SourtoeCocktailClub.com

By Mark Jurkevich

Mexico’s Mezcal, with its famous worm, is no match for our northern neighbor’s novelty drink – the Sourtoe Cocktail. The former comes with one worm in each bottle; the latter comes with one amputated human toe in each drink.

Dawson City’s Downtown Hotel, in the heart of Yukon Territory, has been proudly serving the Sourtoe Cocktail since 1973, when local riverboat captain Dick “River Rat” Stevenson found a severed big toe in a pickle jar.

Stevenson’s original rules for joining the Sourtoe Cocktail Club still ring in the late night hours at the hotel saloon – “You can drink it fast, you can drink it slow, but the lips have gotta touch the toe.”

The purist version of the cocktail is very simple – Yukon Jack whiskey is poured into a rocks glass. The bartender then fishes out a human toe from a dry salt pack and drops it into the glass. If you successfully down the drink, bottoms-up style, so that the toe ends up resting on your lips, you become a member of the Sourtoe Cocktail Club. Read more »

Michaela den | Wikimedia Commons

More than once on this blog I’ve sung the praises of The New Yorker Deli, the venerable and quite inexpensive landmark restaurant on Williamson Road.

It is still venerable and inexpensive and popular (and cash-only … hmmm). The joint was full Friday night. But after an awful dining experience there, the place is going to be difficult to recommend again. The food and service at Hardees are better.

There is no ambiance to the New Yorker, but few of its fans expect any. What they expect are delicious, overstuffed sandwiches prepared and served efficiently.

They have to be quick because the food is so cheap the only way they can make any real money is via turnover. And that was only one of the problems my wife, son and I noted Friday night. Read more »

A shot of the dining room inside Origami, the new Japanese steak house inside Turner Place at Lavery Hall, Virginia Tech's newest dining hall. | vtnews.vt.edu

The Hokie nation awakens this week from its summer slumber. Welcome back, students!

As you streamed back onto campus, you may have noticed one huge difference compared to last year, over behind McBryde Hall.

It’s a gleaming new, $35.7 million, two-level dining hall where you can gorge to your gut’s content. Allow me to treat you to some of the marvelous amenities of Turner Place at Lavery Hall. There you will find:

– A European cafe that has a gelato bar and serves made-to-order crepes and flambe.

– 1872 Fire Grill, an upscale steakhouse with “luxury seating” that serves chops and sirloins sizzled over smoky charcoal. Tech bills it as “the first of its kind on a college campus.”

– A chain bagel bakery (Blacksburg’s first, by the way), a pizzeria with a wood-fired oven, a chain Mexican grill, a soup cafe, and a juice and smoothies bar.

– 833 indoor seats, including dining for the Corps of Cadets plus 244 outdoor seats; and

– A Japanese steakhouse, Origami, where cooks pull karate moves with flashing spatulas as they prepare dinner on tableside grills, while they serve up cheesy jokes.

You may have read about this back in July, in a big front-page spread in this newspaper. The pictures were amazing.

In those, the place looks like the bastard offspring of a mall food court and a futuristic airport terminal, with ultra-modern lighting, Earth tones, natural wood and lots and lots of glass. Read more »

Stan Seymour

Note from Dan: While I’m at the beach with my family I’m treating you to some columns that ran within the past year. This one first appeared Sept. 29, 2011. Since then, Bojangles owner Stan Seymour lost his bid for Roanoke County Board of Supervisors, and Salem finally got it’s long-desired Chick Fil A.

Salem is a city that rarely squawks. But for many years there’s been one oft-heard gripe around town: no Chick-fil-A.

Salemites have to drive all the way to Valley View or Tanglewood malls to feast on a crispy chicken sandwich deluxe and waffle fries.

That 8-mile outrage is a shameful stain on Salem’s otherwise stellar record of luring fast-food joints to West Main Street, which is pretty much a giant mall food court except it has lots of drive-throughs and no common roof.

So there was lots of clucking when Salem crowed it had finally landed a Chick-fil-A for West Main. It would join McDonald’s and KFC and Subway and Taco Bell and Pizza Hut and Hardee’s, Arby’s, Zaxby’s, Wendy’s, Quiznos, Burger King, Sonic, Firehouse Subs, Sam’s Hotdog Stand, Dairy Queen, Starbucks and Sheetz.

But it’s ruffled the feathers of Stan Seymour, who owns Bojangles’ Famous Chicken ‘n Biscuits outlets in our valley and who just happens to be running for the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors.

One of his chicken stands is on West Main, and he sounds madder than a wet hen over the Chick-fil-A plan. Read more »

Dave Asbury, 55, grows tomatoes among other fresh vegetables and plants in his 4,000 sq. ft. garden and his greenhouse along Yellow Mountain Road in Roanoke County, just over the city line. Asbury restocks his self-serve trays that sit under a Box Elder tree in his driveway shaded by a big green umbrella. | By STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS | The Roanoke Times

Monday after work I drove out Yellow Mountain Road, just a little ways past Garden City, to see if I could snag some mouth-watering, organic heirloom tomatoes from Dave Asbury, who I wrote about in this column back in 2009.

Alas, the self-employed stone mason is not selling his delectable treats yet. But his dozens of plants are big, strong, and loaded with maters. He expects to be selling them — on the honor system, as always — by the end of this week.

