Sunday, August 24, 2025

Cracker Barrel

I don't think I ever noticed there was an old man leaning against a barrel, and because the colors are the same, I don't think the new logo is that different. I always thought of it as a hokey restaurant that was an okay change-of-pace, and was pleased that my son in Houston could sometimes get Moxie and Ale 8 there. 

Ale 8 has a new flavor, by the way - Pawpaw, "Kentucky's tropical fruit." I'm not sure when I will be in Kentucky again to try it.  My granddaughter was considering Asbury, where her parents went, but it doesn't have an engineering program. Also, she doesn't want to go that far away now. She's visiting RPI this week, and if she ends up going there I will make the effort to learn how to spell Rensselaer. 



2 comments:

Christopher B said...

I ate (and browsed) at Cracker Barrels pretty frequently between about 1990 and 2010ish. They were McDonald's style in a full-menu table service restaurant with a little more flair than a Denny's. You could pull into one anywhere anytime, order something, and know exactly what you were going to get. Good value for the price, solid but pretty pedestrian meat-and-potatoes. Having lived south of the Ohio long enough now to notice when a menu doesn't have grits or greens, I think their food is (or was) far more Midwestern than Southern (no fried chicken until a few years ago, really?) with a few sides and other dishes mostly for color. The attached store idea was kinda cute but it did make waiting for a table a bit uncomfortable as the only place to sit down was outside. They are thin on the ground in Louisville (only two in the whole metro I think) but there's one not far from us. We stopped there a few times and ordered to go a few more but over the last five years I've been driving past it to get First Watch for breakfast.

Grim said...

My wife loved to eat there because they had a trout dish that she really liked. I agree with Christopher: nothing there was ever very good, but it was all right for what it was. I did enjoy the 'country store' aspect, where I sometimes bought gifts near Christmas or music CDs to liven up road trips. I'm old enough and from the right part of the country to remember the real country stores they were emulating, which were often hardware stores or 'general stores' rather than restaurants.