Hilda's (Jacksonville N.C.)

At home in Jacksonville, N.C., I met up with some of my D.C. friends (Mark and Mike) also spending their holiday in eastern rural North Carolina for lunch. Knowing Mike is a fan of kitsch hillbilly deliverance humor, I recommended Hilda’s, a down-home cooking restaurant housed in a former Piggly Wiggly. Take away all of the posh from Georgia Browns. Add the family local appeal of Mama Dips in Chapel Hill. Mix in 2 tubs of lard and a buffet. Throw it all into a converted grocery store with some ugly fake plants on wall sconces and a pencil drawing of a large black woman… and you’ve got Hilda’s.

My lunch consisted of fried popcorn shrimp, fried chicken, fried okra, mashed taters and some peas – then douse all of it in 3 sticks of butter with a side of diabetic shockingly sweet tea. For desert, a sliver of sweet potato pie – as if the small size could offset the calories and fat I had just ingested. I really was tempted by either the chicken neck or liver and onion special offered today, but the fried buffet looked too good. The vanilla pudding with nilla wafers was also especially southern and tempting. Our service was done by a no nonsense woman clearly unenthusiastic about working on Christmas eve, but who recommended the chicken fried steak nonetheless. She mostly left us alone, but kept the sweet tea flowing. I would like to think her lack of attention was due to our buffet choice and not because we were three white men clearly out of our element given our lack of flannel and dirty overalls. While I doubt most folks who may read this would ever find themselves in Jacksonville N.C., I felt such a quintessentially southern experience would round out my 2009 restaurant blog entries.