Giving Obama a taste of Lynchburg

By Darrell Laurant

Published: August 24, 2008

Maybe they learned about it on the Internet. Or in the Yellow Pages. Or just happened to drive past.

Or maybe they liked the name: “Magnolia Foods.” Whatever the reason, that Rivermont Avenue restaurant/deli was chosen to deliver food to the Barack Obama entourage last Wednesday — 80 meals in all.

“Apparently, somebody from Obama’s advance team came by and ate here first, before they called us,” said Willie Payne, co-owner of Magnolia’s along with Lucy Cook.

Perhaps that was a continuation of an ancient tradition, whereby the king would send a “royal food taster” to sample what had been prepared for him, to make sure no one in his inner circle was trying to poison him.

It isn’t new for Magnolia, which does a lot of catering, to receive an order that large. So Payne, who was minding the store while his partner was out of town, didn’t flinch when the request from Obama’s people came in on Monday. Not at first.

“The thing was, we didn’t know who this was for,” Payne said later in the week. “It wasn’t until the next day that we found out it was going to be for Obama.”

What happened after that was reminiscent of the classic movie “The Big Night,” where the owners of a small Italian restaurant in the 1950s scramble to prepare for a rumored visit from singer Louis Prima.

“I went on the Internet to try and see what Obama liked to eat,” Payne said, “and all I found was a bunch of nonsense. It did say that he liked to eat healthy.”

And given Obama’s slender (the candidate likes to say “skinny”) physique, Payne added, “it was obvious that he doesn’t eat a lot of chocolate.”

So the Magnolia crew prepared two kinds of chicken (red pepper and parmesan crusted), beef tenderloin, and a variety of vegetable combinations. And skinny candidate or not, Payne — Magnolia’s resident cake decorator and purveyor of sweets — came up with a special cookie.

“I took a peanut butter cookie, put a hole in it, and filled the hole with chocolate ganache,” he said. “We used a special chocolate imported from Belgium.”

As you might have guessed, this isn’t Burger King.

Which was precisely the problem. Obviously, you can’t lead a group of 80 campaign workers, volunteers and who knows who else (Local politicians and civic leaders? Media types?), plus a coterie of Secret Service agents, into a fast food place. Not if you hope to escape within an hour or two.

So the food had to be delivered. And Magnolia’s delivered — literally.

“We wound up sending over 100 meals, to make sure they didn’t run out,” Payne said, “and we put them in some hot packs and took them over there (E.C. Glass High School, site of the Obama rally) in my Montero. We had to go through the (explosives-sniffing) dogs twice. Since we had beef tenderloin and chicken on board, I was a little worried about that.”

The Magnolia crew later learned, by word of mouth (so to speak), that their food had gone over well. And the next day, a sign was displayed on the front door to Magnolia Foods that read: “We Fed Obama.”

Not that there was anything political in this.

“Oh, no,” Willie Payne said. “If John McCain comes to town, we’d love to feed him, too.”