Wright’s Restaurant

Pop quiz: make a list of all of the Tuscaloosa/Northport restaurants that you would consider to be “institutions” – the stalwart places that have been around forever and will always be around. Everyone’s list will contain the big names like City Café, The Waysider, and Dreamland. There are other places that would qualify too, but students don’t know about them. Places like Catfish Heaven or Mr. Bills – absolute bulwarks of their communities – rarely see a single UA student enter their doors. My goal with writing reviews for Druid City Eats is to draw some meager attention towards these kinds of places, places that are below student radar, that are pre-internet, that don’t have Facebook pages or people Yelping about them.

Here’s a great example of what I mean: if a Tuscaloosa meat-and-three has been around for nearly 50 years, wouldn’t you expect it to feature prominently on a list of T-Town institutions? Wright’s Restaurant in Alberta City fits that description, but it seems like no one on campus knows about it.

Wright’s Restaurant is a simple breakfast and lunch joint. It’s a single room with walls painted yellow, various religious signage hung on the walls. There’s only about 12 booths/tables in the whole place, with a few more stools at the counter by the kitchen. It’s always pretty packed, yet I’ve never once seen a single student eating there. Wright’s serves a working-class customer base, as well as lots of elderly consumers. The waitresses are attentive and legitimately nice. The whole experience looks and feels a lot like it must have back when Wright’s first opened nearly half a century ago. But all of that downhome atmosphere would be for nothing if the food wasn’t up to snuff, and the steady stream of customers at Wright’s suggests that the food is indeed a drawing point.

Let’s start with breakfast, because Wright’s serves what just might be my favorite breakfast in Tuscaloosa. Nothing flashy, no real reason why it stands out apart from simple execution. They have various meats available each day, ranging from ham to smoked sausage links to red hots. Their bacon is pretty darn good, perhaps owing to Wright’s bacon cook taking each strip off the griddle a bit early and then dunking them into a deep fryer for about 40 seconds. This method results in a crispy strip of bacon that isn’t also dry and overcooked. The pancakes are legit, the omelets look pretty good, and well, the most that I can say is that everything is cooked correctly. Breakfast foods get real sketchy real quick when under- or overcooked, and Wright’s super-efficient crew of three cooks doesn’t seem to make mistakes.

The biscuits are plenty good also, better than The Waysider’s for me. They do have biscuits & gravy on the menu, but last time I went for breakfast the gravy ran out before I got there, which disappointed a B&G fanatic like myself, but it speaks to the quality of Wright’s Restaurant: they don’t use prefabricated gravy. They make their gravy in-house each day. They make their pancake batter in-house. It’s reassuring and a sign of good things.

Lunch is less successful – about the quality of City Café — but well worth the price. Because the price is almost nothing – each lunch special costs under $5. Each day the meat-and-three menu changes. When I went on a Wednesday it was meatloaf, chicken pot pie, or a fried pork chop. Chicken & dressing is on Thursday, country fried steak is on Friday, and I won’t say any more in hopes that you’ll go find out their daily menu on your own. Wright’s also has a menu of constant lunch favorites: you can get catfish strips each day (which I have yet to try here), and their cheeseburger looks pretty legit.

While Wright’s has a small assortment of in-house pies available all the time, there’s also a special dessert for each day of the week (Monday has cherry dump cake, Wednesday has pineapple pudding, etc.).

If you’ve ever driven out on University Ave and into Alberta City, you know how utterly devastated that neighborhood was by the April 27^th, 2011 tornado. At Leland Shopping Center, where Wright’s is located, essentially every other business still has particle board over its windows. When every other place closed up shop because of damage or location, Wright’s Restaurant remained in business. It’s been open for nearly 50 years and it wasn’t about to let that tornado shut it down. It is, after all, an institution.

[barry]

Wright’s Restaurant is located in Alberta City at Leland Shopping Center (University Ave & 25^th Ave, by Leland Lanes bowling alley, right before the Piggly Wiggly).

