On a drive from Ohio to Georgia, I'd been excited to stop for lunch at a Cuban sandwich place in…read morePigeon Forge, Tennessee, that came highly recommended on Yelp. (Cuban sandwiches in Pigeon Forge?!! Yes, I know: WTF?!!) Anyway, I could not locate the frigging Cuban sandwich place. Apparently, it is illegal to display street numbers on Pigeon Forge's main drag, and I guess the Cuban cafe was too well hidden among the go-kart tracks, fighting lumberjack dinner shows (again, WTF?), Jesus stores located two doors down from sex-toy shops, video arcades, and the whole cornucopia of cheapo crapola that is Pigeon Forge. After a couple of U-turns in the area where I thought the Cuban spot was supposed to be, I could not escape Pigeon Forge soon enough and made a bee-line southward.
And I couldn't face Gatlinburg, either, so I hit its bypass. I proceeded in the crawling traffic through beautiful Smoky Mountain National Park. (To you Alabamians in the F-150, your garganturan vehicle will do just fine above 25mph in the quarter-inch of slush at the higher elevations.) I drove through sleepy and sad Cherokee, North Carolina, and past Sylva, seeing few places to stop for a bite and developing a seriously gnawing hunger.
Finally, I arrived in Franklin. Running a bit late and starving by this time, I thought "fast food," and I saw Bojangles. Bojangles!! I'd heard of the wonders of Bojangles fried chicken and biscuits for years, but for some reason had never been to one.
Well, Bojangles, you ain't no Popeyes. At least not at your Franklin, North Carolina location: bland, dry fried chicken that was barely above room temperature, bland "Cajun" beans that were mouth-scaldingly hot by contrast. The biscuit was pretty good, though.
Fresh iced tea was the best thing about this meal. And the fact that the whole lot was only $5 and could be scarfed down in about five minutes.
There were a couple of tables of old guys wiling away the mid-afternoon hours with coffee and iced tea. That sounds about right: probably five stars for that purpose.