White Trash Cafe
1914 Bransford Ave. 383-0109
Hours: 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Mon.-Fri.
The first time Stretch McEwen carried food to a customer's table, she dropped it. It was at the Raleigh Pizza Parlor in Bartlett, a few miles east of Memphis. "Well, you try carrying a hot 10-pound pizza on a flimsy old piece of cardboard," she says in her distinctive, deep-voiced twang. "It hit the table with a splat. But they didn't mind. They ate it anyway."
Such was the inauspicious start to a waitressing career that has spanned nearly 25 years and a dozen restaurants, in the process making her one of Nashville's most well-known servers. "I'm not the most famous," she emphasizes. "Joyce [Stubblefield] at the Pancake Pantry is the most famous waitress in Nashville. The first time I went in there to eat, she impressed me so much. I decided I would do everything her way. She is my mentor, and she is the best."
The second most famous waitress in Nashville was born and raised in Columbia, Tenn. By the time she turned 12, Karen Gail McEwen—as she is known to her mother, but no one else—was 6 feet tall, or as she puts it, 5 foot 12. "Raymond Hampton began calling me Stretch in seventh grade," she explains. "It stuck ever since."
When her parents divorced, her mother moved the family to Nashville briefly, but Stretch graduated from high school in Columbia. "I didn't exactly have a plan for the future," she says wryly. "I just wanted to leave Columbia. I had a boyfriend, and we moved up here. I got a nice boring job with Travelers Insurance, working in auto claims. We moved to Michigan, where I put him through nursing school working administrative jobs in hospitals. I hated it. Then we moved to Memphis, and that's when I got my first waitressing job at the Raleigh Pizza Parlor. It was easy work, I enjoyed it and I liked being around people."
In 1981, she moved to Nashville for good; her path to fame got its start in a place where many have begun the same quest, albeit through a different medium. "My friend Penny got me a job at the Bluebird Cafe. It was a lot more exciting than the Raleigh Pizza Parlor, I can tell you that. I saw everybody play there, before they were anybody. And all the great songwriters: Don Schlitz, Fred Knobloch, Tom Schuyler and Harlan [Howard], of course. I worked there six nights a week. It was so much fun back then. I had a blast, and I made great money. That was before they started shushing everybody. I couldn't get into that."
She was at the Bluebird for three-and-a-half years, but not even a trophy naming her "Most Dedicated Waitress" presented by owner Amy Kurland could keep her there when the relationship soured. "We had a little tête-à -tête, and it was just time for me to move on."
Next stop was Third Coast, then run by Randy Rayburn and Dan Goosetree. The restaurant was located in the building (now where Bound'ry sits) that had once housed the notorious Rock 'n' Roll Hotel, site of legendary all-night carousing with some of the most famous touring bands of the time. "I knew Randy; everybody knew Randy," Stretch says. "But I had never worked for him before. When I first started working there, he gave me a copy of the menu and told me to memorize it. I took it home and studied for two weeks; I was so nervous, I hadn't taken a test since high school. So he gave me six sheets of paper and told me to write the menu. I passed, and I'm glad he gave me that experience."
Stretch always had a good, if somewhat selective memory. "If I saw a customer in Kroger, I couldn't remember their name for anything, but I could always remember what they drank. 'Hey, Jack on the rocks, how ya doin'?' "
It was at Third Coast that she developed Joyce Stubblefield's talent for keeping orders in her head. "People would try to confuse me, but they never could. You have to eventually write it down for the kitchen, or put it in the computer, but I stopped writing orders at the table way back then."
From the Coast, she moved on to a decade-long stint at Sportsman's Grille in Belle Meade, which is where she came to know just about everybody in town. "I loved it there; it was very comfortable, like a family. I ran the front of the house. And kept nearly everyone I ever hired."
Following a brouhaha with a customer at the original Sportsman's, she moved on again. "Logan's, Ireland's, Gerst Haus, Box Seat, 12th & Porter, Sports Cafe, Figlio's, Caesar's." She counts them off on her fingers. "I don't do well in corporate restaurants. I would come home from Logan's with my tongue bleeding. But every other place had its own personality. Harlan used to come in the Gerst Haus every Sunday for pigs' knuckles. Sportsman's Grille was like a big romper room; people just let their kids run around all over the place, completely unsupervised. But I get along with most everybody. It's my table, and I'm in charge, but you're the customer and I'll do whatever I can to make you happy. I don't mind separate checks, and I don't even get bothered much anymore when people don't tip; some people just don't know any better.
"My pet peeve right now, though, is cell phones. It drives me crazy when I come to a table to take someone's order and they're talking on a cell phone. I just say, 'Are you talking on that thing, or are you talking to me? Because you're about to run out of minutes with me.' "
It was as the Gerst Haus that she met Lynn Batey, her current employer—"boss" might be too strong a word when it comes to describing the relationship between Stretch and the person who writes her paycheck. "I always told Stretch that if I ever opened a restaurant, I wanted her to come work for me," says Batey, who opened the White Trash Cafe last month. "If she hadn't come to work for me, I wouldn't have had table service here. This would have been like other meat 'n' threes—like a cafeteria. She knows more about this business than just about anyone and can handle anything."
With its politically incorrect name—which Batey says is taken from the White Trash Cooking cookbook—White Trash Cafe was bound to grab some attention, aided and abetted by its grand opening ad: "Eat here, or we'll slash the tires on your house." The logo on the menu is of an unhitched mobile home swirling about in the eye of a tornado.
The one-room cinderblock cafe, located on Bransford Avenue down the street from the Tennessee State Fairgrounds, is decorated with the kind of astoundingly tacky things that don't even snag a buyer in yard sales—the tchotchkes that end up getting dumped at the back door of the Southern Thrift Store on Gallatin Road, which is where Batey obtained many of them. The china and flatware also appear to have been collected from a secondhand store; tables are Formica-topped, and seating is on mismatched dinette chairs.
Stretch comes in five mornings a week by 10 a.m. and readies the room and service area, making tea, wrapping silver in paper napkins, slicing lemons, wiping down the 20 or so tables. At 11:30, the room starts to fill, and by just after noon, every table is taken, and customers either wait at the door or opt instead for lunch to go. By 3:30, she is usually in her car headed home.
Lately, business has nearly doubled, perhaps a result of the current ad: "Eat here or Stretch will come kick your ass!" She throws back her head and laughs at the notion. "This is my first actual day job," she says. "I've mellowed quite a bit. I used to go out a lot, all over town, but now I just go to South Street; that's my place to hang when I'm not working. These days, I'd rather spend time at home with my dogs. They own the place, but they let me come visit."
