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"FacebookPinterest\n\nUp in northern Harlem, where Manhattan ends and gentrification has yet to begin, concertina wire is strung along unlighted alleyways and buildings with intricately carved lintels stand boarded-up and unused. Here thrives the mini-empire of Charles Gabriel, three storefront restaurants (one with tables, one with stools, one for takeout) where the specialty is fried chicken so good it's rightly been described as the finest in New York. At the very least, none better is offered for sale at 4 A.M. \"Used to be pretty bad up here,\" says Gabriel, who started in the food business selling his southern-style cooking out of a lunch wagon, stopping at post offices, welfare offices, housing-police offices and barbershops. \"Used to be crime, drugs. I've been here about six years, and my door is open wide all night for takeout. There's no crime, no problems, no nothing.\"\n\nGQ, July 2001\n\nUp in northern Harlem, where Manhattan ends and gentrification has yet to begin, concertina wire is strung along unlighted alleyways and buildings with intricately carved lintels stand boarded-up and unused. Here thrives the mini-empire of Charles Gabriel, three storefront restaurants (one with tables, one with stools, one for takeout) where the specialty is fried chicken so good it's rightly been described as the finest in New York. At the very least, none better is offered for sale at 4 A.M. \"Used to be pretty bad up here,\" says Gabriel, who started in the food business selling his southern-style cooking out of a lunch wagon, stopping at post offices, welfare offices, housing-police offices and barbershops. \"Used to be crime, drugs. I've been here about six years, and my door is open wide all night for takeout. There's no crime, no problems, no nothing.\"\n\nI figured if Bill Clinton could come to Harlem to work, although I'm guessing he won't put in a forty-hour week, then I should at least go to Harlem to eat. The first time I drove there, I felt as I do whenever I venture somewhere I'm not certain I'm wanted, but I have to say I was a little ashamed of having that reaction to a locale within the United States. Harlem is unquestionably the most emotionally packed neighborhood in the country, both for white people who have no idea what to make of it\u2014and suspect the worst\u2014 and for black people who cherish it as a singular and irreplaceable element of their heritage.\n\nBig as it is, Harlem does not stretch from river (Hudson) to river (East). On one side is East Harlem (sometimes called Spanish Harlem or El Barrio), and on the other is Morningside Heights (home of Columbia University and another semi-retired administration figure, sometime-professor Al Gore). The southern boundary is 110th Street, and to the north is the Harlem River, which separates Manhattan from the Bronx.\n\nOne of the advantages of visiting a neighborhood with an abundance of vacant-housing stock\u2014that's what politicians call abandoned buildings\u2014is plenty of convenient parking. Charles Southern Style Kitchen is located on Frederick Douglass Boulevard between 151st and 152nd Streets, one of Manhattan's least commuter-congested blocks. I left my car curbside near the Harlem River housing project and headed for the $9.99 all-you-can-eat buffet, as good a bargain as can be found in Harlem. I arrived just as it opened, which gave me the advantage of being the only customer, and I had myself an unimpeded, old-fashioned fried-chicken feed. The chicken, made the way Gabriel's mother taught him back in North Carolina, is marinated, then coated with a slightly sweet, mildly seasoned batter and finally fried crisp in a pan big enough to hold a coop. After three or four pieces, I moved on to meatier fare, starting with smothered steak (a little tough) and smothered oxtails (soft and savory). The smothering was done with a routine brown gravy. The pork ribs in a thin, intensely flavored sauce were even better than I had reason to hope they'd be, considering they hadn't been cooked on wood. The collard greens were seasoned with smoked turkey instead of the usual fatback or salt pork, and when I asked Gabriel why, he explained that a lot of his customers had health concerns.\n\nI found that a comforting insight into contemporary Harlem life. It appears the most feared killer in the community these days is cholesterol.\n\n\n\nNew York City has hundreds of neighborhoods. In the borough of Manhattan, which includes Harlem, they were traditionally based on distinctions of class, wealth or ethnicity. (Those in the rural outer boroughs were more likely to evolve out of towns or villages or even the grandiose schemes of developers.) Just after World War I, Harlem began attracting blacks from throughout the United States, the beginning of a movement that transformed it socially, intellectually and artistically. The Harlem Renaissance lasted from the mid- 1920s until the early 1930s, and since then the neighborhood has cherished memories of Langston Hughes's poetry, Duke Ellington's jazz and Cotton Club revues. Harlem has also represented something more profound, the first glimmerings of black independence.