Pikeville Store-N-Deli

Scottsboro, Jackson County

This joint is on the original AL.com list of 22 (plus 35 submitted by the readers) Greasy Spoon Burger Joints in Alabama you have to visit before you die. 

What you find more often than not at a place where two county roads intersect is a Pure gas station. Sometimes it is abandoned, sometimes only the Pure sign is still standing, sometimes it is still operational, and sometimes it has been converted into something else - like the one on CR81 near Ft. Payne that is a church now, or the one at the intersection of CR21, CR420, and CR31 near Scottsboro. That one has become a Deli, but the old gas pumps are still standing in front of the building.

The deli is called Pikeville Store-N-Deli, and as the list of county roads that lead to it might reveal, it is in the middle of nowhere. There might even a Blues song exists that describes this place, maybe with a young aspiring guitar player as the hero, who makes a deal with the devil on that crossroads.

But although this joint is basically on a different planet, it was packed to the rafters when I arrived shortly after noon on this Friday. I barely could get a table to sit on and many of the cars outside were actually parked on the adjacent meadows.

So naturally, I wondered what all the fuzz was about – was there a big hungry underground population that I did not see on my lonely path to the crossroads, or was that the usual Alien invasion from outer space for lunch each Friday, as so many bad 1950s Sci-Fi B-Movies had portrayed? Where did all those people come from all of a sudden? My bewilderment grew when I scanned the inside and could recognize guys in business suits, workers in soiled Carhartt pants, retirees with Bama caps, some middle aged couples, a family with three small children, some chatty teenagers, and a few guys who apparently had been on a fishing trip. A more heterogenic crowd could hardly be imaginable. They all seemed to be in on a dirty little secret, and now here was I, a total outsider who evidently had stumbled into kind of a clandestine society – of Hamburger connoisseurs.

Oh well, now that I was finally there, after much head shaking about the path my usually trustworthy GPS unit had led me on, I decided to dive headlong into this adventure. But immediately I ran into a problem – there was no double cheeseburger on the menu. Bummer, I was extremely hungry, because I hadn’t eaten all day (don’t tell my wife). So I ordered the Cheeseburger basket, with everything on the burger, plus extra bacon. As it is customary in old style diners like this one, you order, the food is brought out, and you pay after you are done. In my case, with a small drink, that came to not even nine bucks.

While I waited for my order, I had time to watch a whole flock of Hummingbirds buzz around a couple of feeders that were placed outside the completely enclosed porch where I had eventually found a free space to sit. The whole atmosphere of this joint is very, well, country. It is a typical small-town American diner, with no frills, practical furniture, and sparse decoration. The store part of it is rather small, but you can get pickles out of a giant glass there, moon pie, root beer, and the like. The staff is very friendly and helpful, and the food is just great.

The Cheeseburger in the basket, which also contained very crisp and tasty crinkly fries, came with a big beef patty, cheese, white onions, lettuce, tomato, pickles, mayonnaise and mustard (that I ordered specifically – usually, they do not put mustard on the Cheeseburger), on a standard bun. Very juicy, very tasty, very flavorful – and very greasy. In short, this is how a Cheeseburger should be. The only disappointment was the small amount of bacon – it barely registered as a taste enhancer, nor as a different kind of texture.

So, then, finally, I had cracked the secret of why this place was so full of people – they all came here for the burgers. No Alien invasion, no hidden underground community, just plain folks that drove more than just a few miles to eat good, original, hand made food. My hats off to you, Pikeville Store-N-Deli, with such a loyal following success will be yours – it is just too bad that this joint is so far away from where I live. Would that be within an hour’s drive, I’d be a regular Alien there too.

Milo’s Hamburgers

Gardendale, Jefferson County

This joint is not on the original AL.com list of 22 (plus 35 submitted by the readers) Greasy Spoon Burger Joints in Alabama you have to visit before you die. 

