Say
you’ve decided to get off the Interstate and take a drive along some back
country roads. The road twists and
curves through tree tunnels dappled with streams of sunlight, one leading to
the next. Bridges provide passage over creeks and streams with fabulous names,
names like Turkey Creek, Stone Creek, Dry Branch. Time’s gotten away from you,
and the sun and fresh air and changing scenery have made you and your
passengers hungry. You look around but there’s
not a McDonalds or a Wendy’s or a Dairy Queen to be found. But if you’re lucky, there’s something
better. Something special. Something a Burger King or a Taco Bell or
even a Zaxby’s can’t even dream of touching. A small town country café.
Now,
I’m a little more intimately familiar with the inner workings of such an
establishment than most. Whether I consider that a blessing or curse depends
on the particular memory recalled at the particular moment I’m reminescing. See, back in 2006, when my husband Randy was
a small-town businessman already running a combo small-town business in a store
where one side was a Mom-n-Pop video store (this was before Blockbuster and
Netflix pretty much slammed the lid on such enterprises) and the other side was
the local laundry, the owner of a cute little restaurant by the name of The
Courthouse Café decided to sell it. Randy
wanted to buy it. I managed to delay the
inevitable for a little while. “You’re already breaking your back to break
even,” I proclaimed. “A restaurant’d just be one more thing to break your back over!”
And he listened. For about a year. Until the day he called me up at work and
announced he’d just bought it. 
Thus
began one of those true love-hate relationships that you look back on with
simultaneous feelings of fondness and true horror. The Courthouse Café occupied a prime piece of
real estate in Jeffersonville (aka J’Ville), Georgia – right across from the
Courthouse and right beside the local grocery store. Meals were served cafeteria style. Judy, the head cook, stood behind the steam
counter, spoons at the ready to dish out the patrons’ choice of one meat and
three vegetables from that day’s menu.
It wasn’t called all you could eat, but with the amount of food hitting
the plates, it might as well have been. Each day’s
menu sported two meats and seven vegetables from which to make your choice,
complete with either cornbread or biscuits.
Homemade. With dessert (frequently
homemade, though that wasn’t one hundred percent guaranteed). And choice of beverage. Soft drinks were available, but down here in
this neck of the woods, most folks don’t even consider any beverage but sweet
tea (and I do mean sweet) as an option with either lunch or supper. Some folks even drink it for breakfast. Pam, Judy’s assistant, kept the kitchen
moving, threw more chicken in the fryer, fetched and toted. Not only were the biscuits and cornbread
homemade, no instant or frozen mashed potato would have dared show its face in
that kitchen. 
Lunch
started cooking while breakfast was still leaving the kitchen short order
style, frequently by means of the breakfast crowd sticking their head through
the swinging kitchen doors and hollering out for two eggs, bacon, grits and a
side of hotcakes. Or two sausage
biscuits. Or whatever. Big pots of vegetables simmered on the gas range,
liberally seasoned with salt meat, that
staple of southern cuisine. There was a
set menu for every day, as dependable as a calendar. Mondays were roast beef, Tuesdays were beef
tips over rice. Wednesdays were
spaghetti, and Fridays were catfish. Every day was delicious, but Thursdays
were always Thanksgiving. Turkey,
dressing, sweet potato soufflé, macaroni and cheese, broccoli casserole, peas,
collard greens. If you weren’t in the
mood for turkey, you could have fried chicken.
Everybody was always in the mood for the dressing. That dressing was ambrosia from Olympus. Judy and Pam tried on occasion to substitute
out the Thursday menu so it didn’t just scream “Thanksgiving!” It never worked, though, not even in the high
heat of the summer. That’s what
everybody wanted on Thursdays and that’s what everybody got.
I
formed the habit of leaving for work early enough to run into the backdoor of
the kitchen. First order of business was
a hug from Judy and then a hug from Pam.
Or vice-versa, depending on who was closest to the door. Then I’d head to the dining room and see who
among the regulars needed a coffee re-fill.
