With its wooden floors and white tablecloths, mountain music and hippie vibe, the Wildflower Café is the kind of quaint and quirky place where guests may choose from an eclectic menu that includes a black ‘n’ blue prime rib, barbecue-and-bacon smothered chicken and wild-rice-stuffed grilled portobello.
But one dish in particular keeps folks coming back to this little destination dining spot in the idyllic DeKalb County town of Mentone, on top of Lookout Mountain in the northeast corner of Alabama.
And that dish -- the Wildflower Café's cheesy, savory tomato pie -- is definitely worth a drive to Mentone, whether it’s the hour-and-20-minute trip from Huntsville on U.S. 72 or the hour-and-35-minute trek from Birmingham via I-59.
“The tomato pie is unique and it’s different,” L.C. Moon, the Wildflower Café's colorful owner, says. “Some people have had it before and have some sort of nostalgic memory around it. But even people who claim to not like tomatoes, for some reason, love this tomato pie.
“So, it’s almost like we have a magical love spell on the tomato pie that whenever we make it here in this building, people just go crazy for it.”
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The backstory on the Wildflower Café's signature dish dates to a year or so before Moon bought the restaurant from its previous owner, Margaret Baker.
The story goes that a customer, Cindy Tyson, came into the café one day with a tomato pie recipe from Southern Living magazine and asked Ben Keener, who was the chef at the time, to make it for her, Moon says. Tyson even furnished the ingredients.
Keener made the pie but decided to first test it out on some other customers at the café, who ate every crumb.
“The other guests loved it so much that (Tyson) ended up going and buying more ingredients, and (Keener) ended up making her another tomato pie,” Moon says. “And it’s been on the menu ever since.”
So, when Moon bought the Wildflower Café and reopened it in its current location on Alabama Highway 117 in October 2007, she was wise to not only keep the dish on the menu, but also not to tinker with the recipe.
“I changed a lot of the recipes that (Baker) had, but tomato pie was one of the ones that I kept that I didn’t change,” she says.
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The Wildflower Café tomato pie features sliced Roma tomatoes that have been marinated in a balsamic vinaigrette and basil and are then layered with a mix of grated cheddar and Mozzarella cheeses and baked in a 10-inch pie shell until all the flavors and ingredients are blended. It is available by the quarter-pie slice or as a mini tart.
The pie is on the menu year-round, but it is especially popular during the peak summer months when Moon says she goes through between 75 and 100 pounds of Roma tomatoes a week. Most of the tomatoes are from growers in Mexico, California and Florida, she says.
“I haven’t had a farmer up here that can keep up with the amount of Roma tomatoes that I need,” she says. “Most everybody wants to grow slicers, so I just haven’t had luck with anybody locally to grow the (Roma) tomatoes. I wish I could just grow them myself, but I just don’t have the time.”
The tomato pie has become so popular over the years that Moon also features it with several other dishes on the Wildflower Café menu, including a spinach salad topped with a slice of tomato pie, a loaded tomato pie entrée with angel hair pasta and grilled chicken, and even a burger stacked with a slice of tomato pie and served between a bun.
“Sometimes, we’ll serve it with pesto, and sometimes we do it with the garlic-parmesan cream sauce and bacon,” Moon says of the tomato pie burger.
“It’s definitely something that if ‘Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives’ came in, that would be the dish, that would be the one that I would give that guy (host Guy Fieri),” she adds.
The Wildflower Cafe is at 6007 Alabama Highway 117 in Mentone, Ala. The phone is 256-634-0066. For more information, go to www.mentonewildflower.com.
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