This episode contains explicit language, including right here at the start.
Well, my friend Cracker Barrel apparently is going woke.
These bastards don't learn.
Earlier this year, the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain began making some changes in an attempt to attract new customers.
They evolved the menu and remodeled some stores.
The internet had thoughts.
And my Cracker Barrel, it looks like HGTV came in there and redid the whole thing.
Anybody from Cracker Barrel, even if you're the busboy at Cracker Barrel and can deliver this message.
Stop this immediately.
I hate it.
I absolutely hate it.
Absolutely not.
Put that shit back right now.
Cracker Barrel continued with its remodeling plans, despite the online grumbling.
On August 19th, the CEO, Julie Messina, went on Good Morning America to address the response.
What's important is things that people love about Cracker Barrel.
The soul of Cracker Barrel is not changing.
The rocking chairs are still there, the fireplace is there, the peg game, all the things that make Cracker Barrel Cracker Barrel, the vintage decor.
It's still there and it's working.
The results affirm that we're headed in the right direction.
Later that same day though, the company announced another change, one that would spark a dumpster fire of epic proportions.
They were changing their logo.
People went nuts.
I'm more than mad.
If something ain't broke, don't fix it.
I feel so alienated from Cracker Barrel, and I'm not the only one.
The new logo ditched the image of an old man in overall sitting on a wooden chair leaning against a barrel.
And it changed the old-timey font to something more clean and modern.
They just took out every element of character that the logo had, even the character himself and the barrel.
It's just really sad.
And no one likes it.
Not a single person.
The next day, Donald Trump Jr. reshared a post calling for CEO Julie Messina's resignation.
It said, she quote scrapped a beloved American aesthetic and replaced it with sterile, soulless branding.
The post tied the change to her, quote, DEI regime.
Trump Jr. added, WTF is wrong with Cracker Barrel.
From there, the posts were relentless.
It's a very bad move.
It is getting rid of historic IP in favor of something absolutely and ridiculously generic.
Here's the thing, Julie, Miss New CEO from Cracker Barrel.
Your new logo, it sucks.
And what I think, you changed it because you wanted to remove the white man from the logo.
Based on how much visceral anger I've seen online about this, I would say that's probably a vocal majority.
Less than a week later, the president himself entered the chat.
Cracker Barrel should go back to the old logo, he wrote.
Make Cracker Barrel a winner again.
Remember, in just a short period of time I made the United States of America the hottest country anywhere in the world.
One year ago, it was dead.
Good luck.
That very day, Cracker Barrel announced it would scrap the new logo and go back to the old one.
They released a statement that said we thank our guests for sharing your voices and love for Cracker Barrel.
Clearly, Cracker Barrel inspires intense devotion.
But this recent issue is also just the latest in a long history of controversies at the chain.
Today on the show we're telling the whole story of Cracker Barrel to try to understand why it keeps finding itself at the center of the storm in America.
This is The Sporkful.
It's not for foodies, it's for eaters.
I'm Dan Pashman.
Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people.
To understand why people are so attached to Cracker Barrel, you have to look at its long and winding history.
For that we're turning to historian Anthony Stenonis, who's in New Orleans, where he's lived most of his life.
Anthony's research focuses on tourism in the South and how outsiders perceive the South.
That's led him to look into Cracker Barrel.
What's your experience with Cracker Barrel?
Well, you know, I went to grad school in Nashville.
You know, spending six years in Middle Tennessee.
I saw a lot of Cracker Barrels and growing up in the South and doing summer vacations.
We ate a lot of times at Cracker Barrel.
Classic road trip stop.
Classic road trips, right?
It's at the end of the interstate and...
You know, you get consistency.
Did you have a favorite menu item growing up?
You know, I love biscuits.
I love biscuits, and they do a pretty good biscuit.
Cracker Barrel came about at a time when a lot was changing in America, especially in the South.
It was started in 1969 in Lebanon, Tennessee, by a guy named Dan Evans.
He is from Tennessee.
He founds the restaurant close to where he grew up and comes from a political family, actually.
His grandfather was in the state legislature in Tennessee.
Dan Evans before he starts.
Cracker Barrel worked for his uncle, who was actually a 15 term US congressman.
So Dan Evans was very familiar with the political climate of the 1960s.
Dan Evans worked at his grandfather's oil company as a distributor to local gas stations.
This gave him an early insight into a big change happening in America.
New interstates meant more people were driving longer distances and would need places to stop.
And when they did stop, they wouldn't want to wander through a small town trying to figure out where to eat.
