Thread: K&W Cafeteria
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Leila
 
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Default K&W Cafeteria

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