(Marie picked a place for supper on the second night of our vacation that her sister really enjoys…)
As you may recall from the previous stories, we were in Memphis as a family to cheer on my sister’s graduation. I’ve long ago ceded all Memphis barbecue choices to Grant, since he’s in heaven every time we go and I would never want to deprive him of the pleasure of exploration. He doesn’t quite give all the non-barbecue choices to me, but as I get rather fewer choices than he does (primarily because I am not as willing to eat three lunches as he is) I get pretty much free rein.
So after putting my head together with my sister’s and checking out her recommendations and comments on mine, I picked Trolley Stop for us all to convene on the evening before the graduation. They had tables big enough to seat our party together. Actually, they were pretty slow that evening, so we could have been an even bigger party than we were and still had room. Normally I’d have spent a good long time happily browsing the goods for sale, but when we arrived I was just too tired to do much more than scan the options from the table.
The farmer’s market was actually what came first. The owners, Keith and Jill Forrester, have a farm that needed an outlet for their produce that was indoor and year-round, where they could carry over their existing base of customers from their previous farmer’s market work, and the restaurant grew out of the location they wound up taking, as it was a former nightcub with a kitchen. About a third of the food served in the restaurant comes from their farm, and the rest from other local producers.
There are some neat things for sale there, and if I were local I’d definitely pick up my eggs and butter and the like from the farmer’s market portion of the establishment. However, we were there for a meal, and transportation was a problem, and I was tired…my apologies to the readers for not exploring on your behalf!
Grant decided to go veggie and had the “Slammin Veggie Hoagie,” which he enjoyed. The girlchild’s eyes lit up on seeing the pizza offerings, and as she had declined lunch entirely she got to have her own personal pizza, which she found satisfactory; it smelled wonderful. I dithered terribly and eventually settled on the chicken salad sandwich, which was quite tasty and I was able to exceed my expectations for how much I could eat of it (though a very small voice in my head mentioned that it would have been even better with apples and grapes, but that’s just me being spoiled by Chicken Salad Chick).
The boychild was restless and fidgety and not especially interested in dinner; he had been pretty thoroughly thrown off by the change in time zone, routine, and location, poor kid, so with the exception of insisting on a sweetened beverage he was rather hard to interest in the options available. I’d actually half hoped he’d choose the grilled cheese, even though we have a general rule against it on principle, but this one was described a “gourmet 3 cheese” and I’d have sprung if he’d asked-but no. He was at least able to be adorable to his aunt, uncle and grandfather for part of the time.
The location is actually at a stop for a trolley, by the way; the name is not just fanciful word play. The final photo above was taken from the actual nearby trolley stop, which is in the middle of the street in front of the restaurant.
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Marie, Let's Eat! 