Cheeseburger Now!

It was 8 a.m., and not a soul was in the nonsmoking room at Jerry’s Woodswether Café. But half a dozen folks were eating breakfast in the front room, where there’s a black-plastic or green-glass ashtray on every table. None of the patrons were smoking, though, including me.

The main dining room at Jerry’s is more popular because there’s vitality and action in the tobacco-friendly room. The solemn, smoke-free section is diner Siberia. In a society that’s increasingly intolerant of smokers, restaurateur Jerry Naster has turned the tables — metaphorically, anyway — so that his regular customers, predominantly smokers, aren’t made to feel like outcasts.

The main dining room is big enough that wafting smoke shouldn’t be an issue anyway, but the interesting thing is that most diners don’t appear to be firing up any early-morning Camels with their first cups of coffee. Even the woman in overalls who’d been sitting across from me (she looked like Gravel Gertie in the old Dick Tracy comic strip) had a box of Marlboro Reds on the table, right next to her white mug of joe, but she never lit up.

As a former smoker who couldn’t put a lucid sentence together before my morning coffee and cigarette fix, I was impressed by Gertie’s discipline. On the other hand, I was sorely disappointed in my own lack of will when it came to ordering breakfast that morning. I’d intended to eat something light and healthy — oatmeal with toast, maybe. In the next booth, a trio of lithe, bleary-eyed twentysomethings had requested oatmeal, and the waitress had hammered them with questions: “Do you want milk with that? Brown sugar? Butter? Raisins?”

OK, so their hot cereal was probably less healthy after they accessorized it with all of the above, but it was a lot more nourishing than my plate of biscuits and gravy, a bacon-and-cheese omelet that was nearly bigger than my shoe, an equally hefty pile of hash browns, and buttered wheat toast. It would have been the perfect breakfast if I’d left Jerry’s to go to my job as a construction worker or carpenter, I suppose. As a lazy writer, it was a scandalously indulgent way to start the day — I probably would have been better off with a cig and coffee.

But what the hell, it had been five years since I’d eaten one of Naster’s oversized omelets, back when he was still in his original café on Woodswether Road, just off the curvy Woodswether viaduct. I loved that smaller, smokier venue, which was easy to spot because of the graffiti-inspired murals on its concrete-block walls: cartoon eggs with vampire fangs and killer cabbages.

When Naster moved to his bigger location on Ninth Street last year, he hired the same artist to create two murals on the red-brick walls on both sides of the building. When I called for directions to the new place, the waitress patiently explained the route from 12th Street. “You can’t miss it,” she said. “There are aliens painted on the building.”

Well, the aliens are on the west side of the building. On the east side, facing the parking lot, is an artistic homage to The Blues Brothers, complete with a hot dog that looks like Dan Aykroyd, a burger with John Belushi’s face, four chickens getting electrocuted and an egg saying “Think,” the tune that Aretha Franklin — playing a waitress — sings in that movie.

The building’s front door is heavy green metal — not your typical restaurant entrance. The first time I walked in, I half-expected to see Marilyn Chambers on a trapeze. Not that I ever saw that vulgar old ’70s porno film or anything.

[page]

Instead, the Woodswether Café is just the kind of place that Jake and Elwood Blues would find appealing, even if they couldn’t order four fried chickens and a Coke. The lunch menu does offer fried fish sandwiches, chicken-fried steak, fried shrimp and the best onion rings in town.

I learned about those rings on the afternoon that I brought Louise and Jason to lunch with me. They’re nonsmokers, but they nixed the lonely smoke-free zone in favor of the livelier front room.

Louise and Jason were entranced. “Now there’s an appetizer combination I’ve never seen,” Jason said, pointing to the guy in the booth opposite ours. The gent was enjoying a prelunch snack of a cigarette and a small bowl of cottage cheese.

At first, Jason and Louise were confused by codes on the white board that listed most of the lunch selections: “What’s a DCB w/FF? Or a Bac CB w/FF?” Louise asked. The FF stands for french fries, I told her. DCB stands for double cheeseburger, and Bac CB is a bacon cheeseburger.

The menu in the plastic sleeve offers more elaborate descriptions, which is how Jason learned about the fantastic hot-pepper

cheeseburger on Texas toast with grilled onions. It’s my favorite sandwich at Jerry’s, but I didn’t want to influence Jason’s opinion, so I kept mum.

He couldn’t, though, as soon as it arrived. “This is the single best thing I’ve eaten in a long time,” he proclaimed, holding up half the sandwich for us to inspect. “Look at the craftsmanship on this sandwich. It’s beautiful.”

So was the heaping mound of fat and crunchy onion rings that he ordered along with the burger. Louise and I grabbed a few, because we weren’t so enamored of the flaccid FF beside our sandwiches. Louise noted that they still had bits of the potato skin on them. “When you see that, you kind of think they’re healthier than most fries,” she said. True, but they were also a bit too greasy.

Louise did, however, love her grilled Reuben sandwich, thickly layered with pastrami, sauerkraut and Jerry’s homemade Thousand Island dressing. I’d tried to order carefully, having once made the mistake of requesting one of Naster’s DCBs, which turned out to be nearly as big as a soccer ball. This time, I asked for a single cheeseburger but could finish it only by taking the meat off the saucer-sized bun.

Despite Jerry’s limited dessert selection, Jason was game to try something sweet. Our server rattled off the possibilities: “A cinnamon roll, brownies, apple pie.” He chose the latter, à la mode, and brightened up at the slab of pie sided with what looked like a half-pint of vanilla ice cream.

A couple of days later, I returned for another light lunch with my friend Jeanne. She’s one of those smokers who usually prefers to eat in the nonsmoking section, but even she grabbed a booth in the nicotine nook. “No one’s sitting in the nonsmoking room,” she whispered.

She liked the visuals in the main room anyway: lots of burly, barrel-chested men with dusty boots and embroidered name patches on their work shirts.

Jeanne has the same brawny taste when it comes to food. She ordered one of Naster’s most popular lunch plates: the hot beef sandwich. She had seen our waitress deliver the dish to a guy at another booth and started craving that gravy immediately.

[page]

“Look at this,” she marveled as she dug into the mound of mashed potatoes, tender roast beef and soft white bread, all hidden under a thick, shiny beef gravy. Jeanne had finished half of her lunch and was boxing up the rest before I had eaten a third of my hot-pepper cheeseburger.

“A terrific lunch,” she said, gathering up her purse. “Now let’s go outside so I can smoke.”