Thinking Nashville meat-and-three, Arnold’s is right on, tippy-top, must-do.
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You know what to do. Read up on that menu because you don’t want to waste time when your tray makes that first stop!
Beginnings and endings: pie and salad.
I’m not even big on roast beef, but that’s what I got — and it was good.
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Deep, dark, crusty, yummy fried green tomatoes.
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Av did chicken and dumplings, though we both believe more in biscuit-y dumplings.
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In my world, this is a hoecake, but I asked someone who worked at Arnold’s, and they just call this cornbread.
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Ever had chess pie with meringue? Don’t think it really needs it.
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Arnold’s was really good and a fun experience, but Niki’s West in Birmingham is still the top of my meat-and-three list. BTW, al.com did a survey of best M+3 in Alabama, and here are the winners.
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Garden and Gun did a piece by Jed Portman on the classic pear salad:
Like many Southern mid-century cooks, she garnished run-of-the-mill canned pears with mayonnaise and mild cheddar. “Those were the pears on the table growing up,” Burdett says. “You got pears out of a deviled egg tray with cheese and mayo or you didn’t get pears at all.”
My grandparents liked to go to the Morrison’s Cafeteria in the Gadsden Mall (I remember when apartment hunting for University of South Alabama, I noticed they had a Morrison’s and thought to myself: well, at least I can still get my greens and not starve to death — which is crazy because I was super-college-poor and lived on a mix of ramen, the Wendy’s dollar menu, and whatever I could scrounge at Taco Bell). I think the last Morrison’s on planet Earth is in Mobile, where the chain originated, even today. It’s actually owned by Picadilly, which bought the Morrison’s chain, but they let the name live on in there.
Anyway, though the Garden and Gun article makes no mention of it, I remember the cafeteria pear salads always sported a half a maraschino cherry on top. Sure enough, I went onto Flickr and found a pic I took a couple of years ago at Matthew’s Cafeteria in Tucker, Georgia. Voila:
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