Nostalgia: a pleasant memory of a downtown restaurant
June 9th, 2008 by Cliff Bostock in Food & Life, RestaurantsDoes anyone remember a downtown restaurant named Venables? I found mention of it in a column by Linda Brandt in Florida’s Herald-Tribune. She’d recently written a column about cornbread and buttermilk and a reader responded:
From John E. Lewis, whose lengthy and enjoyable e-mail is excerpted here: “Your article today about corn bread and buttermilk brought back memories of riding the streetcar to downtown Atlanta to meet my father for lunch and new shoes or some such when I was 10 or 12.
“We always ate in Venables, a well-known restaurant I believe was owned by the same family who owned Stone Mountain at that time. We ate at the marble bar (Atlanta was bone dry at the time) and his order was always the same: A bowl of pot liquor (that’s the juice from cooking turnip greens, of course), an order of corn bread (which would have been returned if a grain of sugar had been used) and a glass of buttermilk. It was served with a soup spoon and an iced tea spoon.
“My father broke up the corn bread and put half into the pot liquor and half into the glass of buttermilk and ate each with the appropriate spoon. I recall being repulsed by the buttermilk, which I did not like.
I used to watch my South Carolina-born mother eat the same thing although she frequently added huge slices of onion to it.
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