By Jay Whipple
Trend Magazine Online™
Great Burgers and Fries!Re-published from a previous edition...

I have been stopping by this eatery for many years now as
part of the
QCT
Fall Leaf Changesm trip which includes sightseeing along the nationally
renowned
Blue Ridge Parkway which extends
469 miles north to the
Shenandoah
National Park and south to the
Great Smoky Mountains National Park
in
North Carolina and
Tennessee. If you have been in the fall you
can attest to the fact that it is a splendid journey of epic natural beauty
especially if you go during peak leaf-change season which is typically the
middle to end of
October each year.

We use this restaurant for our late lunch stop before descending
to sea level, from over
5,000 feet near
Mount Mitchell (highest
point east of the Mississippi River, 6,683 feet), at
Blowing Rock after
one more stop at
Price Lake. Earlier on our trip (from Charlotte, NC) we
make memorable stops in
Lake Lure (featured in Dirty Dancing [1987]
starring the late
Patrick Swayze and
Jennifer Gray, then picturesque
Chimney Rock, and
Bat Cave (my favorite) before hoping on the
parkway in
Asheville.
We arrived a little off schedule at
1:50 PM to a
crowd waiting to be seated; and were told that our wait would be about
20
minutes. We considered trying our luck elsewhere but decided to keep our
pace in line here as opposed to taking a chance back down the road. Once inside
we ushered through the packed dining room to the deck which was unusually cold
with a wind chill. It was in the
upper 50's, I was told, which is cold
to this
Florida boy and my guests all agreed that a coat with hood or
skull cap was needed to shield us from the frigid temperature.