After an afternoon chasing the Great Eclipse of 2017, we were back into the middle of a hot August afternoon and were making plans for the evening.  We had viewed the celestial event over in Pendleton and then went into Greenville for some late afternoon shopping.  Dinner time came around and I remembered in an article about great fried chicken in the South (in Garden-n-Gun), that there were two entries for Greenville.  The closest for us was Stax’s Original.  We showed up mid-dinner service, were greeted by the hostess and took two seats at the counter.

This diner began in the fifties and still uses the original counter and stools as the front of their dining room.  It is a meat and three, in the most classic of senses, filled with locals and with caricatures of some of the regulars on the wall.  I ordered fried chicken, mac-n-cheese, mashed potatoes and white gravy and butter beans.

Do you see the butter beans?  I didn’t either.  The plate first arrived with pickled beets at “seven o’clock.  Then, when I said something, they replaced those with pinto beans.  I pointed out that they were pintos, not butter beans, and they replaced them with an odd brown bean – speckled butter beans.  I gave up on the butter beans and asked for corn instead. 

The fried chicken was good, with a corn meal crust that flaked off in big sheets when you stuck a fork into it.  The mashed potatoes didn’t test like home made, but the white gravy was.  I love white gravy on biscuits and fried chicken.  When I was researching this post, I saw that their contact info has an aol.com address.  I love that.  I was tempted to e-mail them just to see what happened.  Who doesn’t like to hear “you’ve got mail!”