They'd want reliable restaurants right off the highway.
This trend also helped fuel the rise of fast food in America.
But Evans wanted something a little different a real sit-down restaurant serving Southern classics fried chicken biscuits, country ham, etc.
So the food was one part of it.
But Evans also had the idea to make the restaurant feel like an old-time general store.
Back in the South's farming days, Anthony says the general store was a place where people would hang out chit-chatting around a literal barrel of crackers.
You didn't go to the store and buy a package of crackers, right?
They come in a big barrel, and then the grocer would sort of scoop them out and bag them for you.
So the Cracker Barrel was sort of like the water cooler of its day.
Totally like the water cooler.
That idea of the general store informed the way Cracker Barrel was furnished with barrels of course, and also a porch with rocking chairs.
So he, very early on, hires a local family that deals in antiques to do the decorations around the store, which is old-style farm implements.
So it's very much reflecting the culture of the South people migrating off the farms in the 50s and 60s.
So it's that nostalgia.
But it's also fitting in with tourists from the north who are say, driving down to Florida right to go to Disney and go to the beaches.
It's a way of sort of mimicking what their expectations of the south.
Right.
Kind of kind of like going to an Irish pub in most places in America.
And they have this sort of like, yeah, cheesy Irish iconography that isn't all that authentic.
But it's what Americans think is an Irish pub.
Exactly.
You got to have the leprechaun on the wall.
Right, right, right, right.
In the early years of Cracker Barrel.
What were some of the things they would sell in the store part that was adjacent to the restaurant?
In the store part they would sell things that were associated as stereotypical Southern, which involved the Confederate flag, which was very prominent in the 60s.
Partly that's the centennial of the Civil War, but also very much a reaction to the Civil Rights Movement.
You would see mammy dolls, you know, little cloth dolls of African-American figures.
It sort of depicted this sort of Aunt Jemima-style stereotype of a black servant.
Yes.
I mean, that would be very common across the tourism industry in the South.
Yeah, those were the kinds of things you'd see in the store, along with, like, candy and— Right.
What exactly were Southerners who gravitated to Cracker Barrel nostalgic for?
In the context, right, of Middle Tennessee in 1969, they're nostalgic for the Jim Crow South.
Anthony says Dan Evans wanted to capitalize on this white nostalgia.
In the previous few years, landmark civil rights legislation had been passed.
The South was in the process of being integrated and there was a strong backlash to all the changes.
But there was another bygone era the Cracker Barrel was designed to recall, the agrarian South.
The chain started during a period just after farming became much more mechanized, when small family farms were being replaced by bigger ones.
Many white people had to sell their land and were moving to larger towns and cities.
Old-time general stores were disappearing, and with them, a specific way of life.
The reference really isn't just to the idea of the general store, right?
It's also that the general store was the center of power.
It's economic power, but it's also political power.
So if you look at like Faulkner's short story Barn Burning, it's where the circuit riding judge holds court.
It's a very white space and it's also a very male space.
But as with so much nostalgia, the view of the good old days was somewhat clouded.
You know, I think that's where it gets really interesting, right?
Because the merchant store is a place where small-time farmers would get exploited, right?
So it's really more a nostalgia for the racial system of the South, which is an economic time in a sense for the white Southern customer right.
Because you were above the African-American.
So even though you were dirt poor, your race made you more valuable.
I want to note that we did reach out to Cracker Barrel for comment on these various claims and to get their side of the story.
They declined to answer our questions directly and instead referred us to the official company history and press releases on their website.
We've included some of that information in our episode, but it doesn't address these specific questions of white nostalgia.
So let's talk a bit about the early Cracker Barrel branding.
Their first logo for the first eight years was very basic.
It was black and white.
It was just the words Cracker Barrel in what I think of as an Old West font.
Like in the movies, you saw a wanted poster in the Old West.
The way the word wanted is always written in a specific font.
It's that font.
And then below it, old country store.
In 1977, they introduced the first iteration of the logo that they would have until now, which is this image of an old man in overalls sitting in a wooden chair, resting his arm on a big barrel, big cracker barrel.
And then instead of black and white, this logo is yellow and brown.
Cracker Barrel is written in a more ornate font.
And they keep the words Old Country Store on the logo.
This old man depicted has the nickname Old Timer.
They call him Old Timer.
So unpack this logo for us.
What is this logo communicating?
When they come up with that logo, it's very much a moment in time, right?
You're coming out of the bicentennial.
More importantly, the country has just seen Jimmy Carter get elected to the presidency.
