The old adage is slightly different for the restaurant business: The more things change, the more people want them to stay the same. Nashville has a plethora of options that didn't exist here three decades ago: food trucks, craft breweries, coffeehouses that roast their own beans, eateries representing locales as disparate as Honduras, Vietnam and Turkey. We love 'em. Thanks!
But at the same time, nobody wants to lose the local staples they've been eating since childhood. What's more, we want them to taste exactly the same way. Proust had madeleines to trigger a flood of associative memories. Nashvillians have Rotier's patty melts, Leland Riggan's caramel icing and Jimmy Kelly's corncakes. Sadly, there are fewer such items as the years pass. Gone forever are Hap Townes' stewed tomatoes, The Laughing Man's Buddha Bowl and the Vandyland BLT.
So when a woman saw the logo on some flyers Cindy Moskovitz was copying a few weeks ago at Office Depot, she just about shrieked.
"Mosko's? Mosko's?" she said, all but grabbing Moskovitz by the lapels. "Will you serve the Turkey Munch? ARE YOU SERVING THE TURKEY MUNCH?"
Moskovitz has been asked some variation of that question for nearly 20 years. That sandwich was the runaway success at Mosko's Muncheonette, the Elliston Place newsstand, nightspot, lunch joint and odds-and-sods emporium she and her husband Scott operated for 22 years. It says something about the city's choices back then that a simple turkey sandwich distinguished by a distinctively tangy Day-Glo sauce had folks lined up at the counter. It says something about the sandwich that people have missed it ever since the Moskovitzes sold their stake in 1999, even before the place closed for good a few years later.
"If another person tells me they would kill for a Turkey Munch," daughter Lauren Moskovitz was fond of saying, "I will kill them."
And yet Lauren, who's worn the sobriquet Little Mosko ever since she was old enough to sell cigars, beer and filthy greeting cards to her parents' customers — basically, since grade school at USN — is the one leading the charge to bring the newly reactivated Mosko's brand and that damn Turkey Munch to a clamoring populace that's gone without for too long.
Her anchor space is a small, gleaming kitchen tucked away in the public gathering spaces of the Nashville Entrepreneur Center in the Trolley Barns on Rolling Mill Hill south of downtown. The open area resembles a booming software company's campus, with long tables running the length of the hallways and people seated on either side tapping softly on laptops. All that brain strain requires fuel.
That's where Lauren and her boyfriend Alex Grainger come in. Starting at 8 a.m., their small eatery, Little Mosko's, dishes out coffee and remarkably inexpensive breakfast plates to early workers. How inexpensive? The daily special gets you a bowl of grits topped with Benton's bacon and a Willow Farms fried egg or griddled homemade banana bread — for four bucks. Sandwiches kick in at 11:30 a.m., and the counter stays open until 3 p.m. And by that we mean open: at 3:01 on a recent Wednesday afternoon, peckish visitors kept showing up in line.
The attraction, however, wasn't the Turkey Munch. It was the glass-domed plate of baked goods Lauren keeps on the counter, stocked with puck-sized chocolate chunk cookies, oatmeal-raisin cookies and inch-thick slabs of banana bread. The chocolate chunk had the kind of dense, cakey goodness that produces filaments of liquid chocolate when you pull it apart; the banana bread was moist and deeply flavored enough to make me want to come back and try it lightly griddled.
And that's when Lauren dropped the bomb.
See, when I saw the motto "GF'N Delicious" — well, years of working at an alt-weekly have directed my mind elsewhere. (You feel me, Guns N' Roses fans.) Turns out the GF stands for gluten-free, as Lauren and Cindy, aka Mama Mosko, are both celiac. Lauren loves baking, but she couldn't handle wheat. The problem is that wheat flour has virtually no equal when it comes to producing baked goods of lightness and appealing texture.
But much experimentation in the kitchen has helped Lauren solve what, to me, has always been one of the mysteries of gluten-free baking: why so much of it seems to suck. Her trick, she says, is using precise proportions of four different flours: white rice, brown rice, and potato and tapioca starch. The cookies don't taste like beer coasters; the bread doesn't have the consistency of pasteboard. I'd never have known they were bootin' the gluten.
Lauren says she wrestled with whether to tell people, thinking that would be the ultimate test. A better yardstick is that over the holidays, she moved more than 5,000 cookies, with her family helping her fill and even deliver orders at her home bake shop. When her father Scott put her and Grainger in touch with Sam Lingo, the Entrepreneur Center's president and COO, about taking over the lunch counter, that presented the next challenge: how to concoct an exact replica of the Turkey Munch's famous sauce.
Cindy Moskovitz says the base is nothing more complex than mayo, yellow mustard, horseradish and honey; it's the added spices that produce its proprietary tang. Whatever they are, the faintly pickle-like taste came back in an instant — as did the sensation of having that egg-salad-colored sauce all over my hands and face. And the roast beef sandwich was even better, layered on sandwich bread made just for Little Mosko's by another second-generation baker — from the Charpier family.
The funny thing, as Cindy and Scott Moskovitz admit freely, is that Lauren and Alex are drastically overqualified for the Mosko's staples they're serving. Alex had been the executive chef at Germantown's Silo after a stint as chef de cuisine at New York's Left Bank; his passions, apart from Lauren, lie more in slow-cooking and pasta. What that means, ultimately, is that those nostalgic for Mosko's aren't getting exactly what they remember. They're getting something better.
And really, for me, as a Mosko's visitor from the early '80s on, it never was about the food. The original Mosko's was not a place I went to eat; it was a place I went to feel connected to a cosmopolitan world larger than my hometown of Murfreesboro. It had the best newsstand in town, carrying everything from Pravda to the Village Voice (redundant in those days). It had the Sunday Times, that miracle of human endeavor, when no one else did. It was a secret handshake among the curious and crazy — a place where Cindy Moskovitz says employees like Threk Michaels, Will Kimbrough, David Mead and Bobby Bare Jr. were as much stars for working there as they were for their music, and where that dude who hogged all the magazines might turn out to be the guy who wrote "The Gambler." The food was just a convenience.
But now newsstands are largely gone, and those days are gone, and even in the sparkling new Nashville of power and progress I can't help but miss them. So when they set the Turkey Munch on the counter at Little Mosko's, I took a bite, a warm familiar bite, and I was grateful to feel something I hadn't in this landscape in a while: home.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com