Asbury’s been growing tomatoes for 11 seasons now. He told me this year may be the first in which he believes he has successfully staggered his crop. He hopes that means he’ll be selling them all the way through October.

You don’t want to miss his tomatoes, folks.

To get there:  From Roanoke Memorial Hospital, head out of town on Yellow Mountain Road. Asbury lives on the right side of the road about a half-mile past Garden City Boulevard.

Photo by Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

Stephanie Smith is 60 years old, and she’s not feeling too chipper these days.

The Northwest Roanoke resident has a trifecta of autoimmune diseases. She also has end-stage renal failure, congestive heart failure, lung cancer and she recently lost one eye and has a cataract in the other.

For all of that, she speaks with surprising vigor. Her voice is loud and clear. Her mind seems that way, too. She has old-fashioned manners, and a keen sense of humor.

Somehow, she can still read this humble column. She says if her one good eye ever gets so bad that she can’t, she’ll hire someone to read it to her.

God bless you, Miss Smith.

She called recently to sic me on a story, about the recent disappearance of liver cheese from grocery stores in the Roanoke Valley.

“What on earth is liver cheese?” I asked Smith. I had never heard of the stuff.

“It’s older than dirt,” Smith told me. “It’s been around forever.”

READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.

Shot by Dan

Shot by Dan

Back in September, Elizabeth Moore was looking for a do-gooder project for her daughter’s Brownie troop in Southwest Roanoke County.

She wanted to know the kickoff date for Soup for Seniors, the ad hoc fall food collection campaign run out of a small suite of offices in Melrose Towers on Orange Avenue. It launched in 2007.

The bad news back then was that the program wouldn’t happen in 2011. That was because of some personnel and other changes at the LOA Area Office on Aging.

Today’s good news is that Soup for Seniors is cooking again.

The LOA has adopted it as an agency-wide public service to low-income elderly.

It will take place later this month, from Jan. 23 to 28, and its reach has expanded to Alleghany County and the city of Covington as well.

READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.

Click on the jump below for details. Read more »

The Burger King QuadStacker | Beau96080 | Wikimedia Commons

Note from Dan: While I’m on vacation I’m treating you to previously published columns. This one ran July 24, 2011. The fast food biz remains alive and well — only its patrons are suffering.

Years ago I heard a story about how the town of Big Lick was rechristened Roanoke.

Essentially, the town fathers raised a lot of money and bribed some railroad barons to locate new shops here. (Today we call this economic development incentive.)

Then the movers and shakers realized “Big Lick” was too rube-sounding for what would soon be a booming city.

They decided on “Roanoke,” a Native American word for shells used as a means of exchange. In other words, they slickly renamed the town “Money.” If that story is true, you’ve got to admit the new name was quite fitting.

The problem is, “Roanoke” doesn’t seem like a good fit anymore. Have you had a raise lately?

We should change the name to reflect what the Roanoke Valley obviously values. In terms of business, that seems to be fast food.

READ THE REST OF THE COLUMN HERE.

Mark Taylor with Bambi, right after he slaughtered her

Poor Mark Taylor.

The Roanoke Times’ outdoor columnist didn’t win “Top Chef” honors in the annual newsroom holiday potluck Tuesday. Which is not that big of a deal, when you think about it.

The truth is, most people don’t even enter a dish. They just show up and eat, then go nap at their desks. Not Mark. He spends all year dreaming about that contest. It must be one of the highlights of his not-so-wild life. He’s won it a few times.

This year he made Brunswick Stew.  I couldn’t bring myself to taste it. It looked like someone had vomited last night’s Christmas party into a crockpot and set it on the potluck table. Hardly anybody voted for it in the super-secret balloting, or asked for his recipe.

At the table where we sat down, Mark didn’t regale us with any of the usual macho tales of how he tracked his meat for 3 miles through a blizzard then killed it with a slingshot,  blah, blah, blah. This year he told a story about a pervert he encountered in an indoor pool. I’m not making this up. Yuck. Read more »

Bojangles, Cave Spring

Many were amused this fall at Stan “the Chicken Man” Seymour’s anti-competitive efforts to try to block a Chick Fil A stand from opening near Seymour’s Bojangles location on West Main Street in Salem.

Now, Seymour seems to found an unlikely ally in his battle against the chicken-sandwich chain. Chick Fil A is going after a Vermont artist (his first name happens to be Bo) who’s producing and selling “Eat More Kale” t-shirts.

Chick Fil A claims the use of the two-word phrase “Eat more . . .” infringes on its own trademarked “Eat mor chikin.”

From The Associated Press:

Vermont Law School professor Oliver Goodenough, who specializes in intellectual and property law, said the kale versus “chikin” fight reminded him of a case two years ago, when a Morrisville microbrewer that makes a beer called “Vermonster” ran afoul of the Monster energy drink company. That case was settled when the makers of Vermonster agreed never to go into the energy drink business.

Goodenough said there was little likelihood consumers would confuse kale with chicken.

Who would have thought chikin and kale were so similar? Only some bored intellectual property lawyers, I reckon.

Here’s an idea for Stan: Produce and distribute some “Eat More Bo” shirts. And then tell the Chick Fil A lawyers to go eat it when they come down on him.”