On a recent working weekend, after Adam and I were rejected by Busy Bee Cafe (they are closed on Saturdays), we were forced to look elsewhere for grub. We volleyed back and forth until Adam suggested Paschal’s, a long-standing highbrow soul food joint. It’s amazing to me how many times I’ve visited Castleberry Hills for a meal, only to drive right past Paschal’s. Furthermore, it’s not a particularly good sign that when pressed to come up with a place to get my Suth’un fix in, Paschal’s almost never comes to mind. This despite the fact that it is in close proximity to where I work/live.
Started as a motor hotel by a couple of brothers way back yonder, this Atlanta mainstay has gone the way of corporate America. As my only previous visits to Paschal’s occurred around the time I just started to learn my two plus two’s, I cannot really speak to what once was. What we have now, for better or worse, is the fine dining version of Mary Mac’s Tea Room.
JCT Kitchen just donkey punched me… alright, just had to get that out of the way.
I’ve been all up and over the Westside recently. In that spirit, it’s no surprise then that I found myself dining at JCT Kitchen yet again. It’s time to throw some more stars out, and so JCT gets the nod.
It’s a restaurant I’ve dined at a number of times over the last couple of years; early on, I felt the food drifted toward decent and solid. The unfortunate fact is that the more I visit JCT, the less I like it. In fact, elements of my last couple of meals have ping ponged back and forth between passable and horrendously terribly unforgivably bad (take that senior English teacher!). Alright peeps, no pictures for this one (crushing I know), but plenty of things to discuss.
Ahhhhhhhhh … everyone’s favorite gut buster … none other than Carver’s Grocery on the Westside of Midtown. Okay, in all technicality – what you have is a restaurant (aka Carver’s Country Kitchen) inside a grocery (aka Carver’s Grocery). The reality is that in all my years of visiting the Carver’s and their restaurant, I’ve never once see anyone purchase anything remotely approaching a “grocery.” So for the sake of brevity, let’s just call them one in the same.
Carver’s, named after owners Robert and Sharon Carver, is yet another in a long list of Atlanta institutions that serves soul food, aka southern cuisine, aka meat’n three (though they are actually a meat-and-two). Truth is, the vast majority of long standing Atlanta restaurants serves the aforementioned. But that’s neither here nor there, and the culinary classification that you ascribe to this joint is nothing more than a matter of semantics. At the end of the day, you’re going to walk out with your waist line expanded and your health calorically challenged by indigenous food from south of the Mason-Dixon.
