WHERE HAVE THE CAFETERIAS GONE?
There are more than 6,000 restaurants in Central Florida. You can find just about anything your stomach desires.
Unless your stomach has a nostalgic craving for a tray of blue Jell-O, chicken parmesan, white rice, corn sticks and banana pudding — all served up before you even sit down.
That brings us, empty tray in hand, to this week’s Ask Orlando question.
“I loved the variety of food you can get at cafeterias, but they’re hard to find. Are there any in Orlando?”
Not really.
Oh, there are plenty of buffets where you can load a plate with everything from meat loaf to pickled chicken feet.
“I dig Sweet Tomatoes, actually,” Sentinel food writer Amy Drew Thompson said.
I might, too, if they allowed meat on the premises.
A lot of people dig Golden Corral. With all due respect to the Chocolate Wonderfall, may God have mercy on their souls and stomachs.
But when it comes to good, old-fashioned, industrial-scale a la carte dining in Orlando, cafeterias became extinct on Aug. 13, 2005, when the Piccadilly on East Colonial Drive shut its doors.
It was a day that will live in culinary infamy.
“This one’s like the Alamo,”
Piccadilly manager Al Morris told the Sentinel at the time. “This was the last bastion of cafeteria food in Orlando.”
If you don’t understand why customers were in mourning, you obviously never slid a plastic tray down a cafeteria serving line (school and prison lunchrooms don’t count).
Those lines first formed in America in the late 19th century. Instead of being bound by the menu of a greasy-spoon diner, the hungry masses were presented with a long row of mouth-watering options.
The concept really caught on in the South. J.A. Morrison opened a cafeteria in Mobile, Ala., and built an empire.
My family was like countless others. We’d hustle out of church on Sunday to beat the crowd to Morrison’s.
The dessert section was first. You were far more likely to put a piece of red velvet cake on an empty tray than a full one.
Glass goblets of red or green or orange Jell-O gleamed like tempting jewels. Then you slid into the main courses.
Would it be fried chicken or butterflied fried shrimp? Smothered pork chops or fish almondine?
The one thing it would not be was what my father usually got.
Liver and onions. This was long before “Silence of the Lambs” came out. But even as a child, I knew only a mentally disturbed cannibal would voluntarily consume an organ.
As Hannibal Lecter said, “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”
He would have liked Morrison’s.
What it lacked in fava beans it made up for with collard greens, carrot soufflé, fried okra and macaroni and cheese.
But the public’s taste for such high-carb comfort food waned. Morrison’s struggled and was bought by Piccadilly in 1998.
There were five Morrison’s in Orlando at the time. The one on Colonial was originally the Driftwood Cafeteria, then the Colonial Cafeteria.
It became a Piccadilly with the sale. Soon after, it became the only cafeteria in town.
The hungry masses were more into drive-throughs, Paneras, Pei Weis, sports bars with flat screen TVs and quinoa.
Piccadilly cooks couldn’t pronounce quinoa, much less serve it.
“It was like walking into your mama’s kitchen after you haven’t been there for a year,” Morris said when Orlando’s last cafeteria closed down. “And all the aromas, all the scents and all the warmness of family are the same.
“You just can’t get that everywhere.”
No, but you can get avocado toast for $10 nowadays.
I’ve probably gotten too wistful thinking about Morrison’s Mexican cornbread, but this week’s Ask Orlando questioner is onto something.
There should be a place on the dining menu for cafeterias. Alas, Luby’s, which is the Morrison’s of Texas, is $32 million in debt and shut down about 25 restaurants in the past year.
Piccadilly has 41 locations, which is 90 fewer than it had 20 years ago. But profits are up the past couple of years as it has modernized.
It now has takeout, an email club and sends out text alerts for daily specials. The problem is if you get one in Orlando, the nearest Piccadilly is in Jacksonville.
All we can do is hope for a cafeteria comeback. Maybe, just maybe, one will eventually find its way back to Orlando.
If it does, I’ll be so thrilled I might order liver and onions.