Monday-Friday: 5:00am-11:15am (Breakfast), 11:30am-3:00pm (Lunch)
Saturday: 5:00am-11:30am (Breakfast only)
Sunday: closed

The Front Porch Restaurant

Apologies for adding yet another southern/meat-and-three style restaurant review, but we are talking about Tuscaloosa here. Barry’s recent trip to Mr. Bill’s inspired me to try another restaurant I’ve driven past every day for two years and never tried. Just a mile (or less) up Highway 43 north in Northport (out of the way for many, but on the way home for me) sits The Front Porch Restaurant.

I found a brief review a while back of The Front Porch on Well That’s Cool, an awesome website dedicated spreading the word about good things in Tuscaloosa. The review of complimentary of the restaurant’s preparation of their steak, and it mentioned a meat-and-three option. I decided to try the latter on my visit.

They keep a standard set of veggies/sides available every day (fries, green beans, mac and cheese, etc.) and rotate a few more in depending on the day of the week. Apparently Thursdays are broccoli casserole and creamed corn day. The meats change every day as well. I was left deliberating between the fried pork chop and chicken and dumplings, both of which I am particularly fond. At the waitress’ recommendation, I went with the dumplings, and I ordered the corn, mac and cheese, and broccoli casserole to go with it. The meal also includes sweet tea and either cornbread or a roll for $7.00.

First of all, I didn’t intend for my meal to be entirely white and yellow. I never did like greens very much, though some green beans would have probably been a good choice. The chicken and dumplings were delicious—the closest anyone has ever gotten to my dad’s specialty. The dumplings were super thin and the chicken was finely shredded—not like the big chunks of both you get if go somewhere like Cracker Barrel. The sauce was also spot on. Not too thick or thin. The broccoli casserole was good. A pretty standard combination of rice, broccoli, cream of mushroom soup, and cheese, but well executed. The mac and cheese was equally good with large elbow noodles that were baked without being dry. My least favorite part of the meal was the creamed corn. The corn itself was yellow and sweet, but the cream part wasn’t quite right. It was more pasty than creamy (which wasn’t as bad as it sounds), and I was only able to finish about half of the rather large bowl I was given.

As you would expect from a place who includes sweet tea in their meals but charges you extra for soda, the tea is wonderfully sweet, and the staff is friendly. The waitresses appeared to be mostly high-school aged girls, who were a lot better at their jobs than I was when I was eighteen. My food was out of the kitchen in what seemed like only a minute, and my server was quick to offer my check and take my card (and refill my tea) as well. My favorite part of the meal was the man and his grandson that sat down near me. The boy, who must have been about four, made a bee line at one point for the kitchen door with his granddad chasing after him. The servers looked at one another in a moment of panic, but the man emerged, looking exasperated but carrying the boy on his hip, and everyone had a good laugh.

The Front Porch doesn’t try to be fancy. They just do the things you love right, and that’s just fine with me. Oh, and the post-church crowd there is massive, so you might want to avoid that.

[natalie]

The Front Porch is located at 4421 Hwy 43N in Northport. It’s in the Dollar General shopping center, just north of Hick’s BBQ (and where Archibald and Woodrow’s used to be).

Monday-Thursday: 10:30am-8pm
Friday: 10:30am-9pm
Saturday: CLOSED
Sunday: 10:30am-2pm

Mr. Bill’s Kountry Kookin

Tuscaloosa/Northport is a community of Meat & Three restaurants, and everyone knows that the venerable City Café sits pretty at the top spot in the civic totem pole. City Café was one of my first Tuscaloosa meals, and I’m pretty sure that just about everyone can say the same. It’s an icon. But part of what I want to do for you, Dear Reader, is to expose you to unconventional thinking, to opinions that differ from the city council mainstream. So, for you, I take the risks inherent in speaking the following heresy: City Café is not the best Meat & Three in town. Mr. Bill’s is better.

