Years ago, when our firstborn was small enough to carry around in a basket, a night on the town was often dinner at the Old Hickory Steakhouse. In those days we didn’t eat red meat, but we liked the baked potatoes and salads.
We’d go in, put the basket with the sleeping baby on the jukebox, slide into one of the vinyl-covered booths and proceed with our feast. Some nights our tab would run as high as, oh, $8. Most nights, our waitress was a pretty 20-something named Martie, who was full of bounce and good cheer and charmed by the baby boy in his basket crib.
I suspect we were the steakhouse’s only vegetarian customers. Even so, Doug Hill and his crew always seemed delighted to see us. Eventually, Peter outgrew basket and developed an appetite for red meat. As did his brother and sister, who came along afterward. Even so, I don’t think our steak order at the Old Hickory ever exceeded the sirloin for one, itself a considerable piece of meat.
Tuesday evening, we returned to the Old Hickory for the first time in a long while. The John Wayne posters are still on the walls, but the jukebox and booths are gone; otherwise the place looks and feels the same. When Martie Bowen, still bouncy after a generation of waiting tables, brought us menus, we felt like we had come home.
“My step-grandmother, Jewel Watkins, got me this job. She was a dishwasher here,” said Martie. “I was 19. For the first year, I cooked the bread.”
We’re sitting at a front table in the restaurant just after lunch on an insufferably hot afternoon. Martie has come in early for this interview. With her is her husband, Bobby, the grill master at the Old Hickory. Sue Thompson now owns the restaurant.
At 2 she will start making tea and assembling salads and thus begin a workday that will end sometime after 10 p.m., when the restaurant closes.
For Martie, waiting tables at the Old Hickory resembles improv comedy: There’s the physical aspect — “You have to be coordinated; you have to balance that tray of steaks and get through the crowd” — and, there’s the psychological — “Handling the customer is the biggest thing. Some people want you to cut up and play with them and others want you to leave them alone.”
Sometimes personal service means an extra helping of sass.
One customer told Martie recently he remembered coming in 30 years ago and she telling him to slow down on his tea drinking, that he was going to drown.
“I like to be around people cutting up and carrying on,” she said. “That brings people back.”
An Air Force three-star general in town for his son’s graduation from flight school recently told Martie he remembered dining at the Old Hickory when he was stationed here in ’83.
Rather than work areas like most restaurants, the four waiters at the Old Hickory have a rotation system, like car salesmen. And then each waiter has her own regulars they take care of.
“You get attached to people,” said Bowen. “They get attached to you. Some people you can turn in the ticket before they sit down.”
People like Kenneth Montgomery.
“You don’t even have to say a word,” said Montgomery, a longtime Old Hickory customer, one of Martie’s regulars. “She knows what you want, how you want it cooked and what you want to drink. You just walk in and sit down, and Martie takes care of you.”
Martie’s customers take care of her. Her customers tip well, she says. They remember her at Christmas. When she was pregnant, they bought her baby clothes. A customer from Alabama gave her $100 to give to her second son before his wedding. Another couple gave her youngest son money when he joined the Army.
Asked what she would advise a young person considering a career as a waiter, she replies, “I tell them, ‘you can always try it, but you better stay in school.'”
Each of her three children gave the restaurant business a try — she and Bobby had restaurants of their own from 2001 to 2008 — but none of them stayed.
For mother, though, it’s a different story. “Me and Bobby have been working together for 23 years. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Birney Imes is the publisher of The Dispatch. Email him at [email protected].
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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