Milo’s sweet tea is a true southern institution since 1946. But Milo Carlton not only made beverages in Birmingham, he also opened his first Milo’s Hamburgers joint there that year. Over the years, this mom and pop operation grew into a small local restaurant franchise, with currently fifteen restaurants in the Birmingham area. Good old Milo concentrated his business idea on the sauce for his hamburgers, and according to legend, involved his customers heavily in the trial and error process to find the right recipe. Well, those folks back then evidently had a rather peculiar taste – the sauce has an odd flavor, at least to me. It tastes like a mixture of Worcestershire sauce, A1 sauce, and three weeks old salami pizza. It is neither sweet, nor sour, nor spicy, nor bitter, nor tart – or maybe all of the above. It is just, well, in-distinctively featureless. The double cheeseburger I had came on a flat bun that was toasted to a bone dry state, with two equally non-succulent thin beef patties, some American cheese, chopped white onions, a few tiny pickle slices, and – drum roll please, because this is touted as the latest and greatest invention by Milo’s – a couple of slices of thick non-crispy leathery bacon. And, of course, it was smothered in this dreadful sauce. Yikes. It gave me a bad case of the burbs, and also some mild heartburn. I had a sweet tea (what else?!) with it, and together that came to a quarter less than nine bucks.

The atmosphere in the restaurant was very sober – numerous tables, no booths, no decoration on the walls, other than a couple of posters with Milo’s advertising. It was more a feeding station than a restaurant. The only good experience there was the sweet tea – but since you get this in every supermarket nowadays, there is really no reason to go to one of the Milo’s burger joints to get your fix. The hamburgers sure ain’t worth going there.

Big Chief Drive-In

Glencoe, Calhoun County

This joint is on the AL.com list of 22 Greasy Spoon Burger Joints in Alabama you have to visit before you die. 

Petty coats and root beer floats. Grease in the hair, Rock’n’Roll in the air. Little green men from Mars and pink shark-finned cars. Grape milk-shakes and slush puppy lakes. Life was glee and gasoline was free. The air was fresh and everybody paid cash. Oh, the old times were so much better than it is now. Good thing that there are still places where the clocks seemingly have not advanced past 1955, preserving a glimpse into a peculiar life style, and not succumbing to the mainstreaming of the modern corporate world.

The Big Chief Drive-in in Glencoe is such a place. The architecture alone is very, well, special – the building is of triangular shape, and it is adorned with plates in different colors on a light turquoise background, and a big Pepsi sign on the roof. And then there are those two the huge metal arrows in the parking lot, one pointing its tip skywards, the other one pointing to the ground, with the former having a round shield at the top that has an Indian chief’s head painted on it. It doesn’t get more gaudy than this.

The inside looks and feels like a classical 1950s diner – a small one, to be sure. A counter with half a dozen bar stools, facing the kitchen, and another counter on the window side, facing the parking lot. In the summer, some additional wooden benches and tables are put in the parking lot.

The menu has everything on it, plus the kitchen sink. A large variety of burgers, hot dogs, and sandwiches, and a huge assortment of ice cream, shakes, flurries, and sundaes - the menu board stretches across the whole width of the joint, and the specials are written on small boards that are suspended from the ceiling. From this dizzying array of choices, I picked the meanest sounding for lunch – the double Belly Buster.

That is a cheeseburger with two huge beef patties, American cheese, lettuce, tomato, pickles, BBQ sauce, and a fried onion ring in a standard burger bun. Short and simple, that was one of the best burgers I ever had. The beef was flavorful and juicy, the fried onion ring provided some crunch, and the BBQ sauce was just delicious. And while I was munching away on it, making a mess out of the spot I sat and also the burger itself, the owner came by a few times and gave me some freebees – a cup of grape ice cream, a just freshly baked donut (from scratch), and a slush puppy. Dutifully, I devoured all this, because all this was very, very good. Unfortunately, after stuffing myself with all those goodies on top of the burger, there was no more space in my belly for the fries that came with it, so they went into the trash can virtually untouched. This was not only one of the best burger meals ever, but for just eight bucks also a total steal. Needless to say that the staff was exceptionally nice, and not only because they gave me all those extra things for free. I was treated like family and felt very much at home there. The only bad thing is that this joint is about a two hour drive from where I live. If it was any closer, I would probably hang out there so much, that I would be considered family eventually. Worse things could happen.

Nesmith’s Jumbo Hamburgers

Moulton, Lawrence County

This joint is on the extended AL.com list of 22 (plus 35 submitted by the readers) Greasy Spoon Burger Joints in Alabama you have to visit before you die. 

