Adventure Dining

I get to do a bit of traveling around the state with my job, mainly in the spring/early summer for site visits with my grantees.  I find these trips quite interesting, not being from Alabama, because I really get to see the state. And I am quite sure that if it were not for my job I would have no clue where any towns, aside from the major ones, are in the state.  

I had 2 site visits yesterday, one in Birmingham and one in Huntsville, which is where we ended up for lunch.  The office we went to was a couple of blocks from the downtown courthouse square.  It is a really cute downtown.  I have been there before but they were working on re-doing the sidewalks for what seemed like years.  This year it had been completed and it is now a delightful square filled with historic landmarks, lawyers' offices (conveniently placed across the street from the courthouse), and of course cute, non-chain restaurants.

Downtown Huntsville

Historic I. Schiffman Building where American actress and talk-show host Tallulah Bankhead (1902-1968) was born and lived early in life.

Since these site visits are in such random towns, we usually have 2 choices for lunch: familiar chains or random, local hole-in-the-wall joints.  We like to opt for the latter and have settled on calling this practice "adventure dining".  We never know what we are going to get, but it is usually quite an adventure.  We have ended up at some great places, like the Basketcase in Dothan (southeast AL), or the place on the bay in Mobile (can't remember the name of it but hopefully we will go there next week when we are down there) which we go back to every time we are in those cities, and some not so great places like the BBQ place that charged $3 for a BBQ sandwich and $3 for one side, oh yeah and did I mention they ONLY take cash?  NOT cool....this is 2011!

As I said, we were in Huntsville yesterday and had a wonderful adventure dining experience.  We drove around the square and spotted a little Greek place called Papou's.  I didn't recall ever having been to an authentic Greek restaurant so we decided to give it a try.  

It was EXTREMELY authentic.  I wish I had taken a picture of the inside.  It was like stepping into a cafe in Greece (or what I would image that would be like).  The walls were painted bright blue and they had giant columns painted randomly on the walls.  They had the HUGE (wall-sized) murals of the Greek coast and even had some statues placed randomly around the restaurant.  

The food did not disappoint either.  I had one of their daily specials:  Yia Yia's Chicken.  It was baked chicken seasoned with lemon juice, oregano, and garlic.  It came with some kind of stuffing that had a delicious hint of cinnamon to it; orzo, which looked like giant rice pieces that were more like pasta with finely chopped olives and red peppers, tossed with some balsamic vinegar; and spinakopita which was a layered filo pastry filled with spinach, scallions, dill and feta cheese.  Did I mention the entire meal was FANTASTIC?!?!  I would go back there for sure!  

Spinakopita