On our way back from Florida a few weeks ago, I had planned on driving about nine hours straight through to Paducah, KY. I had only one motive and plan - to finally eat at Doe's Eat Place in Paducah. While Doe's now has franchised locations from their original Greenville, MS restaurant, the one in Paducah was started by - and still owned by - family members of the Signa family whose patriarch, Dominick "Big Doe" Signa, started the original Doe's Eat Place in 1941.
The Signa family immigrated from Sicily and eventually moved to Greenville in 1903. They opened a grocery store in a small building where the Signa family lived in the rear. Doe Signa was born in The grocery store run by Doe's father catered to the large number of black families in the area. The grocery store was doing pretty well up to the devastating Great Flood of 1927. The Mississippi River flooded at record levels that year driving thousands of families from their homes. Many of the families, mainly black families, migrated north to find jobs in the industrial Northern states. Business took a drastic turn for the worse at Signa's store and it was going to be a long recovery due to the upcoming Great Depression. It was then that Doe Signa decided that he needed to turn to nefarious means to provide for his family. He got himself a 40-barrel still and made moonshine whiskey, a practice he continued well after the end of Prohibition in 1933. It was said he eventually sold the still for $300 and Ford Model T.
In the late 30's, Doe Signa got a job working at a cafeteria at a nearby air base outside of Greenville and his wife, Mamie, was running the store that had a honkytonk in front that catered to black people. Doe somehow got hold of a recipe for tamales from one of the airmen he befriended. Doe gave it to his wife who tweaked it a bit. She improved upon the recipe and began to sell tamales out of the front part of the store in 1941. Fish and chili were other items Mamie and Doe Signa would make for their patrons.
Because of social issues in the 40's, white people didn't patronize Doe Signa's honkytonk. But a white doctor making his rounds one day stopped in to see Doe coming in through the back door. Feeling hungry, the doctor looked through the store for something to eat. He found a steak that Doe had in the meat counter and the doctor asked Doe if he would cook it for him. It was so good that the doctor would come back to Doe's when he was in the area on house calls. Word of mouth got around that Doe Signa made a damn fine steak and suddenly white professional people were going to the back door for steaks while blacks still got chili, tamales and fish in the front. It was sort of a reverse segregation at the time when most establishments didn't allow blacks in the front door.
The steakhouse restaurant grew in popularity and Doe and Mamie eventually closed the honkytonk in front to make the whole place a restaurant. Mamie Signa died in 1955, but Doe carried on with the help of his sons, Doe, Jr. (or Little Doe) and Charles. Big Doe Signa retired in 1974 handing the restaurant over to Little Doe and Charles. Charles eventually moved to Oxford, Mississippi and opened a Doe's Eat Place there (it closed in late 2007 after the landlord dramatically raised the rent) while Little Doe continued to run the one in Greenville. The brothers had a little bit of a rivalry with the homemade tamales that they still made from their momma's recipe - both declaring theirs were better than the other's.
Now, I haven't been able to fully ascertain when and why Charles Signa's son, Paul, ended up in Paducah, KY to open a Doe's Eat Place there as part of a downtown riverfront revitalization project. Paul worked for his father in the Oxford location in the mid-2000's, so I'm guessing that he possibly moved up to Paducah sometime around 2007 or 2008 to open what is now the only other Signa family owned Doe's Eat Place. Franchise locations have been around since the early 1990's in places like Little Rock, Fort Smith, Bentonville and Fayetteville, AR, Tulsa, OK and Baton Rouge, LA.
After checking into the hotel, I set the GPS to take us through Paducah to Doe's Eat Place. Downtown Paducah is a charming place for entertainment with a number of shops, bars and restaurants. We really liked it just driving and walking around that night and again the following morning. Cindy instantly fell in love with the downtown area.
We found a parking space on Broadway, just down the street from Doe's Eat Place, which is just a couple blocks from where the mouth of the Tennessee River spills into the Ohio River. (see map) It was around 8 p.m. when we walked through the front door into a bar area with a guy playing guitar to a small crowd of rather raucous - but in a fun way - people.
The hostess met us at a station inside the first of two dining areas at Doe's Eat Place. We were guided to an antique-style wooden table that had a serious leveling problem. After running to the bar to get some coasters, the hostess steadied our table with about a half dozen of the drink coasters. She dropped off a couple menus for us to look through.
Our server for the evening was a young lady by the name of Carson. In the southern tradition of naming a child after the mother's maiden name, I guessed that's how she got her name. But she told us that named after Carson McCullers, the Southern Gothic-style author famous for short stories and novels set in the deep South. Cindy's daughter was getting ready to have her second baby and was having trouble coming up with a name. I thought the name Carson for a girl was rather cool.
It had been a long day of driving for us and I needed a beer. I saw that they had Schlafly Pale Ale available. I was sort of surprised that they had Schlafly, the brewery out of St. Louis. Then I remembered that Schlafly contracted with a brewery out of Nashville to make and distribute Schlafly products in the Southeast. But then it dawned on me the next day that it's less than a three hour drive between Paducah and St. Louis. I only had just the one beer that evening because we switched to a Malbec wine that we shared for dinner.
As I said, Doe's Eat Place is famous for steaks and tamales. I figured we needed to get some tamales to start out. We ordered up a couple for us to get started.
The tamales were wrapped in corn husks and had a type of meat sauce filling. They were different from most tamales I've had in the past. The meat sauce wasn't all that spicy, but had a distinct flavor to it. They came with a chili sauce on the side. I didn't know the drill, but I guess you were supposed to put the chili on the tamales and eat them like that. On its own, the chili was meaty and had a little bite. Had I known that you were supposed to put the chili on top they may have helped with the overall taste of the tamales which I felt were just "OK".
Carson came out soon there after and told us that they were out of 1 1/2 lb. T-bone steaks and baked potatoes. I thought it was rather peculiar that they were out of baked potatoes by 8:30 in the evening considering that I saw a number of baked potatoes coming out of the kitchen and going past our table after she told us they were out of them. But that was all right.
They had a number of different sized steaks on the menu at Doe's including and up to a 4 lb. strip steak. The table next to us got a 3 lb. strip steak and four of the six people seated at the table carved meat from it in sort of a family-style fashion. I wanted to get a picture of the steak before they started in on it, but I didn't want to bother them.
The 1 1/2 pound T-bone was not a deal killer for me, either. I figured to go with a filet and they had a number of different sizes of those as well. I ended up ordering the 10 ounce filet - rare. I got some of their "world famous" French fries for a side. Cindy got the 10 ounce filet, too, only she got her's medium. She chose the vegetable medley for her side.
We both got salads with the house dressing. Asking Carson what the house dressing consisted of she said it was a mixture of oil, vinegar and garlic chunks. She had us at "garlic". I asked if they had crumbled blue cheese and she said they did. I asked her to throw some on top of mine. The salads were actually pretty good with the basic oil and vinegar, but the combination of the garlic and the blue cheese made the overall taste just excellent.
The steaks came out not long after we finished our salads. The steaks were in sort of an au jus sauce and served with oversized and heavy duty steak knives. Cindy's vegetable medley was pretty much non-descript while my "world famous" fries were crispy on the outside, but other than that they, too, were pretty basic French fries.
But the steaks were a completely different story. My steak was cooked perfectly with a cool and red center. The steak was juicy, flavorful and very tender. Along with the sauce on the plate - which was sort of a Worcestershire-based au jus - the steak was one of the better ones I've ever had. It was just out of this world.
Cindy and were stuffed after all that food and we decided to walk around downtown Paducah for awhile. We found a number of other interesting restaurants and a couple places that had live music including a place behind Doe's Eat Place where a couple guys were playing in an open courtyard. Even though we were stuffed, we ended up getting some ice cream at a place called the Ice Cream Factory which was part of a boutique hotel called the Fox Briar Inn. It was a nice capper to an evening of fine dining.
Doe's Eat Place was everything I hoped - and expected it - to be. It was a unique dining experience all the way around. The steaks were just excellent and I'd put Doe's up against some of the best Midwest and big city steakhouses that I've gone to over the years. We absolutely fell in love with Paducah during our short overnight visit and made a vow to come back at some point in the not-so-distant future. And I'm sure that Doe's Eat Place will be on our itinerary to try again.
I hope you make it back to our little town, or maybe you already have. Several publications have named us one of the top ten small towns to visit in the U.S.Paducah is thriving and has grown since 2014.There are many great restaurants in the downtown area now. I would recommend trying Italian Grill if you get a chance to return. CHEERS!
Posted by: Andrea | July 04, 2016 at 11:48 PM