A Meat and Three

April 27th, 2009

The Rose Garden Restaurant

I’ve already made it clear that outside of their blatant lack of good pie, we love the Cracker Barrel. I am going to try to not talk about them anymore because they are not really what I like to look for when I am searching out great food in new places.

When you get a burger at McDonald’s you can be sure that it will always be as good as the last one you ate no matter where that was. They are consistently the same. Never any worse and of course, never any better. No surprises. The Cracker Barrel is even more so. We know the food will be of a certain level and that it will be consistent. In fact, Cracker Barrel carries it to an even higher level of consistency because the stores are all laid out exactly alike. I am sure that I could enter any Cracker Barrel blindfolded and find my way to a table to sit with no help.

But when you are trying to find new exciting meals, you have to move off of the beaten path and take a chance.  In order to move forward in almost any endeavor you have to take a chance and taking a chance means that occasionally you fail. Or in the case of new food finds occasionally you get some bad stuff. That’s life.

I made a new friend today on the road and that alone is something to be happy about.

Mr. J.T. Askew

We pulled into the very small town of Silver Point, Tennessee today to fill up the van and see if we could find some lunch. As I was filling the tank I saw an older gentleman park his car and head into the convenience store. What caught my eye was the license plate on the front of his vehicle that said “The Mayor”. He came back out of the building after I was finished at the pumps to I approached him and said, “Sir, excuse me sir”.

When he looked up at me I asked him if he was the mayor. He laughed and said yes. He said it was a small town and that people jokingly referred to him as the mayor.

“They gave me this license plate because they call me that”.

He then proceeded to tell me about being in the navy during World War II and how he moved quickly up through the ranks because of some special schooling he had. I told him where I had come from and where I was going and pointed to my wife in the car to show him we were traveling together. We talked a little longer and then I told him why I had stopped him.

I said that I figured since he was the mayor that he would probably be able to tell me if the restaurant right next to the gas station served good food.

He smiled and said the he ate there.

That was good enough for me.

When we entered the Rose Garden Restaurant we found a fairly small room with a lot of tables and just a few people eating. Behind the counter however, we saw that there were three women sitting at a separate table eating. It was lunch time for the employees as well as us. One of the lades told us to seat ourselves and then she grabbed some menus and came over and after pointing out the specials on the chalk board, withdrew to fill our unsweetened ice tea orders.

The nice lades of the Rose Garden Restaurant

In the south, and some other areas of the country I’m sure, there is a dinner or lunch that is offered for sale in many small diners or in some cases trailers, small houses or open fields called “A meat and three”.

A meat and three is a meal that comes with a meat dish and your choice of three vegetables. Sometimes you can choose a meat from a list like roast beef, fried chicken or fish. And the list of vegetables you choose from may be anywhere from three or four up to ten or more.

The specials at the Rose Garden included a choice of roast beef with gravy or a boneless chicken breast and three vegetables from a list that included fried okra, pinto beans, mashed potatoes, corn, baked apple or slaw.

A Meat and Three

I had the roast beef with the okra, pinto beans and mashed potatoes and my wife decided to order from the menu and got a BLT with some chips.

While we were waiting for our order the place started to really fill up. Most of the folks seemed local and some of them having obviously been there before ordered dessert first which the ladies put aside for them. I guess they knew that you needed to reserve your pie or cake if you wanted to make sure to get some.

Any dining experience is composed of many parts. The food is important, but there is much more to your experience good or bad, then just the food.

These ladies were about as nice as people serving you can be. They wore smiles and they thank you’d and please’d you as well as anyone could. They were right nice, as they say in the south. More or better attention could not have been paid to us. I guess you can see where I’m going with this.

I do not do professional reviews of restaurants. I just write down my personal opinions for whatever they are worth and that may well be nothing.

My meat and three was not really anything to write home about, and yet, here I am doing just that.

Did I mention just how nice those ladies were?

The roast beef with gravy was actually some sort of rather poor roast beef sandwich type meat and the gravy came from a can or I don’t know anything at all about food. The okra was reheated in a microwave and dry and hard. The mashed potatoes were instant and the corn muffin that came with it all was reheated and hard. However, the pinto beans were pretty darn good. I should also mention that my wife liked her sandwich.

Understand this, I ate it all. It was not the worst lunch I ever had by many miles. It just was not homemade and it was just not anything special at all.

When I see a display case with pie in it I smile. I think I have made it clear in earlier posts just how I feel about pie.

The Pie Cabinet

They had several kinds for sale and after narrowing it down to either cherry or pecan I asked the nice lady if she would just pick one for me. I like to do that in a restaurant. Usually the people who work in the restaurant are pretty knowledgeable about what is really good and what is not so good. She brought me the pecan and my wife had the pound cake.

I would like to state here that the pie saved the day and the whole lunch was redeemed but I see no reason to lie. The pie had a crust that tasted like cardboard and I am sure that it had not been made by anyone who was much different from Mrs. Smith. Oh well. The ladies were real nice.

We greatly enjoyed the meal. The atmosphere was great and the folks in the place were a joy to be around. The meal was not terrible. It was just not homemade and there was absolutely nothing spectacular about it. I am glad we went there. We had a great time and a lot of fun. You have to stick your neck out once in a while and go for something different. You need to sample the unknown. You will never find that in a McDonalds or a Cracker Barrel. Take a chance and look for the spectacular.

P.S. We rolled across Tennessee today listening to good old Hank Williams.

Entry Filed under: A Piece of Pie, Cruising With Bob