Rolling restaurant serves up more than good food
At 10 minutes before 5 Thursday morning, Dale McElyea arrived at a trailer parked near TPC Southwind’s tennis courts and flipped on a grill. In a half-hour came his first customer, a PGA Tour caddie, one of scores he would feed before the day was over.
McElyea’s is a small but unique part of the FedEx St. Jude Classic. He runs a traveling restaurant, feeding caddies and assorted Tour-related personnel breakfast and lunch at one of his five booths or bar seating inside the trailer, or at a handful of tables and chairs outside of it. It’s one of 20 stops he’ll make on the Tour this year.
For the crew of welltraveled caddies who don’t live with the relative f inancial security of some of their playing counterparts — and don’t get passes to eat the club- house buffet — it’s a home away from home. Get some food, sure. But pick up some sunscreen and some headache medicine on the way out the door. Take a number or two from a list of local hotels.
“This is sort of like a clubhouse, not just a place to eat,” McElyea said.
He lives in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., near the Tour’s headquarters but travels to as many tournaments as can be reasonably accessed driving the trailer. His year started in San Diego and will finish in Boston in the fall. (From Memphis, he won’t travel to the U.S. Open in Philadelphia. Instead, he’ll visit his mother’s farm in Missouri and other spots before July’s John Deere Classic in Silvis, Ill.)
The 62-year- old was a caddie himself once, looping for Steve Lowery for 13 years. Lowery is on the Champions Tour now and McElyea doesn’t get around as well as he used to. So he took over the trailer, owned by the Tour’s caddie association (of which he is the president) and funded by the Tour itself, a few years back.
“He saw a need and he filled it,” said Phil Cannon, the FESJC’s executive director.
I ask McElyea what the best thing is on the menu. He’s the cook, so who is he to answer? He asks the guys in booths across the way.
“The hamburgers are ridiculously good,” one said.
“No,” said another, “the banana pudding.”
Thursday’s special, written on a white board near the sliding glass door to the trailer, was the chicken tortilla casserole, $5. (At 8:30 Thursday, I had a quite tasty egg, cheese and bacon sandwich on an English muffin. Participatory journalism and all.)
Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the busiest days, what with all the caddies plus equipment reps who leave by the time the first round starts. Mem- phis isn’t his busiest stop, thanks in no small part to the trailer’s relatively tucked-away location in relation to the clubhouse. Some days at Tampa and Houston, McElyea’s crew — it includes two others — will fill some 400 orders. The busiest time is between about 10:30 and 2, when the caddies coming in from morning rounds mix with those going out for afternoon rounds.
By 3:30, he’ll turn off the grill, another 10-hour day complete.
Weary and aware of another before- sunrise alarm, McElyea has yet one more task to finish: Because the trailer doesn’t have enough cold storage for more than one day’s provisions, it’s off to the grocery store for more eggs, more ground beef, more of everything the caddies will demolish on Friday.