Hey, Franchisee!  Are you interested in catching on the next hot trend in fast food?  Well, let me tell you about Noodles and Company!  Noodles you say?  That sounds too ethnic for middle America!  Well, let me tell you about the Noodles and Co that I went to in Chapel Hill, North Carolina!

Ok, that’s enough exclamation marks for this review.  I was getting tired of eating down home southern food, and I was actually craving something that would be quasi-healthy.  I was walking down Franklin Street and was immediately drawn to Noodles and Co (probably because I needed to use a public restroom).  After leaving the bathroom and catching the eye of the annoyed cashiers, I decided to order something.  The premise of  Noodles and Co is the modularization of Noodles.  You pick a noodle type, then do it in a certain style and wait 10 min as they make you a fresh plate of noodles.

While I waited, I was given this hilarious marker that I could laugh while I waited for my noodles (which didn’t take very long).

I decided to get the noodles with peanut sauce, vegetables and tofu.  This is probably my finest photographic work (I think I got lucky with the lighting), but the picture is quite fitting for the noodles, as they were really tasty.  Admittedly, they were not as cheap as the marker suggested (about $7 for a plate of noodles), but they were very fresh tasting and I would definitely recommend returning here.

I feel strange highly rating franchise restaurants, but Noodles and Co seems to have a pretty good business model.  They make reasonably priced tasty noodles (ranging from Italian to Asian style) fairly quickly.  There are a fair number of combinations that are vegan, and since it’s modular, you can definitely get something different each time you come.  And it has public bathrooms (sort of).  So, I’ll give Noodles and Co four cheese sandwiches.

Noodles and Company
214 West Franklin Street
Chapel Hill, NC 27516 
(919) 967-7320

North Carolina is fairly well known for having good barbecue.  It’s not as good as Memphis (in my opinion), and it is unique with its mustard-based barbecue (instead of ketchup-based).  As a result, my friends wanted to go try out Jim’s Famous BBQ in Chapel Hill.  According to Yelp!, Jim’s is very highly rated for having good BBQ.  On the outset, I was concerned as Jim’s has obviously filled in a former Applebee’s/TGI Friday’s/Other Casual Dining franchise location, as the interior had the sterile atmosphere of a chain restaurant.  That is never a good sign for a BBQ restaurant, though I figured I’d give them the benefit of the doubt. 

For me, I can’t eat BBQ outside of the side dishes, which for the most part are the same, but I try to rate BBQ restaurants from the perspective of how good the sauce is (and if the sauce is vegetarian).  Fortunately, Jim’s provides its BBQ sauce tableside, and has all the ingredients listed on the back.  In case you can’t read, the first ingredient of the BBQ sauce is barbecue sauce.  Barbecue sauce cannot be an ingredient of barbecue sauce!  Sauce is not a fundamental element, so basically Jim’s BBQ sauce is just watered down barbecue sauce.  Not a good start.

What makes Jim’s worse is that they would not even let me get a combination plate of sides (despite the fact that you could get multiple sides with any main dish).  So, I ended up having to order 4 separate side dishes at full price just so I could properly review this place.  Jim’s obviously did not want to make my job easy.  The macaroni and cheese was pretty standard fare from what I would expect to get in a grocery store hot food section (and not a nice grocery store like Whole Foods that has GREAT mac and cheese).  It was pretty dry and flavorless, though was made edible with the watered down barbecue sauce.

The barbecue baked beans was pretty tasty, though were a little to sweet for my liking.  Also, I didn’t need to eat so much barbecue baked beans (this would be an instance where having a veggie combo plate would have been useful).

The coleslaw was very mayonnaise-y, but I liked it.  It too didn’t taste very flavorful, and tasted like it came from a grocery store.  I’m willing to bet that most of the sides are not made in-house.

The only dish that was decent (but nothing to write home about) would be the fried okra.  I think they were frozen okra, but the breading wasn’t too dry or hard (as is the case with many other fried okras that I’ve had). 

Overall, Jim’s is a pretty awful place if you’re a vegetarian.  I don’t even know if it’s a great place if you eat meat.  If you want the true southern dining experience, I think Mama Dips is a better place to go.  So save your time and money and don’t bother with Jim’s.  One cheese sandwich.

