John T. Edge

Feb 27, 2025 | gardenandgun.com | John T. Edge |Gabriela Gomez-Misserian

Neon curlicues romp and flicker across a two-story masonry building, fronted by a towering sign stacked with seeming watercolors of a crab, a fish, an oyster, and a couple of shrimp. Inside, Hunter Evans, the new executive chef and co-owner of the Mayflower Cafe in downtown Jackson, Mississippi, delivers salads scattered with feta cubes to a group of tourists tucked into a booth wrapped in butterscotch vinyl.

Feb 19, 2025 | gardenandgun.com | John T. Edge |Gabriela Gomez-Misserian

A forty-pound box of smoked sack sausage from Father’s Country Hams of Bremen, Kentucky, landed on our front porch in Oxford, Mississippi, at 1:46 last Thursday afternoon. It was just above freezing, so that pasteboard box sat there until I got home, heaved it into the kitchen, and stacked twenty sacks of sausage in our freezer like cordwood. If we go slow, my wife, Blair, and I figure that this, our last order, will last for a year. Problem is, we’ve never gone slow.

Nov 27, 2024 | gardenandgun.com | John T. Edge |Gabriela Gomez-Misserian

A cybersecurity tech named Peter, down from Philadelphia on vacation, dines solo at the horseshoe bar in the main dining room at the Grey, the Savannah restaurant with a gleaming art deco vibe that chef Mashama Bailey and entrepreneur Johno Morisano opened downtown in December 2014. To Peter’s left, glass doors lead to the bays where, beginning in 1938, Atlantic Greyhound Lines buses picked up and dropped off passengers.

Oct 21, 2024 | gardenandgun.com | John T. Edge |Gabriela Gomez-Misserian

My sausage biscuit arrives with a bullet of house-made strawberry jam. Before the square of dough went in the oven, a cook shellacked it with egg wash to give the outside crunch and structure. After it emerged golden and smelling faintly of herbes de Provence, another cook brushed the top with honey and scattered salt flakes that now sparkle in the light of overhead globes. I pull silverware from a crinkly paper sleeve as a fuchsia-haired waitress glides through the room.

Sep 26, 2024 | salvationsouth.com | John T. Edge

I’ve been thinking about what it takes to love the place you call home. Some of that introspection was born of work on a memoir, House of Smoke, which publishes next year. That book required that I go back to Georgia and take a hard look at where I grew up. Another book—Wright Thompson’s The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, published this week—demanded I take a hard look at Mississippi, where my wife and I raised our son, the place we choose to live.