\n\nThe end of the glory that was the Harlem Renaissance was a result of the Great Depression as well as societal changes. An event considered a milestone in the decline was the legendary riot of 1935. Residents took to the streets after reports circulated that a black teenager had been beaten to death for stealing a penknife from a store on 125th Street. Later, Harlem would be further diminished by laws mandating open housing. These allowed blacks to flee the city for the suburbs, just as white residents had always done.\n\nToday Harlem is experiencing a rebirth, one resulting in part from the mid blessing of gentrification. The New York Post, eager to make a socioeconomic trend sound like a Mississippi civil rights demonstration gone bad, headlined the phenomenon BLACKS FLEE A CHANGING HARLEM, whereas The New York Times opted for a milder WHITE FLIGHT, THIS TIME TOWARD HARLEM. When I took a friend who works on 130th street to dinner at Perk's Fine Cuisine, located on Manhattan Avenue, I mentioned that the town houses on the block might soon be worth millions. He corrected me: \"They already are.\"\n\nOur former president has taken office space at 55 West 125th Street, a brick-and-glass building that will never be recognized as part of any architectural renaissance. In the rear of the lobby is a snack bar serving 50-cent coffee so terrible that Clinton should have saved one of his pardons for the man brewing it. Directly across the street, standing empty, is Georgie's Pastry Shop, which once made jelly and glazed yeast doughnuts so sensational they will live in the culinary history of New York. If ever man and merchandise were made for each other, it was Clinton and those doughnuts.\n\nThe economic heart of Harlem is 125th street, a carnival of commerce, mostly of the discount sort. Music blares. Incense drifts. Children wander here and there, even on school days. Hawkers stop black women going about their business to offer myriad hair services, from cornrows to the Senegalese twist. The sale of hair, human and who-knows-what- else, rivals soul food as the leading local enterprise. Knowing our ex-president's partiality toward McDonald's cuisine, I checked out the nearest franchise, a McDonald's Express only a few steps from his door. Customers are welcomed with a bit of good news: \"Add bacon to any sandwich for only 40 cents.\" I waited fourteen minutes for my crispy-chicken meal (bland chicken, overabundance of mayo), an ordeal enlivened by an exchange between manager and employee (\"I heard the F-word, and I know it didn't come from you\"). I also determined the essential difference between a McDonald's and a McDonald's Express\u2014McDonald's Express is much slower.\n\nA minute or two walk from 55 West 125th is Mookie's No Pork on My Fork, a sandwich shop mostly memorable for the name, although the puffy pizza slice with beef pepperoni wasn't bad. The best-known pizzeria in the vicinity is Slice of Harlem, which has a wood-burning and an electric pizza oven. Knowing that wood-burning ovens produce superior pies, I stopped in on three different occasions, hoping to see a pie, a slice or even a sliver come out of that oven. Never happened. Each time, countermen assured me pies were being made in the wood-burning oven, when only the electric oven was being used. I didn't realize I was so dumb looking that even people who slice pizzas for a living feel comfortable lying to my face.\n\nI launched a fried-chicken crusade, tasting the fried chicken wherever it was sold on 125th Street, which is everywhere. I ate chicken until I was pluckin' sick of it. I started at the east end, where the street merges into the Triborough Bridge, and ended near the west end, at Broadway. The best chicken, as well as the most attractive deal, was at Mama's Fried Chicken, which is technically in East Harlem. For $2.99 I got one leg, one breast and a gargantuan biscuit neatly sealed in an attractive box I briefly considered saving to reuse at Christmas. (Too bad fried chicken leaves grease spots.) As I was approaching the west end, I came upon M&amp;amp;G Soul Food Diner (Motto: \"Old fashion' but good!\"). The fried chicken was too heavily breaded on my first visit, almost devoid of breading on my second and not particularly toothsome either time. I kept going back, although I skipped the chicken on visits three and four. I couldn't seem to keep away from the M&amp;amp;G. By the time I'd run out of reasons to return there, I'd decided it rivaled the Apollo Theatre as a 125th Street institution. The Apollo's credentials include the launching of Ella Fitzgerald's career and the showcasing of great singers from Bessie Smith to James Brown. The M&amp;amp;G's credentials are its corn muffins.