Restaurant Closing Blues
It’s been a hard few weeks. I know you all think I’m a grump and a curmudgeon about restaurants, but I really like the good ones. And this summer, we’ve lost two of them: The Cotton Mill and South by Southwest.
Sometimes, I try to brush off all the economic gloom and doom. Maybe I’ve listening to too much NPR, I’ll think. But it’s been obvious for months now that local restaurants are struggling, particularly the higher end ones, the ones with white tablecloths and the like.
South by Southwest didn’t have tablecloths, but it had a great run - 15 years. And many a local chef worked there, including Mary Haglund, the proprietress of Mary’s Of Course Cafe, and Starr Johnson, the owner of the now closed Starr’s New Southern Cuisine in Mocksville (which will hopefully open in Winston-Salem; last Starr told me, she is still trying to sell her building). South by Southwest’s owner, pat Burke, declined to go into why the restaurant was closing but blamed it at least in part on the economy. And in recent months when I’d been in there, things were slloowww. You used to always have to wait for a table at South by Southwest. Not so much lately.
Sweet Potatoes owners’ Stephanie Tyson and Vivian Joiner opened their second restaurant, the Cotton Mill, just last October in the Brookstown Inn. I’d link to my review but everything that was on our old website has disappeared into cyber space. I really liked the Cotton Mill’s food, in particular their generous bread basket that brimmed with a best hits list of Southern carbohydrates (benne wafers, cheese straws, tiny muffins and biscuits). I gave them 4 bells in January, and I’m a real tightwad with those things. The Cotton Mill’s last service will be tomorrow for dinner.
To be sure, restaurants need updates. Menus should stay fresh and chefs should stay energetic and creative - or perhaps they should get out of it. But in the case of the Cotton Mill in particular, it seems like things had barely gotten started.
