Cracker Barrel and The Makings of The Modern South

For travelers heading east on I-40, telltale signs that one is still in the South are hard to come by as the Nashville skyline recedes into the rearview. The landscape is dotted by big-box store-anchored strip malls and the neon signs of yet another truck stop. But, for most of this summer, Lebanon-based Cracker Barrel and its advertising team tried to fill that road-trip void. On the outskirts of Davidson County right before Donelson, the restaurant’s yellow-and-brown logo appears on the billboard next to the proclamation, “It’s all gravy!”

Those weary tourists heading home need not be troubled that they’ve left a world of Southern boutiques and cowboy boots behind. A last taste of Tennessee charm is just ahead. And there’s more where that came from back home everywhere in the contiguous United States besides Vermont, Wyoming, Oregon, and Washington State. 

Yet, those who have followed Cracker Barrel’s long, hot summer know that it’s not been gravy for quite some time. Its stock spent much of the year in a spiral, losing 20 percent of its value as it hit a 13-year-low. Though the chain has been in decline for most of the decade, this trend accelerated when new CEO Julie Felss Masino proclaimed to shareholders nine months into her tenure last May, “We’re just not as relevant as we once were.”

Depending on the source, an arsenal of smoking guns is responsible for Cracker Barrel’s demise. For former Cracker Barrel CEO Sandra Cochran, it’s the lingering effects of COVID and ensuing inflation driving away its core base of over-65s. For the politically savvy consumer, it's the gestures to corporate activism through alignment with groups like the Human Rights Campaign. And, for the multiple employees, past and present, with whom the Pamphleteer has interviewed over the last four months, it's the chain’s' desperate grasp at relevance, combined with the erosion of tradition that's accelerated under Masino's leadership. 

There’s the pressure to increase alcohol sales at a restaurant best known for its post-Sunday rush; the remodeled stores that caused a furor online, sparking even more stock-price slippage; the revolving-door menu that has sacrificed staples like the Uncle Herschel’s Favorite breakfast platter and the popular red-eye gravy. As the chain celebrates its 55th anniversary this year, its PR team is doing everything it can to make it seem like all's right within the Southern-fried empire. But it’s clear to longtime diners, employees, and competitors that someone has lost the recipe. 

Cracker Barrel's runaway success has endowed it with an enduring responsibility: to serve as national ambassador for the South in a cultural milieu that is openly hostile to all the region stands for. Stationed at nearly every interstate exit on the country’s main thoroughfares, the company was always a defender of Southern distinctiveness. Now, under the purview of a CEO who cut her teeth at Taco Bell and Starbucks and, according to her LinkedIn, still resides in Los Angeles, its Southerness is merely a necessary albatross as it morphs into yet another corporate entity beholden to shareholders, business bestseller jargon, and the worst tendencies of activist capitalism, rainbow or otherwise. 

To hear our betters in the North talk, the South’s identity hinges entirely on the unrelenting anxiety that somehow, someway, the righteous would force it to reform its foundational Jim Crow ways, thus leaving us with little other reason to exist. It’s a line of thinking that has inspired numerous thinkpieces about Cracker Barrel, such as Jia Tolentino’s 2016 New York Times article that posits the restaurant is inexorably linked to the legacy of slavery, a navel-gazing act of lazy research and snark that includes such pearls as “the nostalgia sold by Cracker Barrel alongside every plate and trinket requires no previous emotional stake in the South as an institution.” 

Tolentino’s piece is the type of renunciation of the South required for someone raised in the intolerable suburbs of “corporate” Texas to become a staff writer for The New Yorker after paying her dues as a deputy editor of Jezebel. Like so many others aspiring to the legacy media in-crowd, she’s shaken the dust of the simplistic South off of her feet for acceptance at the highest echelons. Better yet, she didn’t have to stoop to the weird anthropological experiments that pop up every year or so in which an urban dweller deigns to eat at Cracker Barrel and gets a byline in publications like Business Insider.

Cracker Barrel’s paeans to Southern authenticity become to the coastal elites and those gunning to enter that fray as merely another example of antebellum erasure. The South must remain the scapegoat for the nation’s ills and, as perhaps the most prominent purveyor of a nostalgic regional sensibility on a near-national level, this particular restaurant is the primary object of derision. Never mind that historians like Thomas J. Sugrue have spent their careers putting the region’s legacy of racism in context and finding it comparable with the rest of the nation. Cracker Barrel never had a right to extol the South’s many virtues. It must remain mired in perpetual atonement.

Since former Shell Oil rep Dan Evins founded the original location in 1969 half an hour outside Nashville, Cracker Barrel has replicated the smalltown third space of the South’s formative years. It all sounds like the makings of the quaint nostalgia for which the chain has become oft-derided; however, it was an act of preservation. 

As Evins’s initial endeavors indicate, the greatest threat to those Sunday afternoons in the general store milling about barrels of bulk crackers wasn’t Reconstruction and its aftermath but the rise of the interstate. For most of its existence, the restaurant has crafted its image and advertising around this central truth. In his book Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life, Tom Lewis argues that the crown jewel of the Eisenhower Administration began a culture shift in which, “Motorists liked the [chain business] product precisely because they were often traveling in unfamiliar territory. No matter where they were, they knew that they could take refuge and sustenance under the flamboyant golden arches or behind the outrageous sign announcing a Holiday Inn.” 