Right.
He built himself as a peanut farmer.
I'm just a peanut farmer from Georgia.
Yeah, exactly.
It's tapping into that moment in the late 1970s of celebrating Southern culture.
This is why Dukes of Hazzard becomes one of the top-rated shows in the country.
And the Confederate flag which the original stores at Cracker Barrel sold Confederate flags and Mammy dolls through the 80s.
And that logo... really sort of reflects that Southern nostalgia of that moment.
Cracker Barrel confirms on their website that this logo was meant to create a feeling of nostalgia, although they don't specify for what exactly.
Anyway, that was 1977, when the chain had about a dozen stores.
In 1981, Dan Evans took the company public to raise money to expand.
In the next decade, Cracker Barrel would open more than 100 new locations, still mostly in the South.
Then in the 90s, they started growing to the rest of the country.
And the nostalgia of the South appeals.
Across the country, there's a whole literature on the southernization of the United States.
Cracker Barrel is part of that expansion of the South outside the South.
The South almost as a brand, as an idea.
The South as a brand.
Right.
Yeah.
Do you have a sense of what was driving that in the 90s?
I mean, I get it in 1969 when Cracker Barrel was created.
It was midst of the civil rights era and the Jim Crow South was still in recent memory for many customers.
Now we're talking about the 1990s all over the country.
What was driving that southernization, as you put it?
What happens with that nostalgia of the Jimmy Carter years sort of continues on.
And that folksiness has a genuine ring within American culture and politics.
That's partly why Bill Clinton is successful in winning in the 90s.
Right.
He gets elected in 1992 and also has some of that Southern charm.
Yeah.
So that sort of throwback to the past and to these sort of rural Southern values has an appeal.
Did the restaurants change in any way as they expanded beyond the South?
Did the branding change?
Did the food change?
Did the way their stores were decorated change?
They generally kept with the store-restaurant concept.
He gets rid of gas stations in the 70s.
Because of the oil crisis, it becomes... too much of an issue to run gas stations.
So he simplifies in the mid-70s to just focusing on restaurant and store.
And so when the chain starts to go national, in the 80s they had Confederate flags and mammy dolls as part of the store.
That starts to disappear in the 90s.
But then you know, some of the baggage of being Southern was also within the store, behind the scenes.
When we return, Cracker Barrel comes up against changing times and its shareholders.
Then we get to the logo controversy of today.
Stick around.
Hope you're hungry, because it's time for some ads.
Welcome back to The Sporkful.
I'm Dan Pashman.
And I got some big news for you.
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I'm teaming up once again with my friends at Culinary Backstreets to lead a group of pasta eaters on a tour of some of my favorite spots.
You'll hang out with Katie Park parla in Rome, we'll eat spaghetti alla sassina together in Bari, and so much more.
Now.
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So get on that list, go to culinarybackstreets.com slash sporkful.
Now let's get back to historian Anthony Stenonis and Cracker Barrel.
By the 90s, Cracker Barrel had more than 100 stores.
They'd expanded beyond the South, becoming an iconic part of road trips and family gatherings for Americans all over, not just those who missed the old South.
Meanwhile, Dan Evans was still the CEO.
But with the expansion came increased scrutiny of the company and its practices.
One of those practices, an explicit corporate policy that they would not employ gay people.
Now, to be clear, that was not illegal at the time.
Federal law did not protect people from workplace discrimination based on their sexual orientation, even in the 90s.
Here's Anthony.
Yes, it wasn't illegal but, that being said, it was very rare for a company, a publicly traded company, to explicitly put in a corporate directive that we don't want.
The exact phrase is, whose sexual preferences fail to demonstrate normal heterosexual values.
Subsequent to that directive, there's over a dozen people who get fired from Cracker Barrel.
And it sparks this huge outrage because it's a publicly traded company.
The New York Retirees Fund organizes a campaign to force Cracker Barrel to recognize gay rights.
And that New York pension fund, you're saying like they were investors in Cracker Barrel.
So they were trying to use – they were using their power as shareholders.
Yeah.
And actually gay activists start buying up stock to join that effort to win enough votes to reverse that policy.
How did Evans respond to that?
Evans reverses the policy because he's lost the votes.
So that aspect of coming out of Middle Tennessee, the buckle of the Bible belt, that gets changed.
But it doesn't sound like he had any big change of heart.
It's more just that he realized it was bad for business.
Oh, yeah.
He doesn't have much change of heart.