\n\n\n\nI ate at ten sit-down restaurants in Harlem. Most specialize in traditional southern-style cooking, which means the food doesn't vary much, particularly not the vegetables and desserts. My favorite vegetables were the yams at Miss Mamie's Spoonbread Too, the collard greens at Charles Southern Style Kitchen and the macaroni and cheese at the M&amp;amp;G. In Harlem, macaroni and cheese is dry and fluffy, not cheesy and gooey, the way I grew up eating it. Desserts were generally of the heavy-duty, high-impact, overly sweet, stomach-thudding sort. Most of the time, if I had closed my eyes while eating, I couldn't have distinguished the bread pudding from the sweet-potato pie.\n\nPerk's Fine Cuisine made my favorite two desserts, a maximum-density bread pudding raised beyond blandness by an intense, lip-smacking brandy sauce, and a peach cobbler served with a frozen whipped cream that was Harlem's answer to Italian semifreddo.\n\nOne of the newest restaurants in the neighborhood is Bayou, which has received considerable attention because it reflects the changes coming to pass. The cooking is mainly Creole (refined French-Spanish-African) and Cajun (unrefined French-southern), and the brick walls are adorned with unevocative photographs of the Louisiana bayous. The night I went there, about half the clientele was white, and an exquisitely beautiful, desperately thin, fine-boned, multiracial hostess stood by the door, barely managing a weak smile of greeting. It felt so SoHo to me.\n\nI was seated at one of the unusually lofty banquettes, which caused me to loom over my guest, who sat across from me in a standard-height chair. Since the guest happened to be my wife, I enjoyed the unfamiliar feeling of supremacy. My shrimp, served in a \"red r\u00E9moulade sauce,\" were overly refrigerated, and the red cocktail-style sauce seemed straight from a midtown steak house. Other dishes were better conceived, although two of them contained aged crawfish too overripe to eat. I pushed aside my crawfish \u00E9touff\u00E9e after a single bite, and it was removed by the waitress without a word of contrition. My wife's shrimp creole, essentially shrimp in a tomato-pepper sauce, was good enough to have found its way north from New Orleans, and a side dish that tasted like warm semi-fermented cabbage was Harlem's best nontraditional vegetable.\n\nJimmy's Uptown, sister restaurant to the highly publicized Jimmy's Bronx Cafe, looks like a converted firehouse from the outside. Inside it has undulating white curtains and light fixtures resembling Chinese lanterns, sort of Ian Schrager by way of Shanghai. I walked in with friends on a Friday night and felt the palpable, arresting shock of Harlem at its liveliest and most attractive.\n\nThe first hour of our meal was perfect. A hostess emerged from the multitudes of revelers to seat us precisely on time. Perusing the menu, the most enticing in Harlem, was an ercise in happy anticipation, filled as it is with such alluring twists on old favorites as crab-and-corn fritters with honey-lime drizzle and herb-crusted pork tenderloin with plantain bread pudding. We devoured the contents of the breadbasket\u2014mini corn muffins, cheddar biscuits and fennel-raisin bread. I couldn't have been happier. Then came misfortune. The food showed up.\n\nI'd like to think the problem was a kitchen overwhelmed on a torrid Friday night, but that wouldn't account for the mediocre quality of the ingredients. The dishes that weren't tasteless were overcooked, an exception being the fritters, which were raw inside. A lobster-and-shrimp \"martini\" reeked of raw garlic. A macaroni-and-cheese souffl\u00E9, an inspired concept, was fatally dried out. A pork tenderloin was gray. A whole deep-fried snapper was so overdone it billowed steam. No restaurant came closer than Jimmy's Uptown in providing a prototype of what Harlem might one day become, and no restaurant disappointed me more.\n\nI hadn't heard a word about the food at Perk's Fine Cuisine, despite its self-aggrandizing name. I decided to go for this reason: A recent arrest of ex\u2013New York Knick and current Miami Heat forward Anthony Mason took place on the street outside the front door. Mason has gotten in trouble at other places, and for much worse crimes than the misdemeanor assault charge he faced after leaving Perk's, but I'm not brave enough to dine at establishments where he has allegedly committed felonies. The main attraction of Perk's is a long, polished, sophisticated bar that must have attracted Richard Roundtree types back in the '70s. The dining room is more modest, with a tile floor and smallish tables. A friend and I were waited on by Mary, who quickly became my favorite Harlem waitress. Each time she had a point to make, she emphasized it by poking me in the shoulder. \"Are the crab cakes any good, Mary?\" \"Very good.\" Poke. Poke. (In fact they were almost as good as she said.) Mary spent considerable time defending Mason, a favorite of hers. Mary's take on the arrest: \"Anthony Mason didn't do no fighting.