Cheap Eats - Countrytime kitch
Sooky’s Kitchen pleases with homespun meat-and-three plates
From the outside, Sooky’s Kitchen looks like a page from a National Geographic photographic essay on small-town America come to life. It’s as typical a local diner as one could imagine, complete with Old Glory flying proudly and parking spaces so close that cars’ bumpers just about kiss the restaurant’s plate glass shop front. Gold block letters announce Sooky’s offerings on the windows: fresh vegetables, meat, fish, homemade pies. When you step inside, you expect to find tables of camouflage-clad reservists and chatting retirees lunching under the watchful eye of Sooky, whose name conjures a portly, beehived Aunt Bee type dispensing folksy wisdom along with slices of warm pie. The clientele’s exactly what you picture, and Sooky is as welcoming and kind-faced as you’d imagined. But she’s far from anyone out of The Andy Griffith Show: She’s a petite Asian woman who smiles shyly as she greets each guest at the front door.
Artful lodger: The inside of Sooky’s Kitchen looks a lot like an Elks Lodge. A deer head gazes down upon diners from its post above the arched entrance to the smoking area. The walls and trim are painted entirely in shades of mint green, and arrangements of plastic magnolias glow from the strings of large-bulb red Christmas lights in the corners of the dining room. Lunchtime offerings are written on a dry erase board behind the register, streaky from items being rubbed off as the kitchen runs out of them. The look is homey and kitsch all at once.
Work this: Breakfast at Sooky’s Kitchen ranges from small, quick and cheap bites such as the piping hot sausage biscuit with suitably orange, gooey cheese ($1.55). The working man’s breakfast is a smorgasbord of all that’s tasty and highly caloric. The combo features three eggs; fluffy, powdery biscuits; gravy, grits or home fries; and choice of meat, including a generous T-bone steak ($6.99) or a slab of juicy country ham ($4.75). Although quantity is, of course, the focus of a menu item with such a name, quality in the working man’s breakfast is, happily, no less important.
Local favorite: Lunch offerings are equally generous and homey. With the exception of a few burgers and sandwiches, the noontime menu consists mainly of meat and vegetable plates. Priced at $5.30 and $5.99 for meat with two or three sides, respectively. The combinations offer good, hearty value. The fried chicken breast is dry and lifeless (what else can really be expected of white meat?) and the gravy dished up on the side doesn’t help revive it. But a fried pork chop, coated in audibly crunchy, salty, peppery batter is so tender it practically juices at being cut. Macaroni salad is flavorful with a hefty helping of mustard and paprika, and fried okra is as crispy and addictive as popcorn. Fried green tomatoes ($2.99) sport the same delectable batter as the pork chop and stay crisp throughout an extended mealtime chat. Pecan pie ($1.75) is sticky, buttery and not-too-sweet, while carrot cake ($1.50) is wonderfully heavy on the cinnamon, chock full of nuts and darkly dense and moist.
Sooky’s Kitchen delivers all the good ol’ homestyle eats you’d hope to find in a comforting neighborhood atmosphere. Sooky isn’t exactly Aunt Bee, but College Park isn’t Mayberry either. And those are good things.