New restaurant Grits offers classic Southern food

Published 11:01 pm Tuesday, February 3, 2009

If you’ve got a craving for Southern-style food just like your momma’s, Milledgeville’s newest restaurant, Grits, is just what you need.

Located at 132 Hardwick St., the specialty restaurant is housed in the same building that Café South used to occupy, and the food is just as good — if not better.

Although the restaurant is only open during lunch hours, customers have flocked to the location since it opened a few weeks ago to taste the delectable Southern-style food, and owner Trey Britt has been overwhelmed by the enthusiastic response of the Milledgeville-Baldwin County community.

“You wouldn’t believe how happy people are that it’s open,” said Britt. “I really enjoy just getting to see so many different people throughout the day and the excitement that they bring. We have a line every day, and it takes about 12 minutes to get through the line. When we opened it up, I thought we would do OK, but I didn’t expect as big of a response as we got.”

The response to the restaurant has been surprising because the business hasn’t been advertising in the traditional sense.

“I think a pretty neat thing about it is that we haven’t really advertised,” he said. “We’ve just made nearly 300 T-shirts to advertise and people have heard about us by word of mouth.”

Britt, who is in the rental business, said the idea for opening the restaurant came about on a whim.

“Actually, I’m in the rental business and that’s a rental property that was foreclosed on and left sitting there. I thought to myself, ‘I could probably make this work,’” said Britt. “They had enough stuff there left over from Café South that it just made sense to open up a restaurant there, and it only took about two or three months to get the place back into shape.”

Former employees of the old Café South got wind that a Southern-style restaurant would be opening up at the location again and came by the when it was being fixed up to happily offer their services again, said Britt.

“All the pieces really came together,” he said. “It was more or