Brisket Grilled Cheese

– Mac’s PTX –

$12.75 | April 2023

It’s 2003. Consumed with a perplexing yet deep desire to see the Pacific Ocean, I arrange a nonstop flight from New York to L.A. On Song Airlines. Song being Song, the flight was cancelled, the family split up and re-routed to California two different ways. Wife and son changed planes in Cincinnati, daughter and I went through Dallas.

Not long after taking off from DFW, I looked out the window, the sky a beautiful blue from 35,000 feet. And I see, on the ground, clear as day … absolutely nothing. Well, this is interesting, I think. I’ve never seen “nothing” before. I must investigate. And so one geographic obsession accidentally led to another: to experience, on the ground, West Texas, the area you’d get if you drew a line northwest from Dallas to Amarillo through Wichita Falls, then south down to Lubbock and back east to Dallas (apologies to Midland, Marfa, El Paso, et. al.).

A few weeks ago, I finally took the trip. Would I have gone if the Turnpike Troubadours weren’t playing Saturday night in the Metroplex? Maaaaybe. I’ve never flown to see a band before, not even Bruce. But this was an unusual opportunity: two bucket-list items for the price of one.

To get the most out of my time in Texas (and the Tucumcari turnaround in Eastern New Mexico), I decided to spend as little of it as possible driving the region’s faster roads. To get to Amarillo, I could’ve just jetted up 287 through Vernon, 225 miles, a straight shot northwest. But then I might have seen something, maybe, and what would be the point in that? (The “nothing” I saw from the plane? Part cows and cotton fields and, nowadays, wind turbines; but also part cows, arroys and ravines; all of it stupendously beautiful, but also clearly very, very poor.)

Instead, it was Texas’s Route 70 that beckoned. Once you get to Vernon, you just kinda dive a little south and then go straight west for 160 miles or so to Plainview, then hop on up to Amarillo, adding a hike through the incredible Palo Duro Canyon if you have the time. But don’t hurry. It’s easy to blow through the, ahem, population centers along the way; they only come up once every 30 miles or so, and if they aren’t literal ghost towns, they’re still of the so-small, blink-and-you’ve-missed-it variety.

One of these is Paducah. Legend has it that a Kentucky native was the original landowner in the area, and that he sold parcels to people in return for their vote to name the settlement after his hometown. The side streets in today’s Paducah are dirt and gravel, and most of the businesses along the main county-courthouse square are, well, out of business. Their signs remain; it’s almost a movie set.

Mac’s, aka Coffee on the Square, is the only food I could see in the center of town, and luckily, it’s a happening place. Kevin McCreary, who owns the cafe with his wife, Paducah-native Jana, came up from Houston, after corporate stints overseas. Somewhere along the way, he watched a bunch of TV food shows and decided he could do that (his wife told me this, so it has to be true). And he has.

McCreary is a natural. The brisket grilled cheese is as good as it looks. The customer has flexibility on the molten lava, cheddar, whatever, which is great, give the people what they want. The brisket itself, isolated, was so good, so soft and imbued with flavor, that I saw no point in ordering that cut again the rest of the trip. (In Texas. Can I pay a higher compliment?) You can dip the sandwich in one or both of the sauces you see in the picture. Up to you. The orange-colored one is the Dragon sauce, honoring the local high school’s sports teams. You can’t see the spice but it’s there. Homemade BBQ sauce takes up the middle of the container. Brisket purists may not want either. Purity, in this case, is not a virtue.

(This is part one of a two-parter. Back soon with a take on Beckton’s Chophouse & Tavern, in Dickens, Texas.)