Big Earl’s Galley Cafe and Bait Shop
Big Earl’s, From the East Texas Journal, May 2015
Pittsburg, Texas – Saturday nights, they took orders for étouffée in the dining room behind the bait shop.
An enterprise that was on Highway 11 west of Pittsburg. The Galley Café specialties arrived with a taste influenced by the number of ports Earl Cheney visited during his decades sailing the high seas.
Shuffled between places to sleep growing up, he’s the ninth of nine children of a Cherokee bride and a wild daddy who visited when it was convenient. He stood on an apple crate to reach the stove at the beginning of his cooking career, boiling down soup bones earned in trade for small jobs and errands he ran for a Gladewater butcher shop.
The first reliable revenue stream he found for working capital came from the dump by the golf course where players threw away empties in the days of deposit soda bottles.
Headquarters for the evolving Cheney family enterprise was Bud Morton’s old store, one of the biggest reasons he always looked forward to summers at the home of an older sister in Camp County.
“We’d ride our stick horses up here,” he said. It was a true convenience store, manned with that was convenient for Bud. “Otherwise, he’d leave the door open and you just left your money on the counter.”
The Cook family later bought the store and the land.
By a quirk of fate in later years, while hunting on the same property, the flight path of the covey of birds Earl flushed passed directly in front of the barn where Gary Cook sat just inside the open door.
“I shot at just the right time and from just the right distance,” Earl said. “We were good friends from the day I introduced myself by peppering him which likely influenced his decision to sell me the place when I asked.”
With an authentic rough finished concrete floor in the old store that served as a foyer opening into three aisles of bait and tackle to your left, or the 6-day-a-week dining room where those not wanting étouffée could pick shrimp or traditional fried catfish. Or a bit of all three for an extra $1 above the $10.95 menu price.
Cooking was serious there. The rue made for gumbo wasn’t the same as the blonde rue basing the étouffée. The shrimp came only from the Gulf. In season, Earl preferred serving vegetables coming straight from area gardens.
Daily lunch specials drew a mix of neighborhood locals coming in from the lake and business sorts escaping town for an hour. Weekends lured diners enjoying a Saturday afternoon drive to supper.
