K&W Cafeteria

On 31 May 2005 23:18:55 -0700, "Leila" <[email hidden]>

Quoted message said:

This is a chain across the Southeast (not certain of the geography, but
my cousin in Virginia had a summer job there in college, as I did in
Greensboro NC). I served vegetables and salads there one summer, my
only foray into food service. All you had to do was keep the little
bowls full of various cold salads on the ice bed, and dish up hot
veggies for people as they pushed trays down the line.

You could get hot roast ham, beef and turkey sliced to order, but I
wasn't senior enough to cut meat!

Loved the veggies: fried okra, fried mushrooms, turnip greens with
vinegar and raw onion offered as condiments, green beans boiled with
fatback, and macaroni and cheese. Don't even argue, mac 'n cheese is a
vegetable and you know it. We were allowed some allotment of free food
on our breaks and I always got a veggie combination, three veggie sides
on a plate. It was a cafeteria but they cooked that food from scratch
and it tasted good. I remember the cooks shredding cabbage in vast
quantities for slaw. Of course they made all kinds of jello, because
jello with a dollop of mayonaisse is a nice salad, isn't it? Not that I
ate jello or slaw, but even then I appreciated the sight of 'em.

Can you Southerners tell me if K&W is still around, and is their food
still good, or has it gotten completely pre-frozen and soulless? Maybe
now in the era of mass-produced food, you have to go to a really
upscale place to get good tasting Southern cooking, I don't know. Like
Chez Panisse with a drawl, using organic produce and pork, and
philosophy majors chopping biodynamically farmed turnip greens, and
prices to match.

If somebody can fill us in on whether this sort of place exists in
North Carolina, I'd be most grateful. I keep threatening to visit my
relatives there, I need to know about the dining out options.

Leila

Hey Leila!
K&W is another restaurant chain that started in Winston-Salem just
like the world famous Krispy Kreme doughnut company. I like K&W if I
want to be good to my body and eat veggies! As good as K&W is though,
they can't make customers line up in the streets to get their food
like Krispy Kreme does when they turn on that "Hot Doughnuts Now"
sign!

Bill

Leila said:

Can you Southerners tell me if K&W is still around, and is their food
still good, or has it gotten completely pre-frozen and soulless? Maybe
now in the era of mass-produced food, you have to go to a really
upscale place to get good tasting Southern cooking, I don't know. Like
Chez Panisse with a drawl, using organic produce and pork, and
philosophy majors chopping biodynamically farmed turnip greens, and
prices to match.

If somebody can fill us in on whether this sort of place exists in
North Carolina, I'd be most grateful. I keep threatening to visit my
relatives there, I need to know about the dining out options.

Leila

K&W is alive and well in NC. We ate frequently in the one in Chapel
Hill about 3 years ago. The lines went out the door. The food is
about the same as I remember it from late 40's and early 50's in
Winston Salem. Let me know if you get to NC. Maybe we can meet at a
K&W for lunch.

http://www.kwcafeterias.com/about.html for locations.

--
Susan N.

"Moral indignation is in most cases two percent moral, 48 percent indignation, and 50 percent envy."
Vittorio De Sica, Italian movie director (1901-1974)

"Leila" wrote in message

Quoted message said:

This is a chain across the Southeast (not certain of the geography, but
my cousin in Virginia had a summer job there in college, as I did in
Greensboro NC).

(snipped)

Quoted message said:

Can you Southerners tell me if K&W is still around, and is their food
still good, or has it gotten completely pre-frozen and soulless?

Leila

A few years ago, my husband was working as a consultant at the submarine
base at Charleston, S.C. We found the K&W in North Charleston and it was
consistently excellent, as well as spotlessly clean and really "upscale" for
a cafeteria. I've often wondered if it were still there and if were just as
good. (It was my first introduction to "sweet tea"!), so I'm glad to see
it's still shown as a location. Wish we had one around here.

Dora

Quoted message said:

As good as K&W is though,
they can't make customers line up in the streets to get their food
like Krispy Kreme does when they turn on that "Hot Doughnuts Now"
sign!

Quoted message said:

Bill

Aw, Bill, you sound like you own too much Krispy Kreme stock. Sorry
about that market drop but that's the way the doughnut deflates...

We sold Krispy Kreme doughnuts to raise money for our school orchestra
back in the late 70s. Yes I know KK well. And I went to summer camp in
Winston Salem (Governor's School at Salem College, the cafeteria food
there was miseable); my brother went to Wake Forest, my grandmother
ended her days in a Methodist retirement home there, and so forth.
Tobacco and underwear money used to run the place, God knows who is in
charge now.

Yes, I should get back to North Carolina in the next couple of years.
We keep saying to ourselves - should we sell our wildly overvalued Bay
area cottage and buy a mansion on the golf course in Greensboro for
cash? Then we look at our life and think about the weather in NC, not
to mention the politics which don't jive with ours, and we decide - no,
we'll keep the shack. To each his own. I have to stay a blue stater for
my peace of mind.

Leila

In article <[email hidden]>,

Leila said:

This is a chain across the Southeast (not certain of the geography, but
my cousin in Virginia had a summer job there in college, as I did in
Greensboro NC). I served vegetables and salads there one summer, my
only foray into food service. All you had to do was keep the little
bowls full of various cold salads on the ice bed, and dish up hot
veggies for people as they pushed trays down the line.

You could get hot roast ham, beef and turkey sliced to order, but I
wasn't senior enough to cut meat!

Loved the veggies: fried okra, fried mushrooms, turnip greens with
vinegar and raw onion offered as condiments, green beans boiled with
fatback, and macaroni and cheese. Don't even argue, mac 'n cheese is a
vegetable and you know it.

(snip)

I tried explaining that macaroni and cheese is a vegetable to my
students here in Seattle and they were appalled. (It's not described in
the old or new Food Guide Pyramid that way.) Then I described how green
beans are cooked down yonder, which really riled the vegetarians in the
class.

Of course, my major problem with southern cuisine is sweet tea. I
consider chocolate a better source of Calories than beverages.

Cindy

--
C.J. Fuller

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