Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [113]
Dillard House
Off US 441
706–746–5348
Dillard, GA
BLD | $$
Dillard House is the Disney World of restaurants—it is huge, it is fun, and you’ll likely wait in line. Located in the beautiful foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, it is a vacation complex that includes a motel, riding stables, and an amazing family-style eatery where large groups of people sit at large tables and help themselves to large bowls of food.
You never know exactly what you’ll be served in the Dillard House dining room. The menu, which is written on a blackboard that you can watch as you wait for a table, changes as all the pork cutlets are eaten up and country steak takes their place, or as fried okra is erased and replaced with butter beans. It is almost certain that among the three entrees always available there will be fried chicken and country ham. Vegetables, many of which come from the Dillard family garden, are served in abundance, and you will have your choice from among at least a half-dozen, including squash soufflé, black-eyed peas, and stupendously rich steamed cabbage. Don’t miss the calico salad, a refreshing mix of pickled tomatoes and cucumbers. Also, there are dinner rolls, biscuits, peach cobbler for dessert, and iced tea in Mason jars.
Lunch and dinner are deeply satisfying. Breakfast at Dillard House is awesome. Eggs are merely a minor note in a repertoire that includes sausage, ham with red-eye gravy, bacon, and pork tenderloin, fried potatoes, grits, stewed apples, biscuits with sausage gravy, cinnamon rolls, and blueberry muffins. Like the other meals, it is an all-you-can-eat affair; and it is an excellent opportunity to store up ballast if you plan to spend the day whitewater rafting on the nearby Chattooga River.
Don’s Bar-B-Que
217 E. US 80
912–748–8400
Pooler, GA
LD | $
“I’m most certainly a barbecue snob,” wrote Meg Butler in her recommendation of Don’s, which she described as a “tiny shack, great for lunch.” If, indeed, one were a Deep South barbecue snob, Don’s might prove a little disconcerting, as the meat served here is more North Carolina–style—pulled pork hacked to smithereens, dressed with a thin, tangy pepper sauce, and best eaten in a bun. On the side you want onion rings and the thing to drink is sweet tea served as per local custom in gigantic portions.
Don’s is a minuscule place with barely room for a dozen people inside. But there is plenty of room for al fresco dining at outdoor picnic tables.
Edna’s
Hwy. 411 S
706–695–4968
Chatsworth, GA
LD | $
Mobbed at lunch with locals and visitors to Georgia’s northern mountains, a little less crowded at suppertime, Edna’s is a meat-and-three feast. That means that every day there is a short list of entrees and a long list of vegetables, from which you choose one main course and three side dishes. In many meat-and-three restaurants, it is the vegetables that matter, and some customers forget the meat altogether, getting a four-vegetable plate for lunch.
At Edna’s the all-vegetable strategy would be a big mistake. We don’t know about the meat loaf or the country-fried steak, but we can tell you that the fried chicken is delicious, a fact that becomes apparent if you look around the restaurant and note that probably half the clientele choose it. Edna’s logo is a chicken wearing a chef’s toque with the proclamation, “Our chicken dinners are worth crowing about.”
The side-dish list includes not only vegetables such as mashed potatoes, fried potatoes, green beans, pole beans, etc., but also mac and cheese and Jell-O salads. And whatever you get, it comes with a corn bread muffin that crumbles very nicely over a heap of cooked greens. For dessert, the star of the show is Edna’s peanut butter pie—a grand ode to the Georgia