Southern hospitality abounds at new Cracker Barrel
First-rate crew extends welcome at long-awaited eatery
Am I surprised that it seems like half of Kern County has been patiently waiting in line at Cracker Barrel since it opened in August?
Heck no. Every few weeks I get emails from readers asking if particular restaurants are going to be opening here. Popular on the list are Claim Jumper and TGI Friday’s. Cracker Barrel has been right in the mix, particularly since they started opening stores in California.
I can understand the appeal. What other chain offers Coca-Cola chocolate cake? What other chain loves to fry things? What other chain has a gift shop full of all sorts of kitschy things including Moon Pies, unusual sodas, ornaments, clothes and even those wooden rocking chairs ($239.99) you can relax in on the front porch during the inevitable wait?
And I do think, given the restaurant’s proximity to Highway 99, that wait is not going away anytime soon. But you can call ahead or go on the chain’s website to get on the list — it even tells you how long the wait will be. We passed on the list and simply arrived at 10 a.m. on a Saturday; we were seated in an hour and were out the door by noon.
If you have a craving for the food to go, you can order it and they have curbside pickup and a station in the gift shop to pay and pick up.
Cracker Barrel offers breakfast all day, and that’s what we ordered. My companion selected the homestyle chicken and French toast ($12.49) while I chose the bacon n’ egg hash brown casserole ($13.49), with the two of us sharing a piece of chocolate Coca-Cola cake for dessert ($5.49).
Now people do rave about that hash brown casserole, and I can understand the passion, given how few dishes go wrong
Most travelers are accidental taphophiles. If you’ve ever visited Père-Lachaise in Paris, Bonaventure in Savannah, Ga., or St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans, you qualify. To advance to the next level, you just need to visit more cemeteries and graveyards, which is easy to do considering they’re everywhere. In 2018, Joshua Stevens, a cartography and data visualization expert at NASA’s Earth Observatory, mapped out nearly 145,000 burial grounds in the contiguous United States.
“On vacation, I will walk around town and stop at any cemetery that catches my eye,” said Steve Stern, a New Jersey retiree and amateur genealogist who posts his research on Find a Grave. “I find them fascinating.”
Taphophiles usually downplay, if not outright dismiss, the creepy factor of cemeteries. Olsen said ghosts will typically haunt their former residence or workplace, not their final resting site. She used Olive Thomas Pickford, one of Woodlawn’s 320,000 “residents,” to demonstrate her point. The Ziegfeld Follies chorus girl, who fatally ingested her husband’s syphilis medicine in 1920, causes mischief inside Broadway’s New Amsterdam Theater. But when she’s at home in her mausoleum, she’s as quiet as a silent film actress.
“I haven’t had many spooky experiences, which I am happy and sad about,” said Loren Rhoads, author of “199 Cemeteries to See
Before You Die.” “Nobody has ever grabbed my foot.”
Around Halloween, a number of cemeteries will raise a few hairs with events that illuminate the sometimes dark and tortured backstories of the buried. D.C.’s Congressional Cemetery, for one, organizes “Murder and Mayhem: Tragic Deaths at Congressional Cemetery” walking tours. Volunteers in period dress channel the personalities residing in the 19th-century Cedar Rest Cemetery in Bay Saint Louis, Miss. Docents also don costumes on the Capturing the Spirit of Oakland tour in Atlanta. However, the Georgia cemetery reassures the easily spooked that the tour is “designed to enlighten rather than frighten.”
“Cemeteries are a place of joy and a celebration of the dead,” said Mary Margaret Fernandez, program outreach coordinator with the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “They tell the story of people.”
BEING A TOMBSTONE TOURIST
I read Rhoads’s book. Consulted with taphophiles. Downloaded cemetery apps. Joined the Find a Grave
community, whose members taught me to never ask a vague question like, “Can you recommend a city with a large concentration of interesting cemeteries?”
First rookie mistake: I should’ve included the country.
“We would also need to know what you want to do when you visit — take photos of interesting monuments? Visit Famous graves? Document military burials? Fill photo requests? Mow the rows? Try to decipher old worn monuments? Or just sit and commune with the souls of the departed?” a member named RosalieAnn replied.
I narrowed my options down to three destinations before settling on New York City, plus a trial run in Congressional Cemetery in my home base. (Savannah and Boston were the runners-up.)
“BEWARE . . . All souls who enter here,” read a sign at Congressional Cemetery’s main gate, setting a tone that was more “Scary Movie” than “Night of the Living Dead.” “Well that sounded spooky, but this is an historic yet active burial ground so enter at your own risk.”