Alonso Smith limps across the main drag in Montezuma, a town of three thousand people tucked into a bend of the Flint River in Southwest Georgia. Bound for an idling Freightliner, Smith wears a yellow reflective vest and clutches a brown paper bag stuffed with two chili cheeseburgers and a sleeve of fries. He’s hauling sawdust today. The interstate would have been faster, Smith tells me after he climbs in the cab to eat lunch. “But the interstate ain’t got Troy’s.”
A block away on Cherry Street, Richard Collier stands behind the high-top counter at Troy’s Snack Shack, a screen door–fronted café that dates back to the 1950s. Sipping from a bottle of Mello Yello, eyeglasses smeared with grease, he takes orders from regulars who mob the place five days a week for biscuits, fried chicken, and burgers, the holy trinity of workaday foods.
Veterans returning from the Mexican-American War settled Montezuma in the early 1850s, naming the town for the last Aztec ruler of what is now Mexico. Originally a trade and transportation hub, now dominated by a pecan wholesaler, Montezuma is the sort of place where people work two or three jobs to feed their families, and neighbors who went to kindergarten together will be buried alongside one another in the same dirt that holds their parents.
Richard, who is forty-two, began working at Troy’s when he was fifteen. Two years ago, when he and his wife, Angie, took over from his father, Richard became the third generation in the family to run the restaurant, founded by Troy Parks, his great-uncle. Little has changed in seven decades of operations. Troy’s is still short on comforts: No heater runs in the winter, no AC pumps Freon in the summer. And the food—cooked to order from honest, never-frozen ingredients—is still straight-up delicious. Baked by Angie, the biscuits are throwback three-ingredient beauties. Drumsticks and thighs, cut from small chickens instead of poultry plant behemoths, come robed in a salty crust that shatters when you bite. Chili slaw burgers, beautifully sloppy and about the size of a deck of cards, cost less than a single from McDonald’s.
Customers dressed in work shirts and coveralls communicate with nods and hand raises and smiles, the lubricants of small-town life. They wear walkie-talkies clipped to their vests and contractor pencils behind their ears. Some tuck their hair in the modest bonnets that local Mennonite women wear. Almost all hail from Macon County, which Troy’s serves as a clubhouse and canteen.
Hard work is the shared language of the people behind the counter, too. Mike Miller, a three-decade Troy’s veteran, got here at three in the morning to patty burgers and chop onions. As the breakfast rush quiets, he ducks out to do yard work and returns to fry chicken for lunch. Jonathan Duke helps out during breakfast before clocking in for his city job at the water treatment plant. After, he works construction until it gets too dark to see. Like the truck driver I met out on the street, he walks with a limp, proof of the tolls that labor takes.
Jonna Duke, Richard’s twenty-year-old goddaughter, often mans the front counter with him. Wearing a hairnet, a teardrop tattoo below her right eye, she fusses and flirts. “All my friends are old,” she says, speaking of regulars whose habits are so dependable that Richard recently laminated their breakfast order tickets. Mr. Joe gets link sausages and cheese grits, she tells me. Uncle Bug wants eggs over easy, sausage patties, and biscuits.
Angie Collier, who met Richard through a church youth group, bakes biscuits at the rear of the storefront, opposite a bank of fryers. Each morning, she sifts flour into a big metal bowl, cuts in lard, pours in buttermilk, and uses a heavy pin to roll out biscuits that come out of the oven creamy at their cores, brown and crunchy on top. Most days, she bakes more than four hundred, which Troy’s stuffs with eggs, bacon, patty sausages, or salmon croquettes.
By midafternoon on the second day of my visit, Richard has moved from the counter to the front grill. Flour from chicken batter speckles his T-shirt. As the clock counts down to three o’clock, I see him fill order after order for cheeseburgers. Each time, he opens the buns with his left hand, spatulas two patties on with his right, spoons out yellow mustard and chopped onions, cradles an empty brown paper bag in the crook of his left arm, and stuffs the burgers inside. Just watching him wears me out.
When Troy’s opened up this morning, the freshly mopped blue tile floors shone, and the trash cans stood empty. Now, thirty minutes shy of closing, the restaurant looks like a small war went down inside. Trash cans overflow, smudged fingerprints mark the front doors, smooshed ketchup packets bloody the floor, and balled-up burger tissues cover the tables.
Richard’s father supposedly retired when he sold the business. And yet Tony Collier has worked the back grill here all morning, singing Christmas carols at a little louder than a hum, as he does all year long, speeding up for “Jingle Bells,” slowing down for “Silent Night.” Tony, too, now moves with a hitch in his step. After four decades of walking these tile floors, spatula in hand, he has replaced both knees and needs a new hip. Still, he tells me, “hard work never hurt anybody.”
History in a Bun
Burger up in Sylvester
Founded about the same time as Troy’s, Carlton’s Hamburgers, an hour south in Sylvester, Georgia, has earned a loyal following for its loose-meat burgers that taste like sloppy joes without the slop. The storefront takeaway began as a side business for a local grocery store and grew as a place for train passengers to eat on stopovers. Today regulars sit on the bench out front to eat chili dogs and tissue-wrapped burgers that overflow with pebbled beef.