Anthony says Cracker Barrel stopped selling Confederate memorabilia and mammy dolls in the 90s.
But that wasn't the end of racial strife at the company.
Then a few years later, early 2000s, there's another issue with Cracker Barrel.
The Department of Justice investigated Cracker Barrel for racial discrimination both against black employees and black customers.
There was a class action lawsuit.
What were some of the details of what Cracker Barrel was accused of?
They were accused of actually maintaining you know unofficially, it wasn't corporate policy the individual stores, some of them, maintained racial segregation in seating.
So they had like a Black people's section of the restaurant.
Yes, they would purposely sit Blacks separate from whites.
There were some stores, you know, that simply refused Blacks any service.
They would handle complaints differently for Blacks and white customers.
And this was found to be in multiple stores.
Like, this was systematic within stores, particularly in the South.
According to the firm that brought the class action suit, there was evidence that Cracker Barrel employees were intentionally providing subpar service to Black customers.
They might make them wait longer for a table, for instance.
There was also evidence that the company paid their Black employees less than white employees, denied Black workers promotions, segregated Black workers from other staff and ignored and perpetuated racial slurs and comments.
In the end, the Justice Department took over the investigation and then Cracker Barrel finally had to settle for like 87 million to reform their practices and put more oversight in place to make sure that racism wasn't systemic within the chain.
Do you have a sense of how hard they really tried to do that?
Cracker Barrel wasn't alone at this moment in time, right?
There's the same investigations of Denny's and I believe Shoney's was under investigation for these sorts of practices.
So you have the issue of gay rights in the 90s.
That gets resolved positively.
And then this gets resolved positively.
You know, the eyes of the country and the eyes of shareholders and the eyes of the government are very much fragmented.
Focus that this doesn't happen again.
By the time these allegations were made in the early 2000s, Dan Evans had transitioned from being CEO to chairman of the board.
Around the time the Department of Justice concluded their investigation, he stepped down.
Anthony says he was pushed out.
It wasn't just an issue of his values not aligning with the company anymore.
These big news stories were hurting the bottom line.
By the time of these issues with the Justice Department and issues of segregation.
This is a chain of 400-plus stores all across the country.
Local practices in the South can't exist in a chain that's serving people in California.
People in California might decide they're not going to go there because they've read something about what's been happening at restaurants in the South, even if it wasn't happening in their restaurants in California.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, that's how the civil rights movement itself evolved. flares up in the early 60s, right?
It starts with the traditional narrative the sit-in movement at the Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina.
They don't go to the local barbecue shop.
They go to Woolworth's because it's a national chain and people in Chicago, people in New York can join the protest.
So when this comes out for Cracker Barrel in the 2000s, it's the same reaction.
After all that, Cracker Barrel became a more buttoned-up corporation.
The chain kept the same decor, similar menu items, the general store vibe, their famous peg game.
But in the period after the racial discrimination lawsuit was settled, Anthony says he did start seeing more Black customers in Cracker Barrels in Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama.
And then, just a few years ago, the chain's next national controversy cropped up all around plant-based meat.
And Southern breakfast restaurant Cracker Barrel is getting in on the trend, adding impossible sausage to its menu.
But Cracker Barrel's fans on Facebook aren't too happy about the addition.
The announcement getting a lot of backlash on the company's Facebook page.
One person even commenting, quote, don't ever try to push that crap in my direction.
Now it's worth noting that this time the backlash wasn't from liberal groups upset about the policies of the CEO.
It was from conservatives who saw plant-based meat as somehow contrary to their conception of meat-eating red-blooded Americans.
The following year, 2023, Cracker Barrel hired a new CEO named Julie Massino.
She had previously been at Taco Bell, a company well-known for appealing to a young demographic.
She soon unveiled a strategic plan that the Wall Street Journal said was intended to attract a younger, wealthier customer base.
One phase of that transformation was remodeling some of the locations.
They're really uncrowding the store.
The old-style Cracker Barrel was sort of a lot of stuff crammed into the store, which is what an old-style general store in the South would have been.
And Cracker Barrel sort of had everything a tourist might want crammed into the space.
So they've like widened the aisles, simplified what they have inside.
So that's part of the redesign in the store.
And in the restaurants, they've started to remove what they've been known for, right?
The old farm equipment and to have a more streamlined, simplified craftsmanship. cleaner look.
Then there was the menu.
They had already added some plant-based options.
Now they were adding lighter dishes like grilled shrimp, and more upscale choices like steak and shrimp.
The original menu was farmer food, right?
It's what you eat and then work in the fields all day.
