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“Does Dolly like the banana pudding?”
I’m on the phone with Nathaniel, one of the concierges from Dollywood’s DreamMore Resort in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and he’s walking me through the menu options for a personalized dinner that I’ll be eating on her tour bus.
The classic menu features dishes like bacon-wrapped shrimp and mesquite-smoked brisket, and I notice three different dessert options. While they all sound appealing, I really just want to know what Dolly likes. I’m assured she does, in fact, love the banana pudding. And what’s good enough for Dolly is good enough for me.
The five-course dinner is included in a stay on Suite 1986, otherwise known as Dolly Parton’s tour bus. The superstar and philanthropist spent over a decade crossing North America on the custom Prevost tour bus, en route to concerts and award shows. The bus is outfitted with a bedazzled bedroom (complete with a hand-painted vanity, microwave, and wig closet) and a kitchen with a full-sized fridge that required the removal of the bus’s front window to install.
Courtesy of The Dollywood Company
The tour bus was retired and permanently docked in the same spot, it was parked whenever Parton would visit DreamMore. Now superfans can book the Dolly Tour Bus Experience. Starting at $10,000, it includes two nights on the bus for two guests, a suite inside the resort for up to four additional people, a welcome amenity, plenty of fun swag (plush bathrobes, signature Dolly perfume), and a highly-customized private dinner cooked by the resort’s chef, Tiffany Hicks. (Proceeds are donated to Parton’s Dollywood Foundation.)
RELATED: I Tried to Eat Everything at Dollywood in One Day
Courtesy of The Dollywood Company
Days before arriving for your stay, a concierge calls to hammer out the dinner menu so it’s exactly what you want. While the standard menu is full of Dolly’s favorites like biscuits, smoked ribs slathered in Cola barbecue sauce, and that banana pudding, Hicks says guests can choose their own adventure.
“We’ll tailor it to you — your preferences, the flavors you like,” says the chef. “If you want something else, by all means, we’re here to help you enjoy it. That’s what Dolly gets — whatever she wants.” It’s just part of an experience that, for a few magical, thrilling days, channels the country music legend’s life.
The first thing I noticed when we stepped onto the bus — besides the walls splashed in hand-painted murals of travelers and crystal balls, and the glossy faux-wood kitchen table where I imagined Parton drinking her morning coffee — was a cheese board. It’s overflowing with cheddar and blue cheese and fruit. Apparently, it’s the same spread the singer gets whenever she arrives at DreamMore. (According to the staff, she loves cheese, which is just one of the many things that makes the icon so relatable.) The full-sized fridge is filled with bottles of water, coke, and root beer, too.
Courtesy of The Dollywood Company
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While you’re staying on the bus, you can visit Dollywood and look out for some of the theme park’s most popular treats, including the funnel cake and iced cinnamon bread. But the made-to-order dinner, each course named for one of Parton’s songs or albums and paired with wine, is only available for Suite 1986 guests.
When it’s time for our dinner, we make our way to the Song & Hearth restaurant inside the hotel, and are led to a cozy banquet in a secluded section of the dining room. On each place setting is a rock imprinted with words like “blessed” and “grateful” along with wooden spoons tied with a recipe for Dolly’s famous Stone Soup as a souvenir.
Courtesy of The Dollywood Company
Chef Tiffany greets us and explains the first course: a cup of duck confit and dumpling soup, with a rich, turmeric-laced broth. It’s a riff on the Southern staple chicken and dumplings. “Turmeric is good for the soul,” Hicks says. “At least that’s what my great-grandma told me.”
RELATED: Dolly Parton Is Releasing Her Own Cake Mixes with Duncan Hines
Next up is a plate of cheddar biscuits sitting alongside a ramekin of roasted garlic and rosemary-whipped butter. (Biscuits are another Dolly favorite.) There’s fresh burrata with tomatoes that the chef cooks with brown sugar and finishes with a drizzle of balsamic reduced with honey.
Course three is bacon-wrapped shrimp and andouille sausage over yellow grits that the chef makes with smoked Gouda. And the fourth and final savory course is a feast unto itself. The procession of mains includes pan-seared catfish, crispy fried chicken, brisket, slow-smoked for 11 hours, pulled pork that’s been smoked for 12 hours, and — the star of the show — five-hour smoked ribs coated in
Church Hill restaurant Metzgar boots anti-abortion group
Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios
For the second time this year, the abortion debate is colliding with the local restaurant scene.
