More Songs About Buildings & Food

Mainly food, actually.

Although I could blog about the building. The place where I went for lunch today is called the Midtown Sundries. There are something like five or six of them around now; it is a locally owned & operated chain that started out by trying to buy one of Charlotte's original Olde Haunts, a joint known as Providence Road Sundries, which is one of those joints that started out life as a drug store, then turned into a dive bar some time after the original owners gave up the rat race and the kids were uninterested in carrying on. (In a standard issue Charlotte-town twist, thery just kept the old sign and called the dive Providence Road Sundries, how clever and subversive, ha-ha-ha.) That turned into a pretty good bar-and-grill sometime between the late seventies and early eighties.

When it turned into a chain, or even if the original B&G is aprt of the chain, is somewhat unclear. I can only state with certainty that sometime in the mid 90's these Midtown Sundries joints started popping up, the first one being in a part of Charlotte designated Midtown, which, true to the nature of my lovely burg, is off to the side of downtown. (Which isn't even actually there anymore, the whole area having been plowed under to prepare for the construction of a brand new condos-and-courtyard shops complex. Which is fine. People bitch about everything in my town getting torn down and new stuff being built in it's place, but nothing in Midtown was ever worth going to Midtown for, with the exception of a Wendy's and a movie theater, and the Wendy's only stayed in business because once you were at the theater it made more sense to eat next door than to fight the traffic getting out. It was a dismal little area. Which is why, in the standard issue civic voo-doo, the powers that be'd gave it the sobrioquet "Midtown."

Anyways.

So some years back construction started on a couple of modified strip centers up towards the outer end of town. As the place took shape, we began to speculate on what the shape on the far corner of the thing was supposed to be. As time went on (and structuire went up) it became more and more obvious that it was going to be a restaurant. And it kept looking nicer and nicer as the building filled out. Feildstone walls outside, dark wood panelling inside, HUUUUUUUUUGE banks of windows, just lovely. The space stayed vacant for a while, maybe a coupla months, and then it started filling in and becoming more and more obviously a restaurant. Then one day the sign went up: MIDTOWN SUNDRIES.

I didn't trust the place. For a number of reasons:

1. It was a Midtown.

No, really, there was more to it that that. It was more like this:

1. Midtown had bit me in the past. I had gone to one that had just opened, and the manager misrepresented the menu, saying they had something they didn't have, and the waitress screwed up and forgot to put our order in, so we had to eat in the space of about ten minutes (once the food finally got to us) so we could scurry back to work.
2. The kinds of places the Midtowns were cropping up were not areas known to attract real restaurants.
3. The last time I had eaten at one-- see above-- the food had been distinctly mediocre, and the menu was decidedly limited.

Other than that, I had nothing especially against the place.

Anyways, eventually we ended up going there, and the food was good, the service friendly and timely, and the menu not too terribly limited. And since it is along a fairly standard path of travel, we find ourselves going there fairly regulalrly.

So today I went there for lunch.

And the moral of the story is, not everyone who poops on you is your enemy. No, wait. Um, never fly off the handle when you're full of shi-- No, that's not it. Er. Um. That Superman is one mean drunk?

This was all supposed to be a set up for yet another installment on the UST (Unified Sandwich Theory), which I usually only post on the Non-Blog, so you'll have to go over there to read it.