“An over-40-year-old favorite is grilled up daily across College Street from APSU”
By: Brian Bigelow
TEXT AS PUBLISHED:
It all started with a sugar shortage.
When Johnny Meeks opened Johnny’s in 1969, honey buns cost 10 cents each and weren’t selling, but when the sugar shortage hit in the 1970s and donuts quintupled in price to a quarter, honey buns stayed 10 cents. They made financial sense, but they needed a hook.
It happened “by accident,” Meeks said, crediting a former chef with the invention. One of the cooks threw a honey bun on the grill and “we added ice cream,” Meeks said.
After that, he said, “we never sold another donut.”
The “honey bun and ice cream” was born – a delicious concoction not quite like anything else and more than the sum of its parts.
“I’ve tried cooking them at home, and you just can’t do it,” said Jeff Bugg, a longtime Clarksville resident and regular customer of Johnny’s for the past 15 years.
“My kids try to get me to cook [the honey bun and ice cream] at home, but it’s never as good as it is at Johnny’s,” Bugg said.
The honey bun is warmed on the grill just enough to become soft and gently melt the ice cream on top. The “bun ‘n’ cream,” as it is sometimes called, is vaguely reminiscent of hot apple pie with cream – minus the apples – but all such descriptions will fall short. You just have to try it for yourself.
In the same location for over 40 years, Johnny’s is a local favorite and an APSU tradition that has survived without advertising, relying on word of mouth to bring in customers and the quality of its food to keep them coming back.
Johnny’s is a fast-food restaurant of the type seen before the advent of monolithic franchises, drive-thrus and frozen meat.
Sitting at the lunch counter, watching Meeks at the grill filling orders as they come in, one sometimes overhears onetime regular customers – former APSU students and locals alike – having returned after many years to revisit their favorite foods, praising it as they pay their bills.
Meeks’s deftness at the grill calls to mind an ever-shifting clockwork, undoubtedly the product of decades at the same grill making the same foods.
Off to one side are booths for groups of two or more and a “Ms. Pac-Man” arcade machine.
“There are kids that come in here now whose grandparents went to Austin Peay and ate here,” Bugg said.
“Before they built the food court,” Meeks said, there were more APSU students coming into his restaurant. Even with the meal-plan-related decline, APSU students still account for 35 to 40 percent of his business, Meeks said, and the restaurant remains busy. “For 37 years I stayed open 24 hours,” Meeks, now 66 years old, said.
The restaurant has transitioned to “semi-retirement hours,” closing each night at 11 p.m. and reopening for breakfast at 5 a.m., mainly due to difficulty finding cooks.
“Cooks don’t know how to cook fresh hamburger meat anymore,” Meeks said, lamenting that their experience is limited to the frozen patties found at fast-food chains.
Johnny’s goes through between three and four cases of honey buns per week. At 50 buns per case, that’s a lot of “bun ‘n’ creams.”
The “bun ‘n’ cream” may be the most famous item on their menu – even garnering its own Facebook page – but Meeks said his favorite is the cheeseburger. For Bugg, it’s the cheeseburger steak.
“You get your money’s worth,” said Bugg, who eats at Johnny’s three or four times per week. “It’s all good. I’ve never had anything bad.”
Meeks opened Johnny’s “to make a living,” having worked in restaurants since high school, but after all these years Meeks’s favorite part of running his restaurant is the people.
“I like the students and everything. There’s constantly new people,” Meeks said. “Honestly, that’s the best part.”
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN: The All State