This place is apparently super popular with locals, but it unfortunately missed the mark for me…read more
We were passing through and saw that this place had great reviews and almost everything else in the area is a chain. We stopped in and started reading the menu board and the lady at the counter just stared at us. We decided on what we wanted even though we had some questions about what was on the menu board. (What comes on a phriends burger? What are the tots loaded with?)
My brother ordered a NC style pulled pork sandwich (Cole slaw and hot sauce) and some tater tots, and I ordered the potato salad and a chicken Philly. We both ordered a drink, and we ordered a pecan dessert to split, but when we had asked her what it was, she had no idea. Luckily, it was good and ended up being a pecan topped cinnamon roll.
One of the reasons we know that this place caters to locals is because she didn't give us cups, they were sitting over by the drink machines, but she didn't tell us to grab them. So when my brother asked her for the cups, she gestures and tells him "they're over there." So as we ate, we realized that the locals know to grab their cups and coffee and then pay for it, we had no idea. We would have grabbed them had she told us to.
I started with half of the Philly while my brother ate half of the pulled pork. I liked the Philly, he thought the pulled pork was just okay. We then tried the potato salad and it was completely inedible. It is probably the worst potato salad I have ever tried, and I unfortunately can't even place what we hated so much about it because neither one of us could stomach another bite. It looks beautiful, but it was very dry and sort of astringent. It was not pleasant. We then traded sandwiches and I didn't care for the pulled pork, so my little brother tried to finish it, but whatever flavor sticks with you from the potato salad then just ruined the taste of the pork, so he couldn't eat it anymore. The tater tots were FIRE though, so hot and crispy and perfect. Those were crazy good. The Philly was served in really thin parchment paper or something, so we did grab a paper towel to wrap the other half of the sandwich in when we left, and it ended up completely soaking through the paper towel and onto the car floor we had it on.
Overall, the food ranged from okay to absolutely-not-okay, the service was "meh", and the price was a bit high for the quality of the food. There aren't a ton of options here and I could definitely see why people would swing here for a turkey sandwich before going hunting, rather than stopping at like dominos, but I almost wish we had just grabbed a sandwich at subway or food lion.