“Mr. Bill’s? What is that?” you may be asking yourself right now. I sure did after I was told about it for the first time. The name itself registers as hilarious, and it’s located on McFarland in Northport, in that mysterious strip of commerce between state highway 69 and U.S. 43. It’s located in an innocuous brick building with crimson awnings, but all I really had to do was look for the parking lot. Mr. Bill’s was absolutely packed on this Sunday afternoon; apparently it’s a popular place to be post-church.

Mr. Bill’s has one of the stranger interiors in a town that’s full of ‘em. For one thing, it’s a very long restaurant, with dozens upon dozens of Formica tables split across three clearly delineated sections. One third of the restaurant is covered in blonde wood paneling, the middle third is very open, with a beeline to the kitchen; the final third features a gigantic painted mural of wooden buildings and horses and carriages and, presumably, this is supposed to be old timey Northport or something. Very quickly you are directed to one of the many tables (and on this Sunday there were only two that weren’t occupied) and handed menus.

Mr. Bill’s Meat & Three menu (a single sheet of paper printed on one side) appears to change regularly, perhaps weekly. Meals cost between $7 and $8 depending on what meat you order, that price inclusive of sweet tea or coffee & your choice of cornbread, Mexican cornbread, or roll. The cornbread comes out in muffin form – a fluffy yet firm interior, singed and tangy on the caramelized bottom.

The side dishes are just straight-up, well-executed versions of Southern staples: green beans, purple hull peas, creamed potatoes & gravy, macaroni & cheese, baked beans, coleslaw, fried okra. Mr. Bill’s prides themselves on their made-from-scratch apple cobbler and banana pudding, and these desserts are available as one of your three sides. I can’t speak to the desserts, but the green beans were classically seasoned with just the right amount of vinegar tang, and the mac & cheese looked quite cheesy. The creamed potatoes are very rich, and they cram a lot of them into the unexpectedly deep plastic serving bowls. My only complaint with these potatoes is that the ratio of brown gravy to potato was slanted too far in favor of the potatoes; the potatoes are certainly enjoyable without any gravy, but this is solid gravy, y’all. Each of the sides I tried at Mr. Bill’s is slightly better than their counterparts at City Café. It is useful to note that the green beans weren’t cooked with ham or other meat, and the hull peas likely aren’t either. It’s hard for vegetarians to find sides at meat & threes that don’t have of animal in them, so Mr. Bill’s $6-for-four-sides deal might be an attractive option.

Where Mr. Bill’s really separates themselves from City Café is in the meats. Mr. Bill’s focuses on chicken, with fried chicken strips and smoked chicken strips, and a delicious chicken & dressing w/ giblet gravy being staples of the menu. There’s a rotating slot that will change from week to week, usually occupied by traditional comfort foods like meatloaf or pot roast & carrots. Some days will feature actual, legitimate barbecue.

I’ll one day go to Mr. Bill’s specifically to try their pulled pork, but I could not resist ordering their catfish. If there’s a better fried catfish in town then I’d be surprised. You get two large, meaty filets per order. Two sounds like you’re getting ripped off, but there is no comparison between these beauties and the three frail, over-fried, skimpy strips you get at City Café. A batter composed of nearly entirely cornmeal, simply seasoned with salt and pepper, coats each filet and coaxes out their essential flavor. These are not overcooked one bit. The flesh has a slightly flaky texture without being at all dry. While uniformly moist and tender, the only thing that could make these better would be if Mr. Bill’s could cook up wild catfish. These farmed ones acquit themselves nicely, though.

Mr. Bill’s is precisely the sort of place that Druid City Eats wants to introduce people to. I’ve lived in Tuscaloosa for more than a year and I’d never heard of it. This community is full of hidden gems. I strongly recommend that the southern cooking fans out there find Mr. Bill’s and make it a little bit less hidden.

[barry]

Mr. Bill’s is located at 2715 McFarland Boulevard, Northport, AL, near the Buford Plaza Shopping Center.

Monday-Friday: 10:30am-8:00pm
Sunday: 10:30am-2:30pm