The Place Setting

    A restaurant name ought to be straightforward and direct, with no cute or cryptic hints about the nature of the business. So says Jane Myron, the dumpling diva of Johnson City, Tennessee.

    When she and her husband Jim bought the nondescript one-story bricked post office building on Market Street, they wanted the place to reflect their simple, no-nonsense approach to cooking. Plainly, for starters they figured they couldn't do any better than Jane's first name. They built a menu of midday fare, so "lunch" had to be in the title. And many of the items, such as the chicken salad, with no nuts or fruit, would be right at home in a lunch box toted to the office, construction site, or school picnic.

    Let's call it Jane's Lunch Box, they agreed, and since its opening on Valentine's Day 2000, the restaurant has become a haven for those who spurn the frozen, the prepackaged, and the prefabricated.

    Local attorneys stake out hte speaker's table almost every day, about an arm's stretch from the coconut cream pie. Of all the desserts at Jane's--the chocolate pie, the peanut butter pie, the butterscotch pie, the caramel cake with caramel icing--coconut cream pie flies off the counter the fastest.

    The light custard filling is tinged with just the right amount of coconut extract and the topping is freshly whipped cream sprinkled with coconut flakes. This is an old-time, buttery cream pie like the ones made long before the arrival of non-dairy whipped topping.

    With old metal elementary school lunch boxes glorifying the likes of Betty Boop and Bert and Ernie, it's fitting that Jane would point to a nostalgic dish like chicken and dumplings as her house special. The dish is available every day except Friday.

    Ask Jane, a University of Tennessee home economics graduate, about the origin of her recipes and most times she'll say, "Up here,", pointing to her head. Her homemade chicken and dumplings begin with chopped carrots, celery, and onions, a trinity of vegetables flavoring most all her varied soups. Then she adds white-meat chicken and drops in the baking-powdered dumpling dough. This warm and delicious down-home repast is best accompanied by a swig of Jane's sweet peach tea.

    "I was thinking about putting in a chicken coop out back, but that's probably against city ordinance," she says.

    Jim and Jane make an efficient team. They've been in the tuxedo rental business since their marriage in 1990, and they've catered some of Johnson City's most dignitary-dotted soirees. At first, when I saw dumpsters behind the building labeled "Jim's" and "Jane's", I thought they'd taken romance to an all-new level. But they aren't his and hers dumpsters at all. "Jim's" belongs to the motorcycle shop next door. So much for the parking-lot feng shui.

    Every Thursday is meatloaf day at Jane's. It's an all-beef offering with no oatmeal or bread crumbs, and if there's any left over, meatloaf sandwiches are on the menu the next day.

    One thing you won't find in Jane's kitchen is a fryer. She says one day a mother brought in her four little boys, who ordered a soup and a salad.

    "That got my curiosity up," says Jane. "I asked the mom why she selected us, since we don't sell French fries."

    "That's just the reason," responded the diet-conscious mother. "I want healthy food for my children."

    Jane's dishes up several sandwiches including a "Real Reuben", as many as four soups a day in winter, and a long list of side dishes such as green bean casserole, pea salad, macaroni and tomatoes, and boiled potatoes. Behind the counter is a rack of Route 11 Potato Chips in various flavors including sweet potato, all made in an old feed store in Middletown, Virginia. The Washington Post called Route 11 "a hip chip with none of the conveyor-belt precision of so many manufactured counterparts".

    Occasionally on the specials board you'll find one of my favorite sandwiches, the Kentucky Hot Brown, invented in Louisville in the 1930s. Jane's version consists of hot toast, a pile of sliced turkey, bacon, tomato rounds, and a hot cheese sauce melting over the heap.

    All this food is dished up by only three cooks. Malina Alonso from Oaxaca, Mexico, created the restaurant's quesadilla, a 12-inch tomato-basil tortilla stuffed with chicken, tomato and onions.

    Jane's is a museum to childhood. Jim's old Cub Scout uniform, red blazer, cowboy boots, and backpack are posed above the tables, and many of the lunch boxes displayed on the walls were given to the Myrons by friends. One of Jane's favorites belonged to the late Virginia Jennings, longtime aide to Senator Howard Baker. It's an industrial-model lunch box transformed into an elegant decoupage purse. The restaurant's sign sports a silhouetted childhood image of Jane in dotted Swiss.

    Jim's old metal toys have found new life in an antique refrigerator alongside a miniature 1930s demonstration model of a stove Jane discovered at a flea market. These are more than just adornment or conversation pieces. They're symbolic of the Myron's approach to cooking and entertaining, taking diners back to the unhurried days when restaurant owners came out of the kitchen to sit and talk with their guests, to a time when they took advantage of what was fresh and plentiful at the market and shared it with simple style and gladness.

--The Place Setting, by Fred W. Sauceman