\" She also told us Clinton's advance security team had shown up to check out Perk's.\n\nMy personal Perk's dining tip: Any dish that's stuffed is worth ordering. The catfish was packed with big chunks of shrimp and crabmeat. The roast chicken came with a savory corn-bread stuffing so irresistible I begged Mary for the restaurant's recipe. She refused, but did offer her own: Stove Top stuffing, crumbled corn bread, eggs, onions, country sausage.\n\nI asked her what Mason ate when he was at Perk's, and she said, \"I always serve him champagne. He doesn't order food.\" I told her I wanted a bottle of Mason's favorite, and she looked at me skeptically, unfavorably comparing my financial status to his. \"He always orders the best,\" she said. Locked in the wine vault, safe from ne'er-do-wells like me, was Veuve Clicquot's La Grande Dame and Taittinger's Comtes de Champagne.\n\nLondel's is a supper club that looks like a period piece, although it's been around only since the '90s. The dining room walls are filled with African-American art, the chandeliers resemble grappling hooks, and the chairs are the black lacquered kind prized by Asian restaurants. \"This looks just like my parents' house,\" said a friend who came with me. She described Londel's as a gathering spot for the black bourgeoisie, insisting that if the television in the bar hadn't been tuned to sports, the customers would be clamoring for reruns of The Cosby Show. The menu includes a long list (without prices) of cabana-boy drinks, the sort served poolside in subtropical resorts. The three of us had two apiece, and they cost $55. Serves me right for ordering a Rhumba Jam in Harlem. The food was simple but generally well-prepared, the one exception being rubbery stuffed clams in an anonymous sauce. The fried chicken was the most admirable of the entr\u00E9es, although it reminded me of one of those Oprah recipes for chicken cooked in the oven that comes out tasting fried. The steak was thick and juicy but cut from supermarket-quality meat, and the prawns were remarkably overpriced\u2014four not-very-jumbo specimens for $19.95.\n\nThe three of us shared a slice of sweet-potato pie, a selection I hadn't realized was fraught with ethnological impact. My third guest said, \"It tastes like pumpkin pie,\" which sounded like an endorsement, but then he patiently explained to me that only white people eat pumpkin pie and comparing sweet-potato pie to pumpkin pie is no compliment.\n\n\n\nIn New York City, the most famous restaurant north of 96th Street\u2014where most Manhattan residents believe the civilized world ends\u2014is Rao's. Located at the corner of Pleasant Avenue and 114th Street, Rao's has been impossible to get into since 1977, when New York Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton praised its red-sauce cuisine. It's a remnant from the days when East Harlem housed more than 80,000 Italians in overcrowded, six-story tenements.\n\nI can't get in. Nobody can, other than regulars. I wrote about Rao's in the late '80s for another magazine, and though my story hangs on the wall, I have no illusions of it earning me anything but a friendly greeting from Nick Zaloumis, the bartender at Rao's for the past quarter century. Two friends and I were on our way to a restaurant in northern Harlem called the Flash Inn when I suggested we stop at Rao's for a drink.\n\nNick seemed glad to see me. Frankie Pellegrino, the owner, was away, and one of my friends overheard the substitute host whisper to a waiter, \"See that guy over at the bar, the one who wrote the story on the wall? He probably thinks he's getting a table tonight.\"\n\nThat's when I became fed up. I looked around and decided the regulars, with their once-a-week or once-a-month or once-a-millennium tables, were way too smug. The same went for the employees, except Nick. They have the easiest jobs in the world, serving the same food that's been on the menu for decades to the same people who have been coming for decades. I called a fellow I know who has a once-a-month table and told him I was tired of the whole Rao's act. I said it probably wasn't any good anyway since the passing of Vincent and Anne Rao. He said I was wrong. \"Look,\" he said, \"I liked it the first time I ate there, thirty years ago. Like everything else, including sex, it was better the first hundred times than the next hundred times, but I love it, and I've never taken a person there who didn't love it.\"\n\nIf the food is as good as he says, that means the fish salad (shrimp, calamari, crab and lobster in a lemon sauce) is unparalleled and the pasta with sausage and cabbage is as good a red-sauce dish as exists on earth. Still, Rao's had a sweetness in the old days that I doubted existed anymore.\n\n\"I think you have to analyze yourself, look into yourself,\" said the regular. \"Here you are, a guy with a story on the wall, you can't get in, Frankie hasn't called and offered you a table every Thursday, your face is pressed to the bars, and you've developed a raging resentment.