Roosevelt Scott stands behind the grill at Scott’s Original
Food Stand and orchestrates the madness. Sisters, children, nieces, and nephews
call out orders in no obviously organized way, and Roosevelt executes,
occasionally pointing at someone and demanding clarification. In seven years of
serving me weekly, they’ve never missed my order (breakfast sandwich with
Canadian bacon). It might happen, but I’ve never seen it.
“There’s kind of like a thread of family that runs through
the whole market,” says Roosevelt’s sister and co-owner, Jannie Scott Thornton.
And if there’s a thread of family, Scott’s, collectively, is Momma, feeding
pretty much everybody. At 4 a.m. on Saturday, the Scotts are there feeding the
vendors, and so it goes. Some stalls are occupied only Saturdays, some
Saturdays and Thursdays. Scott’s is open whenever the market is open. People
gotta eat.
Jannie and Roosevelt have serious stature at the market, and
they’re rightly proud of it. It wasn’t always that way. They’re two of eight
children of a South Carolina sharecropping family. One brother came to
Rochester for work in the early ’50s, and one by one, the other seven and their
mother followed (their father couldn’t abide Rochester winter). Roosevelt
worked at “the Ford place on Lake” for 23 years; Jannie spent 12 years at Kodak
before running her own beauty salon for 13.
Why a food stand? Their mother was a great cook, and 12
years ago a customer told Jannie about a market stall coming open. She,
Roosevelt, and another sister decided to give it shot. They rented for a year,
supposedly with an option to buy. “We were greenhorns,” Jannie says. “He
charged us an arm and a leg and a
neck.” The sharecropper’s children recognized this scam, and after a year, the
owner, predictably, refused to sell.
During that first year, the Scotts say folks weren’t
encouraging. “People said, ‘This is hard work, you won’t be here long,'” Jannie
explains as Roosevelt laughs. “But we came from the farm. Hard work and honesty
is all we knew.” The hard work paid off when the stall next door went up for
sale. Jannie and Roosevelt bought it, and they’ve been the most successful food
stall at the market ever since.
So why do all of us regulars keep coming back? Regulars are
driven by a small set of concerns perfectly addressed. I want that awesome
breakfast sandwich served up fast. The key to great sandwiches is great bread,
and the Scotts use those great Martusciello Bakery rolls. But Roosevelt has a
way with the rest of it: spreading the yolk just right without drying it out,
getting the cheese all through the thing. And it comes so steaming hot you can
burn your mouth. As the months turn bitter, it’s so comforting you could cry.
Scott’s also has my favorite local pulled pork, which
Roosevelt cooks on Wednesdays. Being from Carolina, the Scotts sauce the pork
more sharply than anybody else in this sweet-sauce-crazed town. It’s truly
pulled, and always tender. Of Roosevelt’s chicken, Jannie says, “I taught him
how to make it good,” which brings another huge laugh from both of them.
Whoever taught him did right, because the chicken is tantalizingly moist and
tender.
Ribs, plates, sausage, hams, and hots… Scotts has the range
you’d expect at a Rochester grill joint, all done well and seriously
inexpensive. The meat sauce is slightly hot and slightly sweet, not oily at all
and edible by itself (it’s their mom’s recipe from home, and let’s not think
too hard about what that implies about the myths of the origins of “Rochester
sauce”).
The food is good and consistent, the service fast, friendly,
and colorful. But the true appeal of Scott’s is more than that, or something
else entirely. It goes back to Jannie Scott Thornton’s comment about the thread
of family. When you eat at Scott’s, you feel a part of that, like you’re in on
something along with the other hundreds of customers, something special and
uniquely all of ours. And you are.
Scott’s
II (aka Scott’s Original Food Stand), Rochester Public Market (near the
Railroad Street entrance). Hours: Open Tuesdays at 6 a.m., Thursdays at 5 a.m.,
and Saturdays at 4 a.m. until the market closes.
Food tip
Patrik’s
Culinary Kreations will add a second location in the spring, in the former
Ly-Lou’s spot on South Avenue. It will be called The Gourmet Plate and serve
only dinners. You can find some of Patrik’s pastries at the new Boulder Coffee
Company (South Clinton and Alexander). Lyjha Wilton opened the coffee shop in
July, naming it for the strange boulders in the basement (no connection to
Colorado).
— Michael Warren Thomas
Check www.SavorLife.com for details on
Michael’s broadcast schedule on WYSL 1040 AM.
This article appears in Oct 12-18, 2005.
