About the Book

PREFACE TO “INTERSTATE EATERIES”

Home cooking.

It is a word that warms our tummies, doesn't it?

Barbecue, collards, fried chicken, hot biscuits, real mashed potatoes, banana pudding, sweet tea and more good old time North Carolina fare.

Sometimes we get really hungry when we are taking a long trip on one of North Carolina’s interstate highways. Sometimes it is good enough to make a quick stop for fast food served at the franchised restaurants that surround most of the interstate intersections.

Other times we crave home cooking, the kind you find in “off the wall” places that only local people know about.

Let me admit that, to me, home cooking means more than just good food. It also means home. Or at least it means eating in a place that makes you feel comfortable--like home. It is even better when you find a family-owned restaurant that has been around a long time with sons and daughters helping their parents run things.

I like it best when waitresses who have been working there forever call me “hon” and keep my glass full of sweet tea without my having to ask.

I know I have found my kind of favorite place when the restaurant is full of local people moving from table to table visiting each other, laughing, exchanging news, and maybe even arguing about politics.

When I go to a good home cooking restaurant, a local barbecue place for instance, the great food is important, but what I really look for is the welcoming contact with people. These family-owned places that I visit in towns and crossroads across North Carolina give me--at least for a moment--a way to mingle with people whom I would never meet if I just ate at a generic fast food place. It gives me a way to be a small part of another North Carolina community and the lives of the people who live there.

Although there are lots of these great home cooking places in North Carolina, they are mighty hard to find along our interstate highways. That is why I spent the last few years traveling up and down North Carolina’s big highways looking for these places and making a record of how to find them.

It is my hope that your visits to some of the restaurants in this little book will add the same kind of rich pleasure to your travel as they have to mine.