So now, in this day and age, they have to target a more calorie-conscious audience of with shrimp and low-cal, healthier foods.
These other changes in the store, the streamlining, the changes in the restaurant, the changes in the menu even that was getting some backlash.
Yeah, that's getting backlash because The core idea of their menu as the restaurant is nostalgia right.
So you want what your grandparents had or your great-grandparents made the family heirloom recipes, right?
So yeah, when you bring in grilled shrimp well, it's not.
Many people in middle Tennessee were eating grilled shrimp on the farm back in the 1930s and 40s.
Right.
And I would imagine that by that point, by more recent years, there's another layer of nostalgia on top, which is that now there's a couple of generations of Americans who've grown up eating a Cracker Barrel.
So you have so many people who know and love Cracker Barrel.
They grew up on road trips or visiting family, or it was the place down the road or after church or whatever it was.
And so even if you're not nostalgic for the 1930s –
You're nostalgic for Cracker Barrel.
Yeah, when you start messing with the menu or the design, you're dealing with generations now of people not just in the South anymore, but people in rural communities and small towns and even suburbs think of as their family space.
Right.
It's no longer Southern.
Now it's part of the national fabric.
So even before the new logo, there were already changes and some growing backlash to those changes.
But what's interesting, according to the company, these changes were doing exactly what they were intended to do.
The stores that had the remodels saw their profits go up.
And so it may be true, as is so often the case, that...
A backlash doesn't represent the majority.
It's just the people who are the loudest.
And then the new logo comes out.
Yes.
And this new logo eliminates the old timer, the old man in the overalls.
It eliminates the barrel.
It changes the font very drastically to a very sleek, clean, sort of modern aesthetic.
And this is really what puts people over the edge.
This is when we see Trump post online about it.
It's when we see a ton of commentary from right-wing sites decrying the change as woke and advancing some sort of DEI agenda.
Why?
Like, why did this logo get people so upset?
The logo, right, is in your face.
So they could adjust the menu, right?
That's in store.
It's kind of unseen.
You can still get your chicken fried steak, even if you don't like the fact that they added grilled shrimp.
You know, you can still get your things and they could make those small adjustments.
They could do the stores and do remodels of the stores and make it a cleaner look inside the store.
But when you took away the logo, people who maybe hadn't been to Cracker Barrel for a year or two right, but who still have the nostalgia of having grown up going there they see that change.
What do you think of the new logo, Anthony?
You know, I think the new logo was terrible.
You know, I think it was so bland.
It's sort of like Taco Bell getting rid of the bell.
And I think there's a different approach that Cracker Barrel could have taken.
It's such a sudden change.
It reminds you a little bit of Of Coke going to New Coke in the 1980s.
I was reading that like Aunt Jemima.
When they decided to phase out this sort of racial stereotype character on the label, they did it kind of gradually.
They made small changes.
They kept the same font.
It's not like overnight they completely changed everything.
Yeah, and I think if Cracker Barrel wanted to modernize their logo, they should have taken that approach.
And I think that's partly why this was so controversial is it was so extreme in terms of getting rid of any reference to that original logo.
A tweak instead of like bulldozing.
As we said, within a week of revealing the new logo, Cracker Barrel abandoned it and announced they'd go back to the old logo.
Soon after, CNN reports that Cracker Barrel removed references to DEI and Pride from their website.
So the new CEO is a woman who's driving these changes, and there was a DEI policy in place at Cracker Barrel.
How much do you think those two factors played into this backlash?
Oh, I think it's.
When you see what's happening across the country right now, I think it's definitely part of the backlash, because things are so heightened politically.
I mean, I have to say, watching some of the news clips, when the negative reaction first started.
Julie Messino, the CEO, went out and did some interviews.
She was on Good Morning America.
She was on with Jim Cramer on CNBC.
And I'm watching these clips and I'm thinking man, I'm so curious how all this would read if the CEO was a middle-aged white guy in a suit with a southern accent.
Right.
Versus like a well-dressed blonde haired woman who I'm sure is extremely capable, but like.
I think, to the people who want that nostalgia.
Some of them are also nostalgic for a time when the leaders of giant companies didn't look like Julie Messina.
In terms of like the transition, right?
Dan Evans died about 10 years ago.
So the transition from what the founder said envisioned to what the company's doing now is dramatic.
And yes, that in terms of what its customer base is looking for, in terms of nostalgia, having a woman in charge is a problem for that customer base.
Some of the online backlash specifically points to Julie Massino's gender, like this clip from the conservative commentator Michael Knowles.
