Monday, January 30, 2012.
Blurry Morning. The Worst Restaurant In Town.
The last time I had dinner at Drago's, Drago himself was sitting at his usual spot at the bar, not for the purpose of drinking but for greeting all the people who walked up to say hello. He's pushing ninety, and can't remember everybody. (I'm only sixty and I can't remember everybody, either.) But he seemed to be having a good day that day.
"You're looking good, Drago!" I told him.
"You need new glasses!" he shot back.
He was right. I do need new glasses. The ophthalmologist told me that last time I saw him. So did the examiner at the DMV when I renewed my driver's license four years ago. I haven't done it. And that examination is due next week.
So I went to get new glasses. The optometrist insisted that he give me a full examination. That's not so bad, but it requires getting my pupils dilated. Which means that for two hours I can't read or write. A problem, one I solved in advance by writing most of today's newsletter yesterday.
But what do I do now, at ten in the morning? Breakfast seemed like a good idea. En route to the hospital, I saw that a new Cracker Barrel opened in front of that disappointing new shopping mall at I-12 and LA 21. (That's the one for which hundreds of trees were cut down with the promise of the glitzy new stores that St. Tammany still lacks.)
The last time I darkened the door of a Cracker Barrel was when the kids were little. They loved the place. Not the food--they didn't touch that. But the place, with the gift shop full of candy, toys, and doodads.
Reading the menu then, I thought it would be at least decent. Breakfast is their big specialty, served all day and night. In fact, it was terrible. I kept it simple: scrambled eggs, bacon, biscuits, grits, hash browns. All the things that show up in most of their breakfast combos. (Puzzle: find the difference between the Old Timer's Breakfast and the Country Boy Breakfast. There is one, but it's subtle.)
Today's breakfast was as bad as fifteen years ago, in all the same ways. Dry, flavorless eggs. Chokingly dry biscuits. Salty bacon with little smoke flavor and toughness. Tough bacon? Thick, tepid grits. A hash brown casserole with cheese. None of this was much above lukewarm. It's not often that a platter with so many different items on it is so thoroughly substandard.
I took my time, waiting for my eyes to clear, and checking out the walls. They are covered with old signs, paintings, and photographs from the indeterminate but decidedly extinct past. The signs are not reproductions, but originals, including the dents, rust, and scratches. Good for them for preserving so much of this stuff!
My mind wandered to all the gas stations, general stores, and cafes across America where these signs once advertised. Like most Americans my age, I have a taste for such nostalgia. Maybe more than the average person, though. My early vacations in the mid-1970s were long drives on back highways in search of stuff like this still in its native element.
I found less of it than I hoped for back then. But on those destination-free trips I learned that the worst restaurant food in America is in the rural South. And the quainter and more rustic the roadside diner is, the worse the food would be. That was so consistently true that until my travels took me to the Southwest and the Northeast, I thought the whole country was that way, and that Southeast Louisiana was an even more exceptional place than we say it is.
So that's it. The Cracker Barrel is trying to reproduce the experience of eating on the road through the rural South as it was forty or fifty years ago. They have succeeded. The food in the former Confederacy was finally lifted up when the chain restaurants arrived, starting with McDonald's and heading up through Shoney's, Applebee's, Outback, Houston's and beyond. What irony! One of the biggest modern chains of all is making hay by reviving the bad old days!
I left the place with a new answer to a question I am asked often enough to need a ready response: "What's the worst restaurant in town, Tom?" I will say, "You mean other than the Cracker Barrel?"
I needed an optical shop that would accept my insurance, and had to go home to research this. The one I found was across the street from where I'd just come, ten miles away. I called to make sure everything was right, and said I'd be right over. When I arrived at 1:20 p.m., I found a sign on the door saying "Be back at 1:45."
I am not good at wasting time. I succumbed to the temptation of a Lee's Hamburger in the same strip mall. I had a standard hamburger, and was happy to see that Lee's has gone back to grilling its burgers on a hot enough grill that the trademark onions get brown, sweet, even a little crispy. (I hope that wasn't a one-time error.)
The optical shop was open. Hundreds of frames were on display. I found mine quickly: a faux tortoise-shell pair. These will be the first plastic frames I've had in over forty years, when I began wearing wire-frame glasses in imitation of John Lennon and John Sebastian. It is possible for me to change my look. However, these are round frames, not those narrow, oblong jobs that seem to have taken over the entire world of eyeglasses fashion. I will retain my retro, PT Cruiser-driving countenance.
Another break with the past. The last time I got new glasses--at least ten years ago--they cost $65. These will run $525. Same progressive trifocals, with a slightly stronger left lens. Sometimes the bad old days were okay.
Cracker Barrel. Covington: 8001 Pinnacle Pkwy. 985-893-0151.
Lee's Hamburgers. Covington: 70380 Highway 21. 985-892-2300.
It's over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
