Expect to see Murfreesboro restaurant Joanie’s featured on “America’s Best Restaurants” in the near future.
The show’s crew filmed at both Joanie’s locations – on the downtown Murfreesboro Square and on St. Andrews Drive – last Thursday.
Show host Greg Hutson and field producer/videographer Austin Turner, based in Florence, Ky., travel around the country highlighting local, independently owned restaurants.
The episode is scheduled to be shown across ABR’s social media platforms. The airing date will be announced on the Joanie’s Facebook page and the ABR website, americasbestrestaurants.com.
The crew has filmed more than 700 episodes of the show coast to coast. Last Thursday, Hutson and Turner sat down with Joanie’s owner Jason Day to talk about the restaurant’s origins and spotlight some of its favorite menu items.
The crew got lessons about how to make Joanie’s signature French toasted waffle pancake, the Joanie burger and two versions of a grilled cheese: Mom’s grilled cheese and “not your mom’s” grilled cheese.
The French toasted waffle pancake is a homemade waffle with a pancake layer on each side, then coated in French toast batter and cooked. The Joanie burger is a half-pound burger topped with sauteed mushrooms, bacon and blue cheese crumbles.
Mom’s grilled cheese is a traditional grilled cheese sandwich, but the “not your mom’s” grilled cheese also has smoked barbecue pulled chicken, bacon and tomato.
Hutson and Turner tasted the menu items, which they said they overwhelmingly enjoyed.
“When you think about a waffle with pancakes on each side, you think it would be heavy,” Hutson told Day. “But it’s not. The batter you all use is so light.”
Hutson and Turner spent most of the day filming at both Joanie’s locations. They had surprisingly few pieces of equipment: just two lights, a camera for still photographs and another camera for video.
While Hutson and Turner filmed in the kitchen, it was business as usual for Day and his customers out front.
Originally called Red Bicycle Coffee, Day changed the name to Joanie’s to honor his late mother when another Red Bicycle, unaffiliated with Day’s restaurant, opened in Smyrna, causing confusion for customers.
Day, originally from the suburbs of Chicago, moved to Murfreesboro from California to fulfill his dream of owning a restaurant. He said he chose Murfreesboro because of its exponential growth and its need for more local, independently owned restaurants.
“When I got to Murfreesboro and I would drive around, I noticed, man, there’s a lot of McDonald’s and Burger Kings and just a lot of chains,” Day said. “But I felt like that unique, local, scratch-made feel that a local place would have was kind of missing here, and I thought with what I was going to bring, we could do something special.”
Day opened the first restaurant at the corner of Cason Trail and St. Andrews Drive in November 2019. Day said that the first location was so successful that he opened the downtown location just two years later.
He said he chose the original location because it’s immersed in a large residential area, giving those residents a local option without having to drive across town.
“Traffic is tough here,” he said. “But if I could build something in that neighborhood that was good, all those people would have something close by where they wouldn’t have to get on those big roads. They could just come and have their coffee and good food and either drive, walk or bike.”
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