Let Me Tell Y’all A Story is a weekly column that’s not focused on sports. It’s brought to you by our partners at Chuck Owens, Alfa Insurance.

Saw a video this week of Stafford Shurden eating a chicken biscuit at the Old Koke Plant.

If you don’t know Stafford, he’s a native of the Mississippi Delta who travels all through the Magnolia State and sometimes our neighboring states giving reviews of gas station food grub from the tailgate of his truck.

Let’s be honest, there are LOTS of people in 2025 who think they’re going to get famous either by eating or cooking food on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube.

They try to put their own spin on it by either using an outrageous accent or by eating food in their car and or by even cooking food in their cars.

I think that’s why I like Stafford so much, he’s a genuinely nice guy that owns a restaurant himself. He’s never going to rip an establishment, because he knows what it’s like to pour yourself into a small business.

He loved the Old Koke Plant, as one would expect.

A couple years ago his daughter was trying out for a spot at the Mississippi School of the Arts on a Saturday and I ran into Stafford at Harbor Freight.

I was there getting something for a project, and he was a dad that was wasting time while his daughter was at MSA for a couple hours.

I’d been following him for a while at that point and recognized him instantly. I think he had around 8,000 followers at the time and now he’s grown that to a much larger audience, as he also recently wrote his first book.

 After introducing myself as a Brookhavenite who also loves food from gas stations, I told him I’d been keeping up with him since seeing a segment he filmed with one of my favorite writers, Wright Thompson.

He said that with this daughter coming to the art school, he planned on filming some content down this way and I encouraged that. The Old Koke Plant had just opened at that time, and he mentioned them. I also recommended Dude’s Biscuits and a couple other spots with my passionate endorsement.

You see, I can talk for hours about my love of breakfast.

I’ve lost weight in the past by going to a one meal a day method of fasting, but one of the biggest roadblocks in that type of diet for me is always how much I love a good chicken biscuit or sausage-egg-and-cheese biscuit or  bacon biscuit or full breakfast platter with grits, eggs, and a link of sausage in the morning.

I haven’t stepped on the scale in a few weeks, but my clothes are telling me to chill out and eat better.

And I want to, but to do that, I’ve got to win this battle with my love of breakfast.

Stafford needs to come back and get himself a full breakfast platter from the Old Koke Plant, He should also try their bacon biscuit, which is always the right combo of salty and soft.

He needs to come back and hit Dude’s and have a couple of my favorites from there, the pillowy, smaller biscuits, that pair perfectly with link sausage pieces that snap when you bite into them.

He needs to jump in the line of cars at the Donut Palace when innumerable moms are trying to grab a kolache for themselves and bag of donut holes for their kids on the way to school.

Not going to lie, there have been times in my life where I was at the Palace so much, you could call me King Cliff. I’d pull up and the ladies at the window would say, “got that chocolate old fashioned ready for you.”

Stafford needs to travel down from the School of the Arts campus to a place that is mecca for many of us born and raised in Brookhaven, Janie’s Pastry Shop.

A couple of years ago our local Chamber of Commerce hired me to write a few brief descriptions of things to see and do around town.

My paragraph about Janie’s was straight from the heart, as the folks there know how I feel about them because I tell them with my words and with my wallet.

Don’t sleep on the warming case at Janie’s though. In the afternoon it’s filled with chickens on sticks, but in the morning, it’s got really good breakfast sandwiches, including a hog-in-a-log that any sausage dog fan would love.

Twenty minutes ago, I wasn’t sure what I would write for this column and now I’m at 700 words.

Lord, my back is big, and my cholesterol is high for a reason.

The Hood’s 76 (AKA the 84 Chevron) is another Lincoln County breakfast hotspot worth a stop for Stafford or anyone else hungry for a plate in the morning.

About a decade ago I wasn’t writing about breakfast at the then Chevron, but I was having it almost every day as I drove a skidder for my dad on his logging operation.

We spent half a year on a big tract of timber off Buynkle Road in Franklin County. I was already a breakfast expert in Lincoln County, but heading west every morning before the sun came up allowed me to tap into some new markets.

We’d sometimes get a big breakfast sandwich on toast in McCall Creek or a sausage dog at the Quentin Quick Stop.

Early one morning dad and I stopped at one of those aforementioned spots to grab something to eat before we hit the woods.

We both went with the old reliable of the breakfast game, the bacon biscuit.

As I took a bite of mine, my dad did the same, but he had a violent reaction, turning his head and almost spitting it out.

He turned on an overhead light and looked at the packet he’d just poured all over the inside of his biscuit through squinting eyes at 5:30 a.m.

“My brain was thinking strawberry jelly on my biscuit, but it got ketchup instead,” he said with a laugh.

That’s my problem, my brain is thinking Old Koke Plant bacon biscuit or donut from Janie’s or link sausage from Dude’s as soon as my eyes open.

I’m going to try and beat that old brain back and eat a lower calorie option for breakfast, air.

That is, unless my buddy Stafford needs an expert tour guide for breakfast in Southwest Mississippi, then I’d be willing to come out of retirement.