Cooking for a Cause
The architecture and the ambiance still reflect the days when eating establishments had to classify themselves as private clubs in order to sell liquor. The name is a link to the building’s former life, as a gasoline station.
And it’s a gutsy name, too. It took some gumption for the Woods family in Newport, Tennessee, to come up with a name like the Grease Rack. But it was a stroke of genius. People have remembered it over the years and have flocked there for platter-size steaks, despite the restaurant’s off-the-beaten-path location. You take a road that bisects a hillside cemetery to get there.
But the Woods family has never been short on fortitude. Inherited polycystic kidney disease has decimated their ranks, but they cook on. Near the restaurant is the small building where the late Earl Woods, the restaurant’s founder, took his dialysis treatments. A plaque right inside the Grease Rack’s front door honors over 175 organ donors. Oris Cagle, a friend of the Woods family, was the organizer of the Earl Woods Chapter of Organ Donors. Back during the days of pop-a-top Budweiser cans, the family saved aluminum beer tabs to help raise funds for kidney patients.
Kidney disease killed Earl Woods and two of his sons. Earl’s son Buddy, who now runs the restaurant, has been kept alive with a transplanted kidney, donated by his wife LuAn. As we talk, his iPhone alarm goes off, reminding him to take his anti-rejection medication.
I’ve been eating at the Grease Rack for years, but a recent visit was bittersweet. I was pleased to learn that the restaurant is staying in the family, under the management of Buddy Woods. But his mother Joyce, who had been known to throw a potato across the kitchen when someone rushed her, has died. Her daughter Judy, I learned, passed away several years ago. Interviewing Joyce and Judy was a joy. They held nothing back.
“Earl tried slot machines in here, but that was about the time a new district attorney general came into office and everybody had to get rid of all that stuff,” Joyce once told me. “We sold liquor down through the years. The last time they got us for selling without a license, we decided no more liquor.”
A small anteroom is a hold-over from the days when diners had to press a buzzer and be checked out thoroughly before being allowed to enter the restaurant. Joyce told me it was a way to “keep out anyone with an unsavory reputation.” Plastic membership cards were once required, too.
When Joyce retired her tongs, she passed along to her employees her method of dunking steaks in a soy sauce bath before grilling them. Her grill and grate are still in use.
Service is speedier these days, but Buddy has resurrected a reminder of his mother’s slower era, a hand-painted sign she commissioned that reads, “The reward for your patience is the very best food in town. Thank you for waiting. Earl, Joyce & Judy.”
Joyce would regularly advise her son Buddy never to get into the restaurant business. “I took her advice for 36 years,” he says, as he takes a phone call to arrange a wedding rehearsal dinner at the restaurant.
Just like the architecture, the Grease Rack menu has meaning. Bite-size beef tips, known as “Baby Steak,” were added to the menu when Earl had to reduce his meat consumption during dialysis. The 16-ounce strip steak covered in fried onions is known as “Harold’s Special,” named for Harold Smith, who worked at the Stokely plant down the hill and often lent his maintenance skills when something needed fixing at the restaurant.
From pumping Texaco gas and selling tires in the early days to serving up rib-eye steaks and New York strips today, community connection has always defined the Grease Rack. And so has perseverance.
“You learned a lot of things from Mama Joyce,” Buddy tells me. “One of those things is work.”
About the author: Fred Sauceman’s latest book is Buttermilk and Bible Burgers: More Stories from the Kitchens of Appalachia, published by Mercer University Press in Macon, Georgia.
If you go:
- The Grease Rack
- 555 Morrell Springs Road, Newport, Tennessee
- 423.623.9279