View from the Mountain

A Restaurant that will never let you down

Over a career of traveling for business, I have eaten in a lot of restaurants. We have lived in the Roanoke, Virginia area for twenty-one years.  That has given us a lot of time to sample area restaurants.

One of our first adventures, the spring after we moved to the Roanoke Valley in the fall of 1989 was to drive over the mountain to Catawba.  Our plans were to have lunch at the Homeplace.

Old timers in the area will get a chuckle out of this. We chose Mother's Day as the time for our first visit to the Homeplace.  We found that half the Roanoke Valley has the exact same idea.

While we had to wait an hour or so, we got our first introduction to the food and atmosphere of the Homeplace that day in May 1990. It was a wonderful experience.  I still remember the delicious fried chicken, nicely seasoned sides, and those perfect (not greasy) biscuits.  We truly enjoyed our meal.

Recently we took another trip out to the Homeplace. We have probably been three or four times this year, but this was the first time that it occurred to me that 2010 marked the twentieth anniversary of our first meal at the Homeplace.

It turned out that our recent meal was just as memorable as our first. Though they had just served a bus load of people, things were quiet enough for one of the waitresses to take the time to chat with us.  She has waited on us many times over the years.  She told us that she thinks that only two individuals have had the honor of making the Homeplace's biscuits over the last twenty years.

It is hard to believe that you can make that many biscuits and have them all turn out perfect, but that is the honest truth about the Homeplace.

The waitress told us that one night last weekend there were over 300 people in line at 8 PM.  The Homeplace normally closes at 8 PM, but they have a rule that if you are in line by 8 PM, you will be seated and fed.  She said that they did not finish seating the last person until around 9 PM that night.

She also confirmed what I had heard, that the record number of people they have served in a day was around 1,700.  That is a lot of fried chicken and biscuits.

I have never been disappointed with a meal at the Homeplace in over twenty years.  A meal there is always consistently delicious.  The food is always hot, and I have never been served by an inattentive waitress. That includes a lot of meals when the waitresses were working at warp speed to get food to the tables.

I cannot remember what the price of a meal was at the Homeplace when we first went there 20 years ago, but I know that it has only gone up a dollar or two in those 20 years.  The other day, the meal for the two of us was $26 with tax but before tip.  It included our beverages and dessert if we had wanted it.

We passed on the dessert because we had no room.  The main course servings were so generous that we did not even have to ask for seconds on anything.

The Homeplace is the only restaurant where I have consistently had great food over a span of twenty years.  It has never let me down.

We obviously are not the only folks who love the Homeplace. As we were checking out, the gentleman at the cash register told us that many of their customers were regulars like us.

You can also read Joe Kennedy's Roanoke Times August 2007 article about the Homeplace for some additional history.

I also suggest you check out Yelp's reviews of the Homeplace.  The Homeplace manages an easy Five Stars.  My favorite comment there is this one from a reviewer named Shenna F.

When I finally brought my fiancée to this place, his reaction was "after 5 years of dating, how was it that you just now brought me to this place!?! We should be eating here all the time!"  It's such a great place to eat! Home style cooking with stick to your ribs type of food. Normally, I'm not a huge fried chicken fan. But, I love love love their fried chicken....

There is only one other place where I have had that much success, and it is a drive-in fast food restaurant in Mt. Airy, NC.  That place would be Odell's where I have been enjoying their Big Moe for over 40 years.

Enjoying some mountain weather

When you spend most of your time on the North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks, you have to either embrace the heat and humidity or stay locked up inside.

While you have some climate advantages living at the beach, cool mornings are not something you get to enjoy very often from the middle of June until the first of October along the beaches.

I love living at the coast and don't even mind that there is little dry clothing on me after an early morning mowing of the yard at home on the White Oak River near Cape Carteret, NC.  I look forward to those cooler October days when the waters of the ocean and rivers are still warm.

However, I find that one of the great pleasures of modern life is sleeping with the windows open and hearing no heat pumps laboring to cool the humid air.

Our other home on the foothills of Twelve O'Clock Knob overlooking downtown Roanoke can also get very warm in the summer.  Still when September rolls around, you can usually count on some cool evenings to remind you that you are in the mountains.

We have not only slept with the windows open the last few days, we have opened the doors to our screened porch which opens off the master bedroom.  When you do that, sleeping in our bedroom becomes a little like sleeping in a tree house.  You can hear the sounds of the night, and you have to sleep with layers of cover since by morning, you can count on the room temperature matching that of the out of doors.

This morning I woke up just before 6 AM for a brief bathroom visit, and when I came back to bed, it was so cool in our bedroom that I closed the door to the screened porch.  Then I snuggled down under the light weight down comforter on our bed.

As I was drifting back off to sleep, I tried to remember the last time I had awakened at the beach with any covers on me.  It might have been in early August when some of our children and our granddaughter were visiting.  The kids don't think much of our having the thermostats set to 78 degrees or higher so I think they cranked the one upstairs down to 68 degrees for a day or so.

It won't be long before we are savoring the last warmth of summer that has been stored in the waters along our shores, but for right now that cool mountain air feels like some welcome relief for what has been a very warm summer season.

I know the cool weather is on the way.  I keep a close eye on temperatures around the country and in Canada.  I consider Edmonton, Alberta, the canary in the mine when it comes to cool weather.

This morning they woke up to 34.6 degrees Fahrenheit.  So while I am enjoying some relief from summer's heat, I will remain mindful that it won't be long before we will miss summer's warmth.