What’s happening: Metzger, a German restaurant in Church Hill known for its schnitzel, abruptly canceled a reception planned by the conservative Family Foundation of Virginia last week.
- The cancellation came an hour-and-a-half before the event was supposed to begin, according to the group, which opposes abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
What they’re saying: The Family Foundation’s president, Victoria Cobb, accused Metzger of religious discrimination in a fundraising appeal distributed by the group.
The other side: Metzger, meanwhile, said in a statement they made the decision out of respect for their majority of women and LGBTQ+ staff.
- “We have always refused service to anyone for making our staff uncomfortable or unsafe and this was the driving force behind our decision,” the restaurant said in a statement.
Worth noting: While discrimination on the basis of sex, race, religion or nationality is illegal, businesses in Virginia are allowed to refuse service based on political beliefs.
Flash back: In September, coffee shop owner Ajay Brewer said backlash to a social media post he made supporting abortion restrictions decimated his business, forcing him to close.
- After trying to sell the business, he’s now trying to raise money online to reopen.
Jabal: the new wheat scientists say can withstand extreme heat and drought | Food
A new drought-tolerant variety of durum wheat has been created as part of an international breeding program to boost climate resilience in the food system by increasing crop diversity.
Durum wheat is used to make pasta, pizza crusts, and flatbreads such as pitta and chapatis, as well as for couscous, bulgur and pastry for desserts such as baklava.
The new wheat Jabal, which means “mountain” in Arabic, was developed by farmers and crop scientists by crossing a commercial durum wheat with a wild relative from an arid region of Syria, to create a new durum variety which can withstand drought.
It’s part of the Crop Trust’s wild relatives project, which is using genetically diverse crop varieties to help develop more resilient and adaptive varieties of wheat, barley, rice, and potato that can withstand erratic and extreme weather conditions caused by the climate breakdown.
While it is not yet commercially available, farmers in Morocco will be the first to start growing the new version of durum wheat, which is widely eaten in north Africa and the Middle East, in about three years. Morocco is suffering its worst drought in four decades, and grain production is down by about 70% due to extremely dry conditions.
Breeders and farmers in drought-affected areas planted numerous new durum wheat varieties between 2017 and 2021. Jabal stood out as it was able to flourish and produce grains while all commercial varieties of durum failed. Its distinctive black spikes also produce high yields of plum grains that are made tasty bread, scientists say.
“Many farmers said it was love at first sight when they saw it standing strong when all other varieties were being destroyed by drought,” said Filippo Bassi, senior scientist with the durum wheat breeding program at the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (Icarda) in Lebanon.
Wheat, the most widely consumed grain globally, is grown on every continent apart from Antarctica and eaten by billions of people.
Crop failures due to lost biodiversity and extreme weather events such as drought, extreme heat and floods have led to rising wheat prices and food insecurity in many parts of the world, exacerbated by Russia’s war on Ukraine, as both countries were major wheat exporters.
Last year, prices for durum wheat soared by 90% after widespread drought and unprecedented heatwaves in Canada, one of the world’s biggest grain producers, followed a few months later by record rainfall. Over the last century, Canadian farmers have increasingly relied on genetically similar high-yield wheat varieties, elbowing out crucial diversity.
It takes years to breed new varieties of wheat, in a complicated, never-ending race against time, as global heating drives climate disasters and the emergence of new, adapted or more aggressive pathogens.
Wild relatives are considered the more resilient cousins of commercial crops, having evolved in nature to survive tough conditions such as extreme heat, drought, flooding and poor soils. Plant breeders are increasingly looking to wild and other forgotten varieties stored in seed banks for useful genetic diversity, which was sidelined in favor of yield, uniformity and profits after the Green Revolution.
But the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems warns that in addition to genetic diversity, building resilience in the food system also requires diversity on farms and in landscapes, as well as more farmer led initiatives.
“Farmers have domesticated 7,000 different crop species and have donated more than 2.1m plant varieties to international gene banks, but most of the profit from this effort has been captured by four or five international seed companies,” said Pat Mooney, an expert in agriculture diversity and biotechnology. “[Jabal] shows what can be accomplished with multilateral cooperation where farmers are at the center of decision-making.”