what I ate last: eggs, grits, biscuits, center-cut ham

More good breakfast things today - a late one to celebrate finally getting my driving licence here. The Waysider in Tuscaloosa is definitely going to have a return visit. The best biscuits - fluffy and crisp on the outside and my first real grits. They're kinda weird to have with eggs and ham, as they remind me of pudding, but I got used to them by thinking of Japanese rice porridge which is also a savory dish. But the clientele in the Waysider on this Friday around 10.30am was a real pull. Incongruously groomed old ladies meeting for a gossip over their grits, old couples having a double date: the combination of hearty, inelegant food and twin-sets with Southern accents, with a scattering of the check-shirted working men that you would expect to find in such a place. Sort of like a really old-school London chop house, with that East End gentility bordering on roughness - a kind of Lyons Corner House of America. You could imagine having a great date there at a corner table, with a Southern railroad worker who had picked you up on your way home from teaching elementary school.



It looks like they do a mean lunch menu too - pot-roast, catfish, collard greens and field peas, corn, squash.