Hey, hi.
I'm a lady who took over Cracker Barrel and we're going to make it all look like a hospital cafeteria.
Yeah, we are.
And we're going to get rid of the cracker in the barrel.
And I think Cracker Barrel is sort of between a rock and a hard place, right?
They've got their customer base, which is built around nostalgia for these various aspects of nostalgia, as you laid out.
But on the other hand, as a practical business, I saw a stat that they're down 16 since the pandemic in terms of diners coming to their restaurant.
So they're desperately trying to retool to draw in new customers while holding on to their loyal base of old customers.
And that's a very difficult position to be in.
And so they've brought in new faces with new ideas that understand the modern market.
The question is right.
Does she really understand the old nostalgia, given how much this has blown up?
So Anthony, we talked a lot in this conversation about sort of Southern iconography.
All of these images, the general store, the farming equipment, all of these sort of callbacks to bygone days.
How powerful do you think that type of imagery is in the South today?
I would say that it's still very much a part of the nostalgia of the South.
It's the small town looking back.
Hard to say what it is in reality, but there is this nostalgia and the controversy itself shows that it's very much a part of the South.
In our conversation here, Anthony, we've used the word nostalgia.
And yes, 100%, that's a part of Cracker Barrel.
That's a part of this reaction.
But I wonder if there's another word we should also be adding in, or another idea in addition, just because nostalgia just sort of feels like I want to feel warm and fuzzy.
There's something sort of a little bit sweet about nostalgia.
Mm-hmm.
I think also what's driving this is the fear and economic dislocation of a huge part of America.
And so it's not just like I wish things were the way they were in the day.
It's like a feeling that back then they had a better chance at doing well and things were better, and now they're not.
And also the loss of small-town America and the economic pressure that so many of the people who used to live in those small towns, or still do, are feeling.
That is real.
Yes, that's totally real.
That's very much a part of the politics of today.
And I think the controversy that Cracker Barrel has stumbled itself into, what is America?
What is the America where they actually run their stores?
Those small towns across the interstates where the towns are now ghost towns.
It's hard to know at this point what sort of long-term impact this recent controversy will have on Cracker Barrel.
As Anthony said, the company needs to find a way to attract new customers without losing their old ones.
The majority of customers, it's a focus on their family tradition, their desire to preserve their home.
So it's gotten sucked into this big political debate, and I think that's a fascinating discussion in and of itself.
But I think, on the ground, the people who are the loyal customers.
Some of them are political, but a lot of times it's people who don't want to discuss politics.
They just want their ham.
That may be true, but even if the people upset about Cracker Barrel's changes aren't the majority of customers, that group is still big enough to make a real difference.
After my chat with Anthony, there was more Cracker Barrel news.
The company said they would stop their plans to remodel stores.
In an announcement a few days ago they wrote, quote We heard clearly that the modern remodel does not reflect what you love about Cracker Barrel.
Now, the chain had only redesigned four of its 600 plus locations.
And earlier this year, they said those four stores had seen increased sales.
But the Wall Street Journal says since the logo controversy, sales are down across the board.
And so is the stock price.
In Cracker Barrel's announcement they said they'd keep the antique farm equipment, rocking chairs and other hallmarks of the brand, writing the vintage Americana you love will always be here.
As I said, we did reach out to Cracker Barrel to offer them a chance to comment on this story, but they declined to answer our questions.
My thanks to Anthony Stenonis.
He's a historian in New Orleans.
His latest book is New Orleans Pralines, not Pralines.
New Orleans Pralines, Plantation Sugar, Louisiana Pecans and the Marketing of Southern Nostalgia.
I'd also like to thank Susie Penman, who wrote a great master's thesis on Cracker Barrel.
You can find it on the University of Mississippi's website.
Next week on the show, I travel to Boston to visit Lair House, a Jewish tavern and house of learning, which claims to be the first place in history to combine these two things.
That's next week.
While you wait for that one, check out last week's episode all about how to drink like a Korean.
That one's up now.
And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app?
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Does your podcasting app have that?
And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more.
It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one.
And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to SiriusXMcom slash Sporkful.
This episode was produced by me, along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern and senior producer Andres O'Hara.
Our engineer is Jared O'Connell.
Music help from Black Label Music.
The Sporkful is a production of SiriusXM Podcasts.
Our executive producer is Camille Stanley.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
And I'm Tanya Hudson in Sulphur Louisiana, reminding you to eat more, eat better and eat more better.
