Macon, the city “Where Soul Lives,” is known for a lot of things, including its rich musical history, boasting artists such as Little Richard, Otis Redding and the Allman Brothers Band, as well as an annual film festival that draws filmmakers from far and wide.
But the city’s newest identity is bacon.
Gary Wheat, president of Visit Macon, isn’t quite sure how Macon and bacon became a pair, but he guesses it was born out of the rhyme the two words share. While the city isn’t known for producing bacon, the connection was highlighted when local residents voted in 2017 to name the city’s wood-bat collegiate summer baseball team the Macon Bacon. The team also has a 6-foot mascot named Kevin Bacon.
“We’ve really embraced bacon and what it means to our culinary scene, as well as our athletic scene and our fan base here in Macon,” Wheat said.
Visit Macon is taking that one step further with its new Macon Bacon Trail, a list of 20 restaurants, each with its own bacon-themed dish, posted at visitmacon.org/bacontrail. Every time a diner orders one of the items, they can earn a badge on the Tour Macon app by scanning the QR code available at each restaurant. Some restaurants have the code prominently displayed on tables, while others will bring it out upon request.
After marking off five, 10 and 15 stops, trailblazers can stop by the Downtown Visitor Center to show their completed badges and receive a prize.
“(The trail) just explores the renaissance of this key ingredient, bacon, which has become synonymous with our city,” Wheat said.
The menu items on the trail include breakfast food, appetizers, main courses and desserts. Some are classics, such as a BLT at Gateway Cafe, while others step outside the box. The Jimmy Carter shake at the Rookery comes with banana ice cream, peanut butter and crumbled chunks of bacon. The milkshake’s banana flavor is subtle compared with the generous chunks of peanut butter. The bacon, meanwhile, provides a meaty, salty contrast to the shake’s sweetness.
Credit: Courtesy of Visit Macon
Credit: Courtesy of Visit Macon
Wheat said he hopes the new trail will attract more outside visitors, in addition to local attention. Many of the restaurants listed already had a bacon-inspired dish, while others intentionally added bacon to a dish in order to join the trail, like the miso corn and bacon fritters from Kinjo Kitchen & Cocktails. The battered surface of the fritters gives way to a soft inside filled with kernels of corn and bits of bacon.
The Midnight Rider at H&H Restaurant is one of Wheat’s favorites. H&H has been serving soul food in Macon since 1959, and its blue-and-white-checkered tables host a clientele that includes solo diners, families and college students. The Midnight Rider — one of a handful of Allman Brothers-themed biscuits — consists of a fried chicken breast served inside a sliced biscuit, with house-made pimento cheese and bacon jam, which is made of coffee, dark brown sugar, molasses, onion and bacon, General Manager Tangie Myers said. (Note that it’s only available during breakfast, which is served until 10:30 a.m.)
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Credit: undefined
While the biscuit sandwich already is one of its bestsellers, Myers hopes this promotion will help the restaurant stay busy during the slow times of the year. “The twist they put on the bacon is ... unbelievable,” she said. “You’d be surprised at how many forms you can do bacon.”
While there are several innovative dishes offered on the trail, bacon on pizza is an old reliable. But Laurence Dantzler, director of operations at Jag’s Pizzeria and Pub, said the restaurant introduced a bacon and pulled pork pizza with a barbecue-sauce base.
“We felt like (it) was a little bit more us, and not something that people have seen in other places,” he said.
The new Macon Bacon Trail is a way for restaurants to connect with people coming from outside Macon year-round, Dantzler said, providing the dining spots with an opportunity to interact with a new segment of the Georgia community.
“If we can build that friendship or that family kind of atmosphere with people that aren’t from here, well then we’ve done something right when it comes to hospitality,” he said.
Credit: Courtesy of Visit Macon
Credit: Courtesy of Visit Macon
The city has seen a lot of growth over the past five to 10 years, he said, especially with the Macon Bacon baseball team’s popularity.
Dantzler grew up in Macon during the Braves’ heyday of the ‘90s and would attend the minor league Macon Braves’ games at Luther Williams Field, wondering who was going to make it to the big leagues. After the team moved to Rome in 2003, folks in Macon lost that feeling, he said, until baseball returned to the city in 2017 with the Macon Bacon.
While it wouldn’t be a good idea to attempt all 20 stops on the bacon trail in one day, a selection of the restaurants can be found in downtown Macon. You might want to start the morning with a Midnight Rider, have a BLT at the Gateway Cafe for lunch and, after walking off some of that bacon — making sure to stop at Golden Bough Bookstore to visit the blind and deaf orange cat sitting in the middle of the aisles — wind up with an afternoon bacon-topped milkshake.
“Everybody just seems to really love bacon and Macon,” H&H’s Myers said. “No matter how much you tweak (bacon) or fix it in a different type of way, they just love it.”
Wheat said Visit Macon hopes to add more restaurants with new dishes in the future, along with bacon-themed beverages and even plant-based bacon alternatives.
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