Food Review: Cracker Barrel on Elm-Eugene Street

I grew up on Cracker Barrel. It used to be a small chain of eclectic restaurants we'd visit when my family took it's family vacation down to Tennessee. It was a special place growing up, that always included getting some pancakes with their own little syrup bottles, and smoked sausage unlike anything you'd ever ate before. Of course you'd always get a bag full of 10 cent Tootsie Rolls, and candy sticks on the way out. Some how it seemed Cracker Barrel even during the 80's had preserved some essence of road travel restaurants with gift shops left over from the days of route 66 and that romantic period of the late 40's and 50's. Today it appears the same is true.

No longer is Cracker Barrel a regional restaurant. They can be found coast to coast from North Carolina to California. The rare oddity of the place is now something we take for granted along the highways of America. What's not changed, is it's still a unique and inviting restaurant even if it is as common as TGIF's or Chili's.

But where Cracker Barrel has exceeded, while many of the other restaurants have loosened their grasp on it, is breakfast. It's that one meal a day that used to be apart of everyone's day. While we've traded our morning rituals for interstate commutes, Coffee, and gas station breakfast burritos, Cracker Barrel has refined it's countrified culture within it's restaurant.

The huge Hearst style fireplace is burning as you approach a dining room filled with classic signs, and memorabilia from vintage to historic. Rocking Chairs and checkers are the centerpiece of the dining experience, and each table is filled with a golf-peg triangle game, and old fashioned oil lamp.

But what's most important? The food. While the day I visited, the waitress seemed to be more concerned with trying to figure out who I was than her waitressing skills, she still managed to bring the mother of all breakfasts to the table.

Their menu includes such choices as "Country Boy Breakfast." & "Rise & Shine Breakfast Special", You feel like you should immediately start speaking like your in an episode of Beverly Hillbillies the moment you order.

For me I ordered some concoction of cheese eggs, a nice breakfast steak, hash browns and biscuits. Every bit of the breakfast was somewhere between nirvana, and a flash back to the days gone by. As if to say, it's always better when your grandma makes it, Cracker Barrel has captured that unique style of food that perpetuates everyone's childhood memories of breakfast with the family.

If I were to have to contemplate exactly what is the best breakfast in Greensboro, I'd have to say I've yet to find a rival to my Childhood love of Cracker Barrel.

On our way out, I purchased some fruit slices, and a take home roll of their smoked breakfast sausage, which will allow me to enjoy my experience even longer. And that is what Cracker Barrel is all about. Holding onto those things we cherish about the past. Taking time to sit and wait in a rocking chair, or playing checkers with our kids in front of a fireplace, or just sitting down to a solid, home-style breakfast, talking, and enjoying one another. That's what Cracker Barrel is about.

Three words: Cracker Barrel lawsuit

I'm not forgiving them

ahem... *taps microphone*...."Cracker-Barrel"... "Aptly named, I always thought." Cool

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...no one ever need identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist. Consequently, we do not have words for people who deny the validity of these pseudo-disciplines. Likewise, “atheism” is a term that should not even exist.
-Sam Harris

I have only tried out Cracker Barrel a few times. At no time did my family receive timely service. We're talking about having to wait up to 15 minutes just to get our drink order in to start the process. Often in a restaurant that is nowhere near full. I have yet to figure out what the server could possibly be doing in the kitchen that's so all-consuming. Probably grinding wheat for flour and killing chickens...

I've never had a truly hot meal from Cracker Barrel. The first time I got a meal with a "baked potato" that wasn't even warm enough to melt the room-temp butter I put on it, I sent it back for warming. Something of a mistake, that. I had to wait an extra 15 minutes, and then my food was at most 20 degrees warmer than when sent in. My butter finally melted, so I ate my food and learned my lesson.

No -- I rather think I'll have to be in pretty dire straights to entertain the thought of visiting that place ever again. Pfeh! Rolling Eyes

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"We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard ... and too damn cheap" -- K. Vonnegut (message to be carved into the Grand Canyon as a note to aliens visiting in the future)