Grabbing my own coffee, it was back to the kitchen, where I maneuvered
to the grill between Pam and Judy, both of whom moved in an intricate ballet
between grill, stove, and refrigerator, frequently in time to the black velvet
voices of Southern gospel playing on the radio. The best mornings were the mornings when they
joined their voices to the radio. I’d
soft fry an egg, sometimes two, grab a big spoonful of buttered grits from the
pot warming on the stove (hot, cooked, fine-grained corn based cereal not
generally well-known outside the South and usually truly appreciated only by
Southerners), and add several pieces of the bacon standing ready on a corner of
the grill. There was something so decadently
luxurious about being able to just grab ready-cooked bacon, you know? 
Before
I left, I’d fix my lunch. Why not? I was in a commercial kitchen, right? Fried chicken salads, sometimes. I’d throw some chicken fingers in the deep
fryers and they’d be ready by the time I was done with breakfast. One of the legendary quarter-pound
hamburgers, maybe. They re-heated just
fine at lunch if they were fresh-cooked that morning on the grill. The fixings for a bacon, lettuce and tomato
sandwich. If there were no left-overs
from lunch, then there was no supper waiting at home that night, but there most
always was just enough for our suppers and
Pam and Judy’s suppers. It wasn’t
enough to save, and our customers didn’t expect re-heated food the next
day. We didn’t plan to ever give them
any, either. I can taste that roast
beef, those beef tips over rice, that spaghetti sauce, that fried chicken,
those hamburger steaks now.
In
the end, though, guess what? Randy broke
his back and didn’t break even, though that had to do with the economy that
summer more than anything else. The
Courthouse Café was always packed. Customers weren’t the problem. Gas skyrocketed to over $4.00 a gallon (the
first time, I mean), impacting trucking and shipping with the force of a
meteorite striking Earth. The potatoes we used went from $19.00 for 40 pounds
to $40.00 for $40.00 pounds. In the
space of months. The rest of the staples
followed suit. Between rent, food,
utilities, payroll, taxes, we couldn’t raise the price of the plates enough to
cover the costs of putting them on the table even though the crowds remained
consistently large. The Courthouse Café
closed its doors for the last time on August 31, 2009. A few hearty and optimistic folks attempted
to start another restaurant in the building. They stayed only a few months
each. Small restaurants are back-breaking, heart-breaking businesses. Y’all remember that the next time you’re lucky
enough to be in one. Even so, in more
favorable economic times – say, even the ones in which Randy Branan in a fit of
optimism had purchased the thing – I’m pretty sure it would still be open.
But
there’s one thing y’all should have figured out by now about writers. We never waste anything. We never forget any experience. We remember bits and pieces of here and
there, now and then. And we blend those
bits and pieces into things we hope will be as special for our readers as they
were for us.
So,
even though the Courthouse Café is no more, other than in these pictures
scattered around, it lives on in another world. The e-book world. The
Courthouse Café was the glimmer of an idea, the glint in a writer’s eye, that became
as much an individual character in a certain novel
titled Country Justice as its hero and heroine. Y’all want to read the Courthouse Café’s
full menus? You can find them in the Country Justice. Y’all have any idea of
what goes on the night before an anticipated visit from the Health Inspector?
You do if you’ve read Country Justice. Right
down to taking the kitchen fans apart and cleaning them with bleach. Which, by the way, is one of those things I
don’t miss.
I
hope y’all enjoyed this little tour of the two cafés, one real, one fictional,
but both mine. Keep an eye out. There are still Courthouse Cafés scattered
around the countryside to enjoy, right along with homemade biscuits. If you’re lucky, you can find one now and
then. And if you don’t, well, there’s
always the Scales of Justice Café. All
you have to do is drop in on Turkey Creek, Georgia, located within the pages of
Country Justice and go set yourselves
down at a table. And coming in 2015,
I’ll be revisiting Turkey Creek in Black
Turkey Walk, the second in the Country
Justice series. So y’all come back now, hear?
Find all Gail Roughton titles at
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You can also visit at her Blog
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