\" He had one more point to make. He wanted me to know that with his contacts, he could get tickets to the Broadway hit The Producers anytime he wanted and I could not.\n\n\n\nNo restaurant in Harlem is more evocative than the Flash Inn, located just across the Harlem River from Yankee Stadium and a few blocks from where the Polo Grounds stood until it was demolished in 1964 to make way for public housing. The red-jacketed waiters remember the days when the Flash Inn was the unofficial after-innings clubhouse of the New York Giants, although Yankee players stopped in, too. The night we went for dinner, shortly after not being offered a table at Rao's\u2014not that I wanted one\u2014one of my guests said, \"Back in the days when the Yankees and the Giants were both playing at home, you could stand outside the restaurant and hear the roar from both crowds.\"\n\nOur waiter led us to a prized corner table, available because the restaurant was almost empty. The view was unparalleled: Yankee Stadium outlined against a steel gray South Bronx sky. The food was fine, particularly the smoked duck with hoisin sauce, quite an avant-garde appetizer for an establishment that was mostly Italian for much of the twentieth century. I ordered a special of the day, surf and turf, which seemed the right thing to do. The steak portion of my combo wasn't filet mignon, as promised, but otherwise I had no complaints. With dinner we drank a soft, lovely 1985 Domaine de la Gaffeli\u00E8re, a bargain at $56. We liked it well enough to ask for a second bottle, which our waiter said was impossible because the owner had locked up the wine cellar for the night and gone home with the key.\n\n\"He doesn't trust you?\" I asked him.\n\n\"He doesn't trust the bartender,\" he replied.\n\nThat night, I hasten to point out, the bartender was not Cleo Hayes. I hadn't even heard about her yet. She is a former dancer at the Apollo Theatre and the Cotton Club who bartends at the Flash Inn two afternoons a week. A friend of hers tipped me off, and I returned on a Thursday to meet her.\n\nThe first comment I made after introducing myself was that she looked like Lena Horne. That was a mistake, although I don't know why anybody wouldn't want to look like Lena Horne. \"People say that to me, and it's funny because Lena and I have known each other since we were in our late teens but we were never thought of as looking alike,\" Hayes said. She started dancing at the Apollo in 1934, when she was 19, and she was in the theater when the riot of 1935 began. \"They said a black kid had been roughed up for stealing from Woolworth's,\" she said. \"The riot started about five thirty or six o'clock, and I remember that I was frightened. You could hear them throwing things against the stage door. I didn't know what a riot was until then. We stayed in the theater until three o'clock in the morning, and by the time they let us out it had begun to simmer down. In truth, nothing happened to the kid. He didn't steal anything, and he hadn't been beaten up.\"\n\nHayes is a small woman, about five three, and she was wearing a red striped polo shirt, jeans and a Yankees cap. Business was slow. I had a ginger ale poured from a single-portion bottle, the way bars with class serve soft drinks.\n\nShe told me she grew up in Greenville, Mississippi, and worked briefly in Chicago before making her way to Harlem. From the sixteen-girl chorus line at the Apollo she went to the Cotton Club, and in 1938 she toured South America with the Cotton Club Show. She remembers a lot about Harlem, including the restaurants and clubs that didn't welcome blacks as patrons, not during the Harlem Renaissance and not for a long time afterward. Even the Cotton Club had a strictly white clientele, except for a few black celebrities such as Bill \"Bojangles\" Robinson, Cab Calloway and Joe Louis. In particular, she cherishes her memories of the heavyweight champ. \"He was really a shining light,\" she said, leaning on the bar, for a moment not wary of my presence. \"He brought his championship to Harlem. He stood on the balcony of the Hotel Theresa on 125th Street and showed the belt, and people were trying to get close for blocks around.\"\n\nShe asked me if I remembered the Hotel Theresa, and when I said I did not, she sighed.\n\n\"There was no television in those days,\" she continued, \"and everybody listened to his fights on the radio, and when his fights were over people opened their windows and their doors and rushed out on the streets. There was so much noise. It was the same after he lost to Max Schmeling; the streets were full, but you couldn't hear a sound.\"\n\n\n\nAmy Ruth's, Miss Mamie's Spoonbread Too and the renowned Sylvia's, the Harlem restaurant most often visited by tour buses, cater to the concept that a restaurant associated with a southern black woman, real or imagined, sounds too good to pass up. I tried all three. Miss Mamie's, owned by former model Norma Jean Darden, was the only one to serve an agreeable meal.