Shades of Shades

Wednesday night we started out intending to eat at the Grecian Garden, "open from 11--????" Apparently not until 6:30 pm. We were going there bc Sandy's cousin's husband Mark and his golfing crew had gone there (the only people we'd ever heard of who had) and said it was pretty good. Plus also, since eggplant is in season, it seemed like the perfect choice. We now return to our original assumption that the resto is a front for some other more lucrative business. Opa!

So we got back into the car and trundled down the road to the square at Seaside to The Great Southern Cafe, once known as Shades. In that former incarnation, it was pretty good for lunch, with excellent crab cakes, burgers & iceberg wedges with Maytag dressing. In both incarnations, it has a nice beachy atmosphere, with a brand new building structured as if it were a shack to which other shacks had one-by-one been attached, butcher paper atop white cloths, baskets of silverware in the center of the table, etc. As Shades, the joint displayed fake "outsider art," seemingly composed by the owners' kids; as Great Southern, the art is pseudo Klee. In both cases, that is, the art was exactly the same.

Our waiter was sort of a bubba, who tried to sell us ginormous steaks, and sounded like other bubba's E has known. He brought us nice big glasses of Tanqueray with olives, which we enjoyed very much (celebrating Al's good news from the transplant docs). We ate green salads (fine), fried crab claws (quite good), and the house specialty, Grits A Ya Ya--cheese (gouda) grits topped with shrooms, shrimp, and a thicket of fried yam straw (all a bit gummy and finally not too interesting). E topped the meal off with a few bites of a very nasty key lime pie. We haven't written the place off entirely, but we won't hurry back.

Note: S is probably going to give up trying to blog pix of our meals: even when she does have the camera, she forgets to shoot until half the course is over and the plates just look like hell. And when she gets off a clean shot, the focus or exposure is for shit. If you want to see food staged properly, check out Pepper's blog.