Jim’s Famous BBQ
115 South Elliot Road
Chapel Hill, NC 27514 
(919) 942-7427

There’s nothing like a good home-cooked meal, and when it comes to Indian food, I can’t help but compare any food I eat to what I would get at home cooked by my mother or previously my grandmother.  One problem with most Indian restaurants is that they try too hard to maximize profits at the expense of putting out good food (which is part of the reason most Indian restaurants serve buffets).  In North Carolina, I was informed that there was a good Indian restaurant that I should check out, called Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe.

First of all, I will say I was initially pleased with the naming of the restaurant.  So few Indian restaurants name it after the owner or chef, which creates a level of detachment from the food.  If I were to put my name on a restaurant, I create a level of responsibility on the quality of meal that you will get.  Calling an Indian restaurant Taj Mahal or Bombay Palace is not only cliche, it doesn’t identify who’s responsible for this crap.  With Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe, I know if I have a problem with the meal, I go straight to Vimala.  Which is great because when I went there, I saw Vimala.  She’s responsible for running the kitchen and making sure all the food is great.  So before I even got the food, I knew it would be good.  Thus ends the educational portion of this blog.

I wanted to sample the full spectrum of fare that Vimala had on store, so I ordered the Vegetarian thali, which was a little pricey by North Carolina standards (~$14), but a bargain by Boston standards.  For the thali, I get two curries, rice, yoghurt, chutney, daal, papadam, and chapati (an Indian bread, thinner than naan).  I saw that there was idly and vada sambar available as well, which I wanted to try, so I asked the cashier who was Indian where he was from.  Which in hindsight is the kind of racist questions that I usually get annoyed about, but the reason I asked was I wanted to know if the sambar was going to be any good.  North Indians have about as much clue on how to make a good sambar as Chinese people know how to make Mexican food (I’ve had Chinese-Mexican food, it’s terrible).  But I assumed because he’s Indian that he was related to Vimala (which he wasn’t), though out of a strange coincidence, they were both from Kerala (a state in southern India).  He also offered me a sample of the sambar to try out.

Every item on the thali was as good as my grandmother’s cooking, so I will have to credit Vimala for that.  In fact it is much better than my mother’s cooking, though my mother is limited by having ulcers and high blood pressure, so she never cooks salty, sour, or spicy.  The rice and daal were delicious enough to eat on their own, just enough spice and flavor.

The beans curry and raita were both very fresh and tasty (you could tell that if they were batch-made, they were batch made recently).

The sambar was a home run!  Probably the best sambar I’ve had since I left India (sorry mom).  As they were Keralan, everything was chock full of coconut, which is bad if you eat it a lot, but deliciously amazing if you go out to eat it every once in a while.  And the sambar had legit vegetables in it like squash and okra in it, unlike even Indian sambars (which are usually just onions and maybe a rare carrot).

I’m not a fan of chapati or papadams, so I won’t make a comment about them, outside of the fact that they too were tasty.

Spicy chutney was offered in case you don’t find the food spicy enough.  I thought the food was just spicy enough, so I just ate it with the papadam.

Finally, my friend ordered a thali as well, but did not opt for the sambar (mistake).  He got aloo mattar as well, and even that was amazing!

I was thoroughly impressed with Vimala’s on multiple levels.  First, the food was all uniformly amazing, and vegetarian/vegan options are clearly delineated from non-vegetarian options.  It would be nice if she could make a pure vegetarian restaurant (just in case there is any meat contamination, though I don’t think there is), but I don’t think that’s sustainable in North Carolina.  What is even more impressive is her versatility to make delicious North Indian as well as South Indian dishes.  Also, the restaurant is very casual and friendly and not as ostentatious as most Indian restaurants attempt to be.  It is delicious fare somewhere of unparallel quality with an atmosphere somewhere between a roadside hotel and fancy restaurant.  Finally, I must give some credit for being very involved in the local community, including sourcing most ingredients locally (I presume the tamarind, fenugreek, asafoetida and other spices aren’t grown in North Carolina).  It’s rare to find an Indian restaurant that makes that kind of effort to make delicious food and ingratiate itself with the community.  Because of these reasons, I have to give Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe five cheese sandwiches.

Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe
431 West Franklin Street
Chapel Hill, NC 27516 
(919) 929-3833

My last excursion to North Carolina was so great that I decided to return another year later to see how much has changed (not much) and see if I can try out the other great restaurants in the Chapel Hill area.  One place that looked really interesting that I didn’t have a chance to try was Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe (think Waffle House, if Waffle House was founded in 1832).  Ye Olde Waffle House is not that old, but it definitely acts as if it is.