\n\nAt Amy Ruth's, I asked the waitress whether she thought I should have the chicken and waffles, a house specialty, or the chicken and dumplings, a special of the day. She said, \"I don't know. I don't eat chicken.\" I ordered chicken and dumplings, cheese grits, collard greens and lemonade. After a few bites and a sip or two, I asked for the check. I can eat almost anything when I'm hungry, but I couldn't eat this. The chicken was cold, the dumplings half-cooked, the lemonade worse than the tap water and the grits devoid of discernible cheese. The collard greens, the only tasty item, were lukewarm. The manager was dismayed by my loss of appetite and refused to let me pay. I left a nice tip.\n\nSylvia's is the flagship restaurant of Sylvia Woods, who bills herself as the \"queen of soul food.\" Her name is emblazoned on the front of the restaurant eight different ways, including once in marquee lights. Inside, Sylvia's resembles an unkempt, old-time politicos hangout. The walls are covered with hundreds of photos, clippings, posters and magazine covers, almost all slightly askew. It looks as though a tremor hit Harlem a decade ago and nobody got around to straightening up.\n\nThe waiters were friendly enough, in a distant, we-know-we're-dealing-with-tourists sort of way. They got most of what the four of us ordered wrong, but the food wasn't well-prepared enough for us to care. I was interested in seeing how a \"Harlem-style\" waffle compared with a \"California-style\" waffle. They were exactly alike: thick and spongy. The brown gravy was bland, the yams insanely sweet, the grits lumpy, the salmon cake filled with dark, overcooked fish. Nothing I tried at Sylvia's wasn't better elsewhere.\n\nMiss Mamie's is near the corner of 110th Street and Columbus Avenue, which has the potential of becoming one of the nicest locations in Manhattan. The restaurant is across from Morningside Park (no longer deadly), a few blocks from Central Park (never as bad as its reputation) and in sight of the back end of the majestic Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the largest church in the United States. Still, the location remains dreary, and Miss Mamie's is a bright spot. The chrome-edged tables are yellow, the chairs green and the bric-a-brac bright red. When I mentioned to my waitress that I was thinking of having catfish, she flinched. I asked why, and she said, \"I don't like catfish.\"\n\nI was learning an essential difference between midtown waiters and Harlem waiters. In midtown they'll insist that every menu item reflects the genius of the chef, while in Harlem the food better be what they like or they're having no part of it.\n\nI started with Miss Mamie's Seafood Gumbo, which wasn't true gumbo but rather a thin, dark seafood broth with rice and a few shreds of fish. For an entr\u00E9e, I ordered the sampler, which included nicely fried shrimp, too dry fried chicken, pork ribs slathered with a syrupy sauce and admirably meaty short ribs. I'm a lemonade lover, and I ordered it wherever it was alleged to be homemade. None was memorable, but Miss Mamie's was the best.\n\n\n\nOn my first visit to the M&amp;amp;G, I sat at the L-shaped Formica counter, noting that fully a quarter of the stools were missing. I blamed decrepitude. By the time I returned for a third lunch, they were back, which I attributed to a fine maintenance program.\n\nEverything at the M&amp;amp;G appears about a half-century old, except the jukebox and a few of the waitresses. Off to the side of the counter is a lemonade dispenser filled with something green I never saw anybody order, and in the middle of the room is a coat rack I never saw anybody use. When I mentioned to a friend who joined me at lunch that he was eating with his coat on, he said, \"The only person who isn't is you.\"\n\nThe cooking at M&amp;amp;G is unpredictable, varying from shift to shift, but the split, buttered, grilled homemade corn muffins are awe-inspiring. My friend found them so riveting he spoke of little else for weeks. The ladies behind the counter wear hairnets and aren't in much of a hurry to distribute food, which bothered me until I sank into the placidity of the place. The M&amp;amp;G is for folks who have a little time on their hands and don't mind being waited on by a staff that acts as though it has all the time in the world. It feels like an eating spot in a sleepy southern town where travelers have some eggs and biscuits while waiting for the bus to Savannah.\n\nDuring one of my meals, a schoolgirl came into the restaurant, put a few dollars in the jukebox and climbed up on a stool. She opened her lined notebook and sat doing homework while eating pancakes and grits and listening to rhythm and blues. When I was at the M&amp;amp;G, I swore I caught the scent of magnolias in the air."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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