Tuesday, July 29, 1997
Ma Allen's in Sweetwater is a 'madhouse' on
Sundays
By MIKE COCHRAN Associated Press
SWEETWATER - The guy looked as stout as a bull and every bit
as ornery, and when Billy Allen asked him if everything was okay,
he allowed as how it wasn't.
"I ate too much," the guy grumbled.
"Happens all the time," Billy said with a friendly
shrug, ringing up another $7 lunch tab on an ancient cash register.
And so it goes Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., at
Allen's fried chicken emporium in this wind-tossed West Texas
town of nearly 12,000 west of Abilene.
Folks have a 45-year habit of eating too much of Allen's family-style
offerings.
It was 1952 when Lizzie Allen, Billy's grandmother, dragged
a table for 12 into her modest four-room frame home and began
serving fried chicken and all-you-could-eat meals for the princely
sum of 75 cents.
It's $7 now, and six tables. Lizzie's gone, but the house and
food and fried chicken's pretty much the same.
A recent visitor found a seat among seven strangers, including
a female cop, a registered nurse, a sweet lady from Snyder and
her male friend from Rotan.
There was a slim, polite young man who ate his weight in chicken
and a kid who wolfed down enough peach cobbler to feed a chain
gang.
This was truly remarkable, coming as it did on the heels of
heaping bowls of red beans, green beans, hominy, creamed corn,
squash, okra gumbo, sweet potatoes, sliced buttered potatoes,
potato salad, pea salad and cole slaw.
Not to mention iced tea, hot rolls, roast beef and cream gravy.
"Eating at Ma Allen's in Sweetwater is like eating Sunday
dinner at grandma's," says Bill Hart, a portly Abilene sports
scribe dedicated to discovering the state's pig-out palaces.
And how good is Allen's fried fowl?
In "Road Food," authors Jan and Michael Stern describe
it thusly:
"It is sheathed in a lovely, crackling-crisp crust, juicy
and loaded with flavor inside, a perfect blend of spice, crunch,
juice and balmy bird flavor."
That's pretty much a bull's eye.
Besides the late Lizzie Allen, Billy's father ran the restaurant
for years. Now it's Billy, 44, and his two sisters, Teresa Turnbow
and Suzanne Nasworth.
"My dad and my wife come down on Sundays to help us, and
we get the kids in to help when we can," Billy said. "That's
our really big day. Sundays and during the Rattlesnake Roundup."
"It's humpity bump then."
How many is humpity bump?
"Don't know," Billy frowned. "We don't have
time to count 'em."
The six tables seat 52, often full and almost always occupied
by total strangers. Across the parking lot, there's a banquet
hall for special occasions.
"Most people don't mind sitting with other people,"
Billy pointed out. "You get to meet a lot of folks. You can
come in here every day of the week and not eat with the same person
twice."
The menu, even on Sundays and during the rattlesnake festival,
never changes much.
"We have chicken every day and sometimes roast beef, barbecue
sausage or meat loaf," Billy explained. "And on Sundays,
we try to serve macaroni and cheese and maybe carrots, too.
"We used to make cornbread, but we don't get up early
enough to do that anymore."
They start cooking at 8 a.m., using three deep-fat fryers for
the chicken and pans for the vegetables that sister Teresa swears
are "50 years old or better."
Their customers' biggest complaint?
"Diet food," says Ruth Dunlap, one of three employes.
"We don't serve diet food. We don't have diet food. And we
don't advertise diet food."
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Copyright ©1997,
Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps Publications
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