HPC Re-Opens!!!

The Highland Park Cafeteria, formerly known as the Casa Linda Cafeteria (and before that the Highland Park Cafeteria), is once again open for business at the Casa Linda location, and so far that business is booming. Many younger customers (between, say, forty and seventy) have added to the loyal following of older clientele. People in line reminisce about old favorites, and many of them are still available unchanged. The chicken fried steak with cream gravy is excellent – hand cut and battered, crispy on the outside, tender inside, and tasty. Selected veggies (spinach salad, black-eyed peas, corn) were satisfying, especially if you are nostalgic about home-cooking. Jalapeno cornbread and zucchini muffins were delicious as ever. A yummy-looking sugar-free pie was, in David’s words, “resistible”, and his favorite sour slaw was not among the salad choices. More importantly, the chocolate layer cake that has been a family birthday tradition has NOT been among the dessert choices. Otherwise, Dallas’s cafeteria gold standard was up to par and very welcome.

The presidential portraits are missing. Not an aesthetic choice, but actually mysteriously missing. A sign asks for any information on the whereabouts of the former pictures or on a source for replacing them. Another non-food change: the presence of a baby grand piano apparently fitted to play the digital equivalent of piano rolls. And no more salad-and-soup bar, which counts as a non-food change in my book. Or blog.

Susan