TYRONZA -- Clara Nell, 68, isn't worried. Some Fridays, she has lines out the door! People from Memphis and Jonesboro, Osceola and Blytheville spilled onto Main Street, all of them waiting to devour her fried catfish.
"I keep my prices low, because I draw Social Security. I'm not in the business for money. I'm just in here to feed people when they're hungry," Nell says.
Tyboogie's Cafe is the source of this nonexistent worry. Keith and Jill Forrester's new restaurant in the white, boxy building that once housed Tyronza Grocery is less than a block from Nell's own Midway Cafe. With its milky-blue facade and half-a-dozen daily pies, Midway has been a Tyronza staple since the 1930s. In recent years, it has been the town's only restaurant.
Nell considers for a moment, then says, "I'd like to see them make it."
THE FORRESTERS
At a glance, there's little about Tyronza, population 895, to attract an enterprising young family like the Forresters. Main Street is anchored to the north by empty grain bins and a historic merchant building housing the town showpiece, the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum. The cracked pavement continues south, past the fire department, a bank and First Baptist Church before emptying into a neighborhood of houses past their prime.
But Keith Forrester, 40, is a lifer. His widowed great-grandmother settled in the area, sharecropping to support her four children. His grandfather planted 1,500 acres of cotton and soybeans. Keith and his wife, Jill, 38, are raising their 2-year-old son Fox, in Keith's grandfather's two-bedroom house. On about 13 of those 1,500 acres near Tyronza, they grow flowers and produce to sell at farmers markets and supply the casual dining joint they own in Memphis, 30 miles away. Now Whitton Farms will also supply Tyboogie's.
The Forresters are accidentally-on-purpose farmers. In 2001, Jill was at Arkansas State University, and Keith, a few years out of the Peace Corps, was coaching at his alma mater,
Rivercrest High School in Wilson. They lived in Jonesboro, where Jill had spent her entire life. It
was Jill's idea to move to the farm.
"We were newlyweds," she says. "We wanted to spread out and create our life."
Jill is whimsical. She painted the farm bus with yellow flowers, orange carrots and curly vines. She says she hates cooking, but co-owns two restaurants and sometimes gives canning lessons. Initially, Keith won her affection through stories of his time in South Africa.
It seems appropriate that Jill's love of flowers led to the Forresters becoming farmers. For her birthday one year, Keith tilled a plot and sprinkled zinnia and sunflower seeds by the handful. Weeks later, they had hundreds of pink, orange and yellow blooms.
Jill was overwhelmed. "You can only put so many flowers in your house before it starts to look like a funeral parlor," she says.
So they filled their car with blooms and drove to Memphis, setting up a table at the Agricenter's Farmers Market. They earned a week's worth of coaching salary in a single day.
"That really got us thinking we were onto something," Jill says.
Keith quit coaching and, that winter, they made plans, built greenhouses at the farm and coaxed seedlings from plastic trays. They still had one steady income -- Jill was teaching junior high math -- but after the first full season of farmers markets, Jill resigned as well. Since then, they've started the first community supported agriculture share (a subscription vegetable service) in the Memphis area and opened two restaurants and one commercial kitchen. They employ about 70 people, and their home, Whitton Farms, has been featured on public television and hosted educational and fundraising events.
"If you believe in working hard and you're very goal oriented, you can pretty much do whatever you want to do," Jill says.
FEEDING MEMPHIS
The Forresters opened the Trolley Stop Market in Memphis' medical district on six years of farmers market proceeds. The original plan was to run a year-round, indoor market with a small cafe. But crowds poured in -- employees from downtown banks, law firms and Le Bonheur Children's Hospital, students from nearby ophthalmology and dentistry schools. Soon 200 people were lunching at Trolley Stop each day. The Forresters added tables and extended the bar. Now the restaurant occupies about 6,000 square feet, and the market is relegated to less than a tenth of that.
When space became available two doors down, the couple spent about $70,000 transforming it to Whitton Farms Cannery, a health department-certified kitchen-for-rent, used regularly by vendors who make raw, vegan and gluten-free items, among other products.
Back at the farm, they planted with specific dishes in mind. What they couldn't raise (some produce, all meat), they sourced from small farms in Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri and Mississippi. Trolley Stop's menu is extensive -- pages of salads, burgers, sandwiches and pizzas. They work with 17 farms to keep the restaurant stocked.
For a while, Jill and Keith drove to Memphis daily. Keith cooked while Jill organized.
"Jill handles people differently than I do," Keith says. "I wouldn't have patience with grown people who just don't want to get with the program."
Keith is fidgety. He prefers outside to in, doing to explaining. He peppers serious conversation with jokes, never changing expression, (i.e. "I grew up on the farm. We didn't have a computer, we didn't have cable TV; we had plumbing and electricity and air conditioning; we didn't get to use that much. It was great." Delivered with a drawl, but in a single breath).
These days, Keith stays at the farm or works at Tyboogie's. Jill still goes to Trolley Stop a few times a week, because sometimes things get chaotic. Recently the grease trap backed up, the ventilator went out and they ran out of pizza yeast, all in a single shift.
FEEDING TYRONZA
The pizzas do well at Trolley Stop, so Keith is betting they'll do well at Tyboogie's. In fact, he has dedicated half the kitchen to monstrous pizza ovens.
But Tyboogie's isn't Trolley Stop, and the clientele won't be the same urban, hippie-hipsters. Tyboogie's is down-home Delta -- cafeteria-style, with straightforward food.
"I know what people around here like to eat," Keith says.
According to historian Cindy Grisham's A Savory History of Arkansas Delta Food, local staples include: chocolate gravy (prominently placed on the Midway breakfast menu), barbecue (the Forresters serve pork sourced in Cross County), fried catfish (a Friday night special for Midway and Tyboogie's), beans, greens, cornbread and potatoes.
Nell says, "Here in my restaurant, they got to have a bean on the menu everyday. They want a choice of beans. Either brown beans, pinto beans, navy beans or green beans ... that's what most of these people was raised on."
Most of Nell's vegetables are harvested from her sister's garden. Years back the restaurant was under another owner. Things didn't go well.
"Frozen," says Nell, shaking her head in admonishment. "Didn't nobody want to eat it. She had to close."
Down the road at Tyboogie's, the nonpizza half of the kitchen is dedicated to fried chicken, enchiladas, vegetables, brown beans served with neck bone and the like. Three weeks in, it was feeding about 100 people a day.
"I need to get 300 people a day coming through here to make this place work," Keith says.
That would mean everyone in town rotates through the restaurant every third day. But the Forresters are nothing if not ambitious. And Linda Hinton, director of the museum, is doing her part.
"I've been there almost every day since they opened," she says. She loves the mixed greens.
Tyronza resident James Raines has been to Tyboogie's three times. The first time, he found the menu limited and the fries cold. The second time, both problems had been remedied, and his chicken and dressing was exceptional.
He appreciates having a place to chat with his neighbors, by design or chance: "It gets people together. There's not many opportunities like that in Tyronza."
Hinton and Raines spend about $10 per meal at Tyboogie's. Neither of them worry about Midway losing business because largely, the restaurants have different hours. Midway is open from 5 a.m. to 2 p.m. weekdays and for dinner from 5 to 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday. It's closed on weekends.
Tyboogie's is open from 11 a.m. to 8 or 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday and draws after-church crowds for Sunday lunch.
DOWN ON THE FARM
Fox, who shares his father's strawberry-blond locks, plays with trains in his bedroom, babbling in Spanish to his Salvadoran baby sitter.
A solid man in overalls, Keith leans against the tiny toddler bed and stretches his legs across a rug that doubles as a U.S. map.
"Hey, bubba," he says.
"Hey, Daddy," Fox responds.
"What have you been doing today?" Keith says.
"Ah do dis," Fox says, dragging a puzzle from a pile.
"Playing with your puzzles?" Keith says.
"Play-ing puzzles," Fox parrots.
"Want to go outside?" Keith asks.
It's unseasonably cool for April. Keith zips Fox into a jacket and sidesteps the gaggle of mostly grown puppies, progeny of a pregnant stray who wandered onto the farm.
"They eat a ton," Keith grumbles, shooing the wriggling mass from Fox's face. The dogs and the tot are just about eye level.
The farm is messy from recent rains, but hardy greens abound -- kale, mustard, turnip, chard. Keith crouches to check the strawberries, since night temperatures have dropped to the 30s.
"When the wind blows, you can take colder temperatures. It's not as likely to frost because the cold doesn't have a way to settle," he says, satisfied with the plants' white flowers.
Inside the greenhouse -- huge sheets of plastic draped over steel poles -- it's 20 degrees warmer and humid. Keith shows Fox how to pluck a leaf from a head of young lettuce. Fox sticks the leaf in his mouth and chews thoughtfully.
"The farm needs to make more money," Keith says.
It supports three full-time employees, costing more to run in winter than it brings in. Next year he's planning more events -- more elementary school field-trippers, eventually a pumpkin patch or corn maze.
"It took me years to understand the concept of legacy and heritage, what it meant to be a multigenerational person out here, even though we don't farm the traditional way my grandparents did," Keith says.
Whitton Farms isn't certified organic, but the Forresters use natural methods of fertilizing and pest control, and nothing they grow is genetically modified.
"Growing flowers and produce the way Jill and I do, it keeps me at home and it keeps me being a farmer," he says. "I don't have combines and big tractors, and that's fine with me."
Tyboogie's, 197 Main St., Tyronza; (870) 487-2054, tyboogies.com.
Style on 05/20/2014
