eating this stuff. Anything that’s not deep fat fried is barbecued. Sometimes it’s deep fat fried and barbecued. Those are the vegetables.
“My sister was in an Applebee’s once,” said Carmine. “She said they have salads the size of this plate.”
“And that comes with your dinner?” said Vardon.
“No, you gruesome, old fool, that IS your dinner.”
“A salad. That’s all they make, salads?”
“No, you can get other things, I’m just saying my sister says they have these big salads. They are so big that they are a meal. They put chicken on them and whatnot.”
Sammy, the 13-year-old busboy, was listening to this while filling the saltshakers. Sammy has long, thin blue hair on the left side of his head and the right side is shaved clean. He always wears a black T-shirt that has the name of his favorite band written across it in letters that look as if they’re carved in crumbling marble. It says “Drops of Spit.” I’m hoping he owns several of the exact same T-shirts, but then, that’s very optimistic on my part.
Chef Bob makes Sammy wear a hairnet, but since he has to push up all the blue hair from one side to the shaved side to make it all fit, he looks as if he has a big blob of cotton candy on his head. It is not the “don’t mess with me” look he had in mind.
“I’ve had a salad before,” he volunteered. “I wouldn’t eat another one. Tasted like grass. Cows eat grass. When I want grass, I’ll eat a cow.”
Carlton didn’t think Ruth Ann should be worried about the Applebee’s taking too much business away from the Big Pig. He adjusted his John Deere baseball cap and said, “Oh, it’ll get your trendy crowd, but they’re a fickle bunch, they’ll be back here in no time.”
I looked around the half-empty restaurant at the handful of aging farmers wearing Agway baseball caps and washed out Dickey work shirts eating five-egg omelets. Take a black-and-white picture of this and it’d look like something out of the dust bowl. If they’re relying on our trendy crowd, poor Applebee’s.
(Jim Mullen is the author of “It Takes A Village Idiot: A Memoir of Life After the City” (Simon and Schuster, 2001). He also contributes regularly to Entertainment Weekly, where he can be reached at [email protected].)