The New York Times has this for the entry: "This is the restaurant that Cracker Barrel aspires to be, a down-home country kitchen with kitsch and outstanding breakfast fare. Start the day off with eggs Florentine, stuffed French toast, even sweetbreads and eggs; or go old school with eggs, grits, hash browns, and biscuits 'n' gravy. For early risers or late-night partiers, Skyway Jack's greases its griddle starting at 5am."
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The egg comes first
To make breakfast at Skyway Jack's in St. Petersburg you have to crack a few eggs. Say, 1,300. Every day. And you better do it quick. The tourists are hungry.
By JEFF KLINKENBERG Published February 28, 2007
ST. PETERSBURG -- Let us now praise an unsung hero of tourist season: the short-order cook slinging hash, right this minute, in the crowded kitchen at Skyway Jack's Restaurant.
His name is Glenn Thompson. He is 51 years old. He sprints from grill to toaster. The notoriously feisty waitresses at the notoriously politically incorrect restaurant don't suffer dawdlers.
"The waitress from hell."
Thompson doesn't call her that. She wears a button that brags about it.
"Where's my eggs?" she demands.
"Coming up."
Thompson takes his place in the kitchen every morning, his home away from home for 18 years. Outside the kitchen, at daybreak, a school of fishermen take possession of the counter stools. Then the day shift cops grab a booth, followed by a flock of old men who don't sleep decently anymore and look forward to their early mornings at Jack's, where they talk and laugh and argue.
Starting around 8 a.m., the sleepy-eyed tourists show, and then the business people, trailed an hour later by the just-folks, black and white and brown, some dressed like they mean to impress the steely-eyed boss at corporate headquarters, others in T-shirts and flip-flops who don't care if a little egg drips on the cutoffs.
It's a madhouse until closing time, 3 p.m., when Thompson says "See you tomorrow" and takes a long, deserved breath.
Pigging out
On a busy day, he fixes 1,300 eggs, 150 pounds of potatoes, 60 pounds of sausage and 45 pounds of bacon. On the other side of the swinging doors, the waitresses pour 1,000 cups of coffee.
Every March 1 ( that's tomorrow) is the annual "Pig Day" at Skyway Jack's, Thompson prepares a plethora of pork dishes for the menu. One busboy traditionally dresses like a pig and plays harmonica. The waitresses traditionally resist the temptation to kill him.
Most waitresses at Jack's are at the long end of age 40. They have put up with so much balderdash and heard so much bushwah over decades that they know how to handle customers and short-order cooks.
"You've got to fight the waitresses a little bit," Thompson says. He wears work shoes, shorts, a blue apron, a red-and-white T-shirt and a small hoop in his left ear. He has thick brows and solemn dark eyes behind glasses spattered by bacon grease.
He learned to cook in Delaware from his grandmother, Margaret Thompson, when he was 5. "I stood on a chair next to her at the stove and she said, 'Watch this.' " At 14, he worked in the kitchen at Sheraton Lakeside Inn near Disney World, followed by gigs in St. Petersburg at Sweden House (R.I.P.) and Maas Brothers (R.I.P.) before becoming a star at Jack's.
Not a star like on television, where some celebrity chef or another is pontificating, preaching and, of course, kicking it up a notch. If Glenn Thompson has a niche, it's speed cooking.
Midmorning at Skyway Jack's: The place is hopping, the waitresses are on their game. Thompson towers over a crate of eggs.
One-handed, he cracks open the shell. With the same hand, in one continuous motion, he tosses the contents into the bowl and the empty shell into the garbage.
Donedonedonedonedone! He's on a one-egg-a-second pace. A fumble. Forty-eight eggs in 60 seconds, according to the stopwatch.
Western omelet. Fried egg. Over easy. Bacon. Ham.
"Where's my scrapple?" The scary waitress glares through the pass-through. Scrapple - the glory of many a Navy shipyard - is an acquired taste, the product of pork, pork stock, pork skins, pork livers, pork fat, pork hearts, cornmeal, wheat flour, salt and spices. It tastes acceptably good with Thompson eggs. Same goes for the pork brains.
Yes, pork brains are on the menu, same with that other stick-to-your-ribs breakfast food of military yore, SOS, which we will call "something on a shingle."
'Old-fashioned food'
Jack Thomas - yes, the famous Jack of Skyway Jack's fame himself - thought any self-respecting breakfast place needed to serve sausage and gravy over biscuits.
Jack started the restaurant in 1976. It was near the bay back then, at O'Neill's Skyway Boat Basin, in a claustrophobic shack with uneven floors and damp washrooms.
Jack was a tattoo-loving former Navy guy, a retired engineer, when he opened the restaurant. It was an all-night joint where some customers wore neither shirts or shoes, though they were smart to don shoes if they used the bathrooms. The waitresses wore shirts with Jack's trademark: pictures of sunny-side eggs plastered across their chests. It wasn't Hooters, exactly, but most customers got the naughty point.
Eventually, Jack moved the restaurant to its present location because of zoning problems and ended up with a larger place, though it seems crowded at any hour, especially on Sundays after the churchgoers arrive and start ordering eggs and bacon with grits on the side, and the waitresses start nagging and Glenn Thompson starts shoving food at them while trying to maintain his cool.
Denise Abel has worked at Jack's more than half her life, first as a waitress and now as the manager. She's 49, a little tired-looking, the keeper of the peace among cooks and waitresses and customers.
Jack died in 1999 from a bad heart, too many cigarettes and an appetite for his own food. So she is the memory.
"You're not going to come in here and order something that's good for you," she says. "It's not going to happen here. I mean, you don't come here for a bowl of fruit. You come here to eat old-fashioned food.
"Nothing here ever changes. We have the same customers we had in 1976. We actually have the children of old customers, who now bring their own kids.
"What we offer is consistency. We have been serving chicken and dumplings every Tuesday for 25 years."
Curtis Hill, 49, makes the chicken and dumplings. He makes the soups and the chili. He comes in at 3:30 a.m. and gets the kitchen going for Glenn. He has worked at Skyway Jack's for 17 years.
"At a lot of restaurants, you have a cook for a week and he's gone," Hill says. "But here people stick around."
A job for life
The ovens were old when Jack started the restaurant in 1976, but they still work. The spatulas ought to hang in a museum. Same with the cook.
"I've got nowhere else to be and nothing else to do than be the cook at Skyway Jack's," Thompson tells customers.
A waitress, looking in the pass-through, notices that he is talking instead of cooking. She gives him the eye. It's part of the endless chess game played between servers and cooks.
"I get along with most of the cooks," says Glenda Hill a few minutes later.
She started waitressing at Jack's in 1979. Born in Tennessee, a Christian woman, she was shocked by the ambience and Jack's insistence that waitresses wear those suggestive T-shirts. "I blushed a lot at first," she says.
She arrives at the restaurant at 3:30 a.m. to prepare for the day and remains on her feet for another 12 hours.
She's closing in on 60, with curly hair, hazel eyes. She is still trim from the hustle-bustle, still feisty enough to give any old cook a run for his money.
Want to hear her favorite saying?
"If a------- could fly, this place would be an airport."
Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at (727)893-8727 or klink@sptimes.com.
IF YOU GO
Skyway Jack's is at 2795 34th St. S in St. Petersburg; (727) 867-1907. It's open 5 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily serving breakfast and lunch.
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