Sweet tea has its detractors. Take the Beacon, near my home in Oxford, Miss. It's a throwback cafe with what might be described as a kind of ski lodge moderne interior. It's a working-class place that draws all classes.

The Beacon is resolutely Southern. Even anachronistically so. (Check the Confederate battle flag wallpaper in the back room.) At breakfast, eggs come with grits. At lunch, peas come with snaps.

AMY C. EVANS/Special (ENLARGE)

At the Beacon restaurant in Oxford, Miss., waitresses wear T-shirts letting customers know to not even think of asking for sweet tea.

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But no amount of pleading will get you a glass of sweet tea.

Iced tea, sure. But sweet tea is anathema. So much so that Beacon waitresses sometimes wear teal T-shirts, the backs of which read, "Naw, We Ain't Got No Sweet Tea."

Ask a floorwalker how the policy came into practice and, by extension, how the shirts came to be printed, and you get a variety of answers. "Sweet tea is too much trouble to make," says a woman of 40 or so as she absent-mindedly deposits a sweaty tumbler of tea alongside a plate heaped with mashed potatoes, stewed cabbage and black-eyed peas. "It leaves the tabletops sticky," says another.

Daisy Owens, a curly-headed grandmother recognized as the mother superior of the wait staff, answers with more authority. "We had a crew of construction workers who came in here all the time, and they like to worried us to death," she says. "Always wanting sweet tea. Always asking for it. We'd tell them we didn't have it. Didn't intend to have it."

But the men wouldn't leave well enough alone. "They'd ask for it, even when they knew the answer was no. And then they'd take what we served them and go through every sugar packet on the table, stirring it in," recalls Owens. "Just making a mess. Those shirts were the owner's way of settling the argument. We don't have sweet tea. We won't have sweet tea. No way."