Throwed Rolls
Some weeks ago we received a letter from the bishop to all clergy inviting and encouraging us to attend a one-day health conference at diocesan Camp Beckwith. Linda and I decided to come, in part because, starting at 9:30 a.m. and lasting until 6:00 p.m., it would necessitate coming over the day before and staying two nights. We stayed at the Quality Inn in Foley, Alabama at a bargain $62 per night, and are reckoning this was our summer vacation.
Held in Beckwith's bay-front building (which we didn't know existed) the conference will help us give increased attention to health matters of diet and exercise and to continued vigilance about weight. Ending the conference, the last two hours, the bishop had a “called clergy conference” to discuss and lay down policies and procedures regarding the adoption by General Convention 2012 of a liturgy for blessing same-sex unions. The bishop is an uncommonly patient man: if some of these sailors were in my ship I'd call the assignment office in Washington.
Anyone who knows me knows my main reason for going anywhere is to check out the local food, from lobster and clams in Rhode Island early in Navy years fifty-five years ago, to the sushi in Yokohama our years in Japan, to bringing home a dungeness crab Friday evenings in San Diego, to the annual Oktoberfest those years in Columbus, Ohio, right up to last night and this morning. Our habit for the past thirty years when in or through Foley was The Gift Horse Restaurant, a classy buffet in an place built in 1912 to be The Foley Progressive Club, for concerts, dances, and other cultural events. But checking online for their hours turned up reviews for the past two or three years with consistently dismal reports, so we skipped it. Madge mentioned Lambert’s Cafe, one of a small chain called “The Only Home of Throwed Rolls.” Checking my iPad showed it ranking #1 of 60 Foley restaurants. We ate there Wednesday evening, an adventure. Apparently there’s usually a wait up to two hours, but we arrived early and were shown right to a table. It’s a rowdy place, a waiter wheeling a two-tier cart around shouting “hot rolls,” and throwing a grapefruit-size roll at anyone who raised a hand. If you don't catch yours, let it roll across the floor, he's about to toss you another one. Delicious and yeasty, but white bread is not on my list, so only one. Our menu arrived and we ordered catfish and chicken-fried round steak. More servers came round, one serving apple butter or molasses on your roll. Others with huge pots of fried okra, which they spooned onto your napkin to munch while waiting for your meal, or black-eyed peas, potatoes and onions, tomatoes and macaroni. Our meals were enormous, resulting that there was enough in the go-boxes for catfish and chicken-fried steak breakfast yesterday. Again, an adventure. There are three Lambert’s Cafe locations, the other two in Missouri.
Thursday evening we tried the #2 rated restaurant in Foley, Fish River Grill. Shrimp, huge and fantastic, and oysters. Turned out to be about sixteen enormous oysters, superb, so much that half of them spent the night in the refrigerator, to be heated in the motel microwave for breakfast this morning. If that place were on Beck Avenue in St. Andrews the waiting line outside would be longer than Hunt’s Oyster Bar. Plus, about seven o'clock a singer with guitar lit up, the image of Johnny Cash.
My iPad has a National Hurricane Center icon on the desktop, and we’ve watched Hurricane Isaac, increasingly less and less threatening to our area, shifting slightly west with every updating. This morning’s 5-day cone has it coming in right where I’m sitting in Foley, Alabama at this moment drinking coffee and writing my blog, Isaac making landfall next Wednesday at two o’clock in the morning. But by then, the way it keeps shifting to the left, our friends in Texas may be in for it. Maybe some of the drought area will get rain. Anyway, batten down, Phyllis and Sonny.
Tom