How do you know you’re in a Southern Diner?  Look for folksy puns on the menu.  Only the pun on this menu is confusing as I think they mean “good food, no yolk”, replacing “joke” with “yolk” as they serve a lot of egg-based foods here.  But I guess they thought they weren’t going far enough with their pun, so they punned “yolk” and “yoke”, which is strange, as a yoke has more to do with oxen, and has a slight connotation of the slave-holding history of the South.  Or they could just not know how to spell yolk.  I tend to overthink these things.

I was so hungry I didn’t realize I should be taking pictures before eating (a rare feat for me), so you’ll have to forgive me for not getting the missing piece of waffle in this picture.  But, I’ll promise you that the missing piece tasted exactly like the rest of the waffle… delicious.  Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe waffles have a slightly “doughnut” batter taste to them, which is pretty awesome.  It’s almost like eating a funnel cake with butter and syrup (ooh! idea!).

No Waffle House/Shoppe meal is complete without some hash browns.  I got them with onions, peppers, mushrooms and cheese (the works).  They were a little overcooked in my opinion, but were fine with some hot sauce.  It’s pretty hard to ruin potatoes and cheese without completely burning them.

Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe is a quaint folksy place to come grab breakfast or lunch if you’re in the Chapel Hill area.  It’s popular among the local students, so expect to fight for a table, or you can just sit up front.  There are not a lot of vegetarian friendly choices (as per usual), but otherwise it is pretty good.  The prices are reasonable by Boston standards, but may be a little steep for a Waffle House clone (or progenitor?).  So, I’ll give it three and a half cheese sandwiches.

Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe
173 East Franklin Street
Chapel Hill, NC 27514 
(919) 929-9192

When I told people I was going down to Chapel Hill, I was almost universally recommended to go to Mama Dip’s.  Mama Dip’s is everything you think it is and more (unless you’re picturing a nouveau cuisine restaurant specializing in finger foods - then you’re way off)!  Some might call this soul food, others would call this early onset diabetes (or heart attack on a plate - depending on what you order).

Soul food by its very nature makes you feel really good whenever you eat it, only the problem is that you feel terrible after eating it 15-20 years later.  While I’m still young, I figure I’ll take as many chances as possible to eat unhealthy food before my doctor starts treating me like Bill Cosby.  Now that my complaining is out of the way, let’s get down to the grub.

I was told to get the fried green tomatoes, which were supposed to be delicious, and on the scale of deliciosity I would rate this a 7.  Unfortunately, the thing about fried green tomatoes is that you either love them or you hate them.  So, if you hate fried green tomatoes, you will probably hate these as well.  But if you love fried green tomatoes, you might be slightly disappointed in these.  These tomatoes are heavily breaded so that you can barely taste the tomato, which is disappointing, as I enjoy the taste of green tomatoes.  Nevertheless, the deliciosity is saved by the presence of a side of ranch dressing, which overcomes the overbreading (while time cures all wounds, ranch cures all flavors).  And yes, I am aware that I used deliciosity twice in this paragraph, and that deliciosity is not a word.  But if Domino’s can make up words, why can’t I?

Unfortunately, there are not a whole lot of vegetarian options available outside of the vegetable plate and a few starters (such as fried zucchini and pickles and the aforementioned fried green tomatoes).  If you’re vegan, you’re probably completely out of luck, as almost everything likely either has dairy or eggs in it.  I got the vegetable plate (which includes 4 vegetable sides and bread).  However, they gave me apparently the children’s vegetable plate (which is only three sides and bread).  I don’t know what Mama Dip’s was playing at, but the children’s vegetable plate was just the right size…  This plate is quite similar to what I got at Rocklands a few days ago, except with spinach casserole replacing the cole slaw.  What I had at Rocklands was superior in every aspect, though I did enjoy the spinach casserole and macaroni and cheese.  Overall, I enjoyed eating at Mama Dip’s, but I probably would have preferred it if I had gone for breakfast as there were more vegetarian options available for breakfast.  As a result, I’ll give Mama Dip’s two and a half cheese sandwiches.

Mama Dip’s
408 West Rosemary Street
Chapel Hill, NC 27516-2301 
(919) 942-5837