Atlanta reacted with a collective “noooooooo” when word spread that Carver’s Country Kitchen would close at the end of March. This classic meat-and-two has spent the last 20 years as a lonely corner outpost in Knight Park, a far west Atlanta neighborhood that many people only ever visited in order to eat at Carver’s.
As often happens in the South, this cafe began life as a neighborhood market. Robert Carver opened Carver’s Grocery in 1975. In the early 1990s he married the former Sharon Unterwagner, a blond firecracker and good cook, whose fried chicken, squash casserole and Coca-Cola cake belied her upbringing in Idaho. She set up a small open kitchen in the back of the store, where lunch guests would line up to point at the daily offerings in the steam table. Sharon scooped the food — mashed potatoes and gravy, lumpy rutabagas seasoned lovingly with onion powder, fat slabs of baked ham — onto oval plastic platters and sent you off with a pint of sweet tea to find a spot at an inside picnic. Robert sat by the register behind a counter and nodded whenever you looked his way. Often, he’d leave his perch to join regulars as they ate.
As the picnic tables increased in number and the stocked shelves decreased, the inside clutter of Carver’s began to feel like a kind of folk-art installation. Marilyn Monroe flashes leg and a smile above a standing Hobart mixer and a sign that reads “Normal People Worry Me.”
In fact, all kinds of framed pictures and painted boards with jokey messages cover the walls, giving Carver’s the personality of a PG-13 Cracker Barrel. (Example: “We don’t skinny dip anymore. We chunky-dunk.”) There’s a framed letter to Dr. Ruth that starts as a complaint about a sex-addicted husband and ends, well, messily.
Soon, the sole remnant of Carver’s previous days as a grocery was a sparsely and strangely stocked shelf along the back wall. I don’t imagine anyone comes here to buy #10 cans of candied yams and sweetened condensed milk, or if they’re even for sale. But somehow Carver’s wouldn’t be Carver’s without those cans.
Last March Robert Carver died from cancer at the age of 76. His son from a previous marriage, Robbie, took over duties behind the cash counter, and if you squinted you almost saw his dad.
The day after word spread throughout Atlanta that Carver’s would close, Sharon served a packed room. She wasn’t scooping the potatoes with typical gut-busting abandon, but with a measured eye. Could she get three more portions out of the pot?
At 2:30 p.m., when things should have been calming down, a line stretched to the door. Sharon stopped for hugs with old friends and regulars as she left the kitchen to wipe yet another vegetable option from the dry-erase board. “It has been crazy,” she laughed.
She confirmed that she was going to remarry and travel, and that every item in the restaurant was for sale. Some already had price tags on them.
But even as Sharon insisted that she was getting out of the business and moving on with her life, she was in talks with S.D. Davis, a longtime customer who has expressed interest in buying the restaurant if Sharon would agree to consult during the transition. A decision had not been reached as of press time.
Whether or not Carver’s remains in business, it belongs to the disappearing breed of traditional Southern meat-and-threes, those old-school standards of country cooking.
I remember when I first started working at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in the late 1990s, there were any number of little no-name cafeterias where you could get clamshell boxes packed with collard greens, mac and cheese and buttery cabbage, always topped with a sheet of deli paper and a corn muffin. But as more choices — Vietnamese, Mexican, Lebanese — came, the heavier Southern food seemed less appealing for a midday meal.
On the upside, the best known of the bunch are mostly still around. Mary Mac’s Tea Room in Midtown, the Busy Bee Cafe in the West End and Matthew’s Cafeteria in Tucker still play to capacity crowds. Some of us still make routine pilgrimages to these temples of potlikker and fried green tomatoes. Others only visit with out-of-towners and wonder why we don’t eat like this anymore.
But with fewer meat-and-threes around, we are losing something. We are losing those days when lunch meant a plate of cheesy, buttery, pork-scented goodness, and when we all made the same comment — that the fried chicken is good but we come here for the vegetables.
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