Southern Comfort

Do people really eat more when times are bad? My parents were both children of the Depression, when the most popular restaurant concept was the cafeteria. Even as relatively well-off adults in the 1960s, they loved sliding a tray across a stainless steel serving line and heaping it with stuff they couldn't get in nicer restaurants: congealed gelatin salads, ambrosia or home-style fruit cobbler. And all so cheap! My mother's penny-pinching grandfather was especially fond of the idea, wherein value and quantity trumped culinary style. And because he hated tipping the waiters at full-service joints, he loved his small-town cafeteria (which recently closed, a grimy parody of itself), where he didn't have to leave an extra dime.

The cafeteria concept started as early as 1893's Columbia Exhibition in Chicago. It was meant to portray a Swedish-style "smorgasbord," although "cafeteria" is Spanish for coffee shop. But like every great idea, it needed a few years and some savvy entrepreneurs to kick it around. By the end of World War I, A.W.B. Johnson had started the Britling's chain in Alabama (Elvis' mother worked in the Memphis location). But by the time World War II rolled around, a full tray of other Southern cafeterias had become such hits -- Piccadilly (1944), Wyatt's (1946), Luby's (1948) -- that they expanded north, competing with local mom-and-pop places or independently owned successes like Kansas City's Forum Cafeteria, which at one time served 3,000 meals a day. Everyone loved the new idea of the cafeteria, but the concept really reached its "full flourish" in the South, writes John Mariani in America Eats Out. "Especially at a time when the South was in economic distress."

Those Southern cafeteria chains served what Mariani calls "solid, old-fashioned Southern cooking -- hot biscuits and gravy, fried chicken, turkey with cornbread dressing" -- and often for less money than it would cost to cook those dishes at home. When times are tough, honey, eating a lot takes the edge off of things, which is why itsy-bitsy portions of nouvelle cuisine immediately fell out of favor when the stock market tanked in 1987.

And it may explain the logic of opening a restaurant in a nearly-forgotten urban mall that clearly has seen better days. It's been a long time since there has been anywhere to sit down and eat at the Landing, a strip mall at 63rd and Troost that once was home to several popular restaurants. But the two-month-old Cornbread Café has taken over a forty-year-old space previously occupied by an inexpensive steak house chain. Its owners have kept a few details (the salad bar, the neon signs) and polished up the place, adding mustard-colored tablecloths and decorating the walls with jazz posters or blown-up menus from long-forgotten downtown diners, such as the old Top Hat Grill on 18th Street (which served fried chicken, waffles and steaks until 3:30 a.m.).

Patrons are escorted to a table, given silverware wrapped in a paper napkin and left to fill white china plates from a salad bar jammed with more items than Tom Joad's truck or from a smaller but neatly maintained station of hot dishes. The salad bar is more than elaborate by local buffet standards, with two kinds of greens, olives, shredded cheese, pasta salads and ten dressings that look as good as they taste. I never saw fewer than three different varieties of hot soup, among them a beef-vegetable thick with fat chunks of tender meat and, on one cold day, a hearty ham-and-bean concoction.

The restaurant's signature pan-baked cornbread was pleasantly moist and not too sweet -- the better to mix into a bowl of soup or dribble with honey. It worked just as well for spooning up sausage gravy on a Sunday morning, when the restaurant serves brunch dishes, as for sopping up vinegary collard-green juice on a Wednesday night. Other breads -- sugary muffins, bland wheat rolls -- don't stack up to the cornbread. But not everyone has a yen for that classic Southern dish, which gets two incarnations on the Café's buffet: as a thick slab of bread and as a crumbly, lightly seasoned stuffing served alongside a vat of turkey breast slices and shiny brown gravy.

That plain turkey breast and stuffing are always in the Cornbread Café's dinner repertoire, which doesn't change dramatically from day to day. Daily specials rotate through the steam tables during the week (liver and onion on Wednesdays; fried catfish and cod on Fridays) but share space with the usual suspects: petite slices of a dense baked meatloaf, its surface blanketed with ketchup; fried chicken legs skinnier than any barnyard bird I've ever seen and a peppery crust that's never crispy enough and actually slides off the pieces. But judging from the number of patrons heaping the underendowed breasts and leglets on their plates, the chicken is one reason people flock to this restaurant. Much better, however, are giant, tender candied yams, black-eyed peas simmered with pork and the macaroni and cheese, with its little curls of pasta swimming in a pale, creamy sauce.