Artist, musician, cook, clown and TV personality, Jim Stacy is a natural-born performer.
Wielding a drill last week amid the construction at Pallookaville Fine Foods, the Avondale Estates soda fountain and deli he hopes to open by Halloween, Stacy showed his camera-ready charisma, mixed with a pixilated penchant for anarchy.
“I guess I screwed that one up pretty good,” he said, admiring his handiwork in hanging some art.
It doesn’t hurt that he’s 6 feet 6 and covered in tattoos, with scruffy red hair and a matching beard that frames his face in a cartoonish glow.
He’s used all that as the host of “Get Delicious!,” the series of Emmy award-winning local restaurant specials that air on Public Broadcasting Atlanta, and as the judge/co-host of “Deep Fried Masters,” the carnival food cooking competition on Discovery’s Destination America.
Recently, on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” Stacy used a drill fitted with a drywall mud mixer to stir up a bucket of funnel cake batter spiked with Jameson. Through the magic of TV, it became deep-fried bananas with bacon whipped cream and chocolate sauce.
Later, Leno and actor Jason Sudeikis delighted in deep-fried pickles, washed down with multiple swigs straight from the whiskey bottle. “Not bad,” Leno quipped, and clutched his chest to feign a heart attack.
Stacy, 46, was born and raised in Atlanta, and graduated in 1985 from Sprayberry High School, where he was student body president. At the University of Georgia, though, things started to get weird.
“I showed great promise until I went off the rails in college,” Stacy said. “I didn’t last long.”
If he had a resume, it would include tours of duty with punk/country/clown bands like the La Brea Stompers, Big Top, Grand Moff Tarkin, and Greasepaint, stints as a bartender at the Manhattan Cafe and co-owner of the Downstairs restaurant in Athens and the Star Bar in Atlanta. He also managed the Starlight Drive-In and performed with Blast Off Burlesque.
“But I’ve always worked with food in one way or another,” Stacy said. “Going back to touring the country with the La Brea Stompers, and eating at all kinds of places along the way, that was the genesis for ‘Get Delicious!,’ really.”
Stacy’s deep-fried corn dog fame came with his Pallookaville trailer, later a food truck. He still drives it to outdoor festivals, like Chomp and Stomp in Cabbagetown, to serve up what he calls “fine gourmet carnival concoctions.”
How he came to star on “Deep Fried Masters” and be invited to hang with Leno is another story — one that may have more to do with another popular reality show featuring big men with beards.
“I think ‘Get Delicious!’ and the Emmy wins put me on the radar for being camera-ready,” Stacy said. “But I think the popularity of ‘Duck Dynasty’ all of the sudden had talent buyers scrambling for bearded burly guys. Oddly, that became a chic thing, and that was what made some of the square networks look at me.”
The bricks-and-mortar version of Pallookaville has been more than a year and a half in the making. Stacy partnered with restaurateur John Gianoulidis, who owns Park Grounds cafe in Reynoldstown, to come up with a concept that goes beyond corn dogs and carny fare.
The build-out features an assortment of handcrafted and vintage materials, including a bar top fashioned out of planks from an old bowling alley lane, airport landing lights, and a 1930s soda fountain. The menu also is a throwback to the kinds of classic eateries and neighborhood gathering places that Stacy often features on “Get Delicious!”
In total, Gianoulidis and Stacy have taken to calling their vision “a Jewish deli run by Gentiles.”
“It takes its cues from the pharmacy counter, and the meat-and-three, and the Jewish deli, and the Greek diner,” Stacy said. “It’s that made local and sustainable. We’re not on a high horse about farm-to-table, but we want to use that stuff when we can.”
Stacy, who once lived in a double-wide at the Starlight, now lives in a house in Avondale Estates with his wife, Kim, and their two young children. The fact that the wild man is now a family man, too, figures in his plans for the new restaurant.
“I’m known as the deep-fried guy, and I do serve a lot of fried food,” Stacy said. “But Pallookaville is a reaction to food that’s either chain crap or so esoteric and foodie that I can’t take a kid there.
“There needs to be a middle ground. A place where you can feed the family for under 100 bucks. But it’s got to be decent, intelligent food. That’s the nexus of what we’re doing with Pallookaville. Plus, there’s got to be time for some fun.”
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