The resulting cliche has something to do with interstate exit homogeny and mom-and-pop dreams falling by the wayside. However, Cracker Barrel earned its place in American pop culture through a full-throated defiance of this view of events. It opposed the convenience and efficiency of interstate pit stops with rustic dining rooms and leisurely service. It encouraged its patrons to browse gift shops chocked full of items that recall the knick-knacks of grandmas past and now appeal to the softening Gen Xers who’d rather apply their trademark irony to a “Mamaw’s House” coffee mug featuring a peacock than another spin of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” 

Cracker Barrel’s drive to consistently emulate home cooking across the nation rests on the reputation of the cornbread, beans, and country ham that have remained a fixture at Southern tables regardless of racial demographics. That the region’s native sons and daughters whose families trained them from birth to ferret out lukewarm imitators of good home cooking remain Cracker Barrel’s most devout should put any questions of inauthenticity to rest. 

In contrast to the rubber-stamped McDonald’s and Starbucks aesthetic, the restaurant’s decor has led it to become a de facto steward of historical preservation. No two locations are alike thanks to the company’s 26,000-square-foot antique warehouse and resident curator who ensures that diners can experience a clear sense of place even if they never travel more than a mile away from the interstate. Such is why, for many Southerners, a summer trip to the beach or the morning of Christmas shopping wouldn’t be an annual tradition without a stop at the Old Country Store. 

So, it comes as quite the surprise that the South’s most prominent culture researchers and food historians have no time to meditate on Cracker Barrel's influence as they intellectualize collard broth and honey-butter biscuits on the way to James Beard accolades and lucrative speaking engagements. In their 2017 book-length study The Resilience of Southern Identity, Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts spend pages analyzing data about the fried okra, Moon Pies, and catfish available at any Cracker Barrel in America with nary a mention of the only national restaurant that makes such items central to their offerings. Likewise, John T. Edge’s NPR-and-Wine Enthusiast-lauded history of Southern food, The Potlikker Papers, makes one reference to the chain when comparing “cornpone” Paula Deen’s depiction of Savannah to “an oversized Cracker Barrel store, serving casseroles bound by cans of cream of mushroom soup.” 

Tellingly, the only person who has his pulse on the importance of Cracker Barrel to the region’s culture is J.D. Vance, who makes it the subject of Hillbilly Elegy’s most potent barb about his imposter syndrome in the world of the urban liberal elite: “At no time was this more obvious than the first (and last) time I took a Yale friend to Cracker Barrel. In my youth, it was the height of fine dining—my grandma’s and my favorite restaurant. With Yale friends, it was a greasy public health crisis.”

Of course, any business striving for cold corporate legitimacy as much as Masino’s Cracker Barrel can’t associate with the couch fucker no matter how astute his insights. But such abandonment of the salt-of-the-earth and their Sunday rituals displays both a failure to understand Cracker Barrel’s clientele and the ramifications of the bourgeois, Franklinized South that would rise in its wake. 

During my visits to the newly remodeled Mt. Juliet store on the Sunday mornings before July 4th and the week before Labor Day, Cracker Barrel had more to offer than a respite for rednecks. A senior in an American flag button-down ate pancakes with his grandkids. A party of 13 gathered at this roadside location for a 60th birthday celebration complete with balloon bouquets. Several multi-generational families enjoyed an afternoon meal. 

Those who have dedicated their careers to Cracker Barrel or worked there in their formative years seem as befuddled by the changes as the rest of us. For former server Hannah Barger, the chain’s increased corporate culture has led its fans to the more local and authentic options that have reclaimed its aesthetic. “Cracker Barrel was always the go-to place in the South for breakfast or brunch. I think we're seeing more locally owned or boutique breakfast/brunch places pop up, and we learned over the past few years how important it is to our communities to support the business ventures of our neighbors,” Barger said. “I think there's just too many competitors now in the ‘Southern home style cookin'’ niche for Cracker Barrel to rely on its corporate brand or old tactics.”

Another server with a near decade of experience who wishes to remain anonymous has seen how the adoption of this antiseptic corporate culture has affected both customer and employee morale. “Most people enjoy the old time store. We do have vacationing people of all types and from all over the world, so they like to feel that family is taking care of them in a friendly way. I think if you take that away, we will just be another restaurant.” 

For a longtime retail store manager who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, the public perception of the company under Masino is the greatest danger to the brand’s longevity. “The real problem isn’t going to be people coming in, seeing the changes and shrugging their shoulders. It’ll be the older clientele who simply hear about it and refuse to come back,” he said. “It will feel a betrayal to them. It’s modernizing without purpose; just to change something.” 

As a server recently implored to her colleagues on social media: “Bring back the Uncle Herschel’s, bring back the sunrise sampler, bring back the egg basket, bring back the first roast beef vendor that you had, bring back hospitality and kindness to your staff, as well as the guest. Bring back GM [general] managers who care about their employees, show gratitude for the ones that show up to work every shift schedule show some appreciation to the value of people who appreciate the brand of Cracker Barrel.”

In a pop-culture so hungry for nostalgia, it’s clear Cracker Barrel doesn’t need to strive for relevance even among the millennials and Gen Z Southerners who made as many memories there as with the Ghostbusters and The Lion King. It’s fully ingrained in the social fabric in a way that transcends its urban core stereotypes. It’s more than its stock price. 

Over in Mt. Juliet the showpiece store is doing just fine. The artifacts of a South long gone continue to make their presence felt on the slightly less-cluttered walls. The peg games remain a part of every place setting. But the bulky overused wood tables at this flagship are no more—the dining room now awash in particle board replacements. Still, they are helping keep the memory of the best the South has to offer alive for as long as they can. 

The Pamphleteer contacted Cracker Barrel's PR hotline by phone and email for this story multiple times. No one could be reached for comment.