Nesmith’s Jumbo Hamburgers is another one of those “slug burger” joints, where they mix the meat with bread and fry the patties. That makes for a very crisp outside and a somewhat soggy inside, and also provides a lot of flavor. But contrary to the name of the joint, the burgers are not jumbo, they are more adjacent to the size of sliders instead. The double cheeseburger all the way comes with two patties, chopped onions, ketchup and mustard, on a standard burger bun. The mixture of bread to meat seemed to me a bit more to the meaty side, which resulted in a firmer bite in the middle. The flavor was good, but not outstanding, and it is a must to put some of the red pepper spice on it that sits on every table.

The restaurant itself, which opened in 1966 and is still operated by the same family, is a rather small hole in the wall, with a counter that provides seating for about ten customers on simple wooden stools. There are also a couple of tables around the corner, next to the big window. No decoration worth mentioning adorns the walls, and although the place is certainly clean, it is also a bit stuffy and outdated. With just a little effort, new wall paint, some old license plates and the like, this could be easily transformed into an icon of American tradition. As it is right now, it is a fairly bland joint with cheap burgers – I paid just over for bucks for a double cheeseburger and a sweet tea – and the exaggerated claim to serve some kind of “Jumbo” burger. 

C.F. Penn Hamburgers

Decatur, Morgan County

This joint is on the original AL.com list of 22 Greasy Spoon Burger Joints in Alabama you have to visit before you die. 

When you step into C.F. Penn Hamburgers in Decatur, it is like walking through a time portal back into the 1950s. The red checkered linoleum floor, the sparsely decorated red and white striped walls with their old fashioned yellowed menu boards, the corny Pepsi clock in one corner, and last, but not least, the prices for the food instantly make you feel like Peggy Sue or Johnny B. Goode. There is a long counter with eleven chrome-clad bar stools, and some of those four-person booths and some of the two-person variety on the opposite wall and the window side of the restaurant. They accept cash only, which should not be a problem, because, as said before, the prices are very reasonable. I paid not even seven bucks for two double cheeseburgers all the way and a large soda.

The hamburgers there are a unique local specialty – the so called “slug burger”. Originally, during World War II when meat was rationed, the patties for the "slug burgers" consisted mostly of fried lard with blood and bits of trimmed meat. Nowadays, it is meat and about one third of filler/extender material, like bread crumbs. This specialty only exists from North Central Alabama to Corinth, Mississippi, where they use potato or soy flour as the extender. The extender stretches the portions and also contributes to the low price.

The patties are dumped into a large rectangular frying pan with boiling oil, and pulled out of there when the outside is golden-brown and crispy. Since most of the flavor of any food comes either through various spices, or through fat, oil and grease by way of the cooking process, you get a very flavorful patty here – and in the South, we know anyway that everything is better when it is deep fried. Outsiders may be dismayed by this, especially since after you crush through the crisp outside, your teeth will sink into the somewhat soggy and mushy inside of the hamburger patty – remember the bread crumbs ... Well, I personally like the two very distinctive textures of the patty, but it is certainly not the uniform and standardized stuff you get at those national franchise places.

The staff there will “pre-cook” the patties, and there is always a stack of them waiting to be used in a new burger. Since they will take the upper most patties from the stack for each new burger, the patties on the bottom are fairly dated when they eventually get to them. And, of course, you better not try imagining what all that glorious grease and oil will do to your coronary system or your waist line – it is soul food, not health food, dummy!

The really huge double cheeseburger all the way comes with two of those fried patties, some American cheese, chopped onions, and mustard between a standard burger bun. There are shakers with red pepper spice on the tables, which gives the burger a very nice kick in the pants, and adds an additional layer of flavor, if you need that. You can have French fries as a side, which are also top notch, especially with some of the red pepper spice sprinkled on them.

The staff at C.F. Penn Hamburgers is very nice, and the restaurant is kept spotless clean. This is definitely a place where the locals eat, and at any given day there is a mixture of teenagers, workers, house wives, business people, and retirees to find there. The building is situated in the revitalized downtown Arts and Entertainment district of Decatur, just a block away from the fabulous Princess Theatre, which is a 1950s gems that has been restored to its former glory. I do not know whether C.F. Penn Hamburgers has ever received a renovation – it probably exists in a time bubble that defied all outside pressure for modernization since they opened in 1927. I hope it will stay that way for at least another 87 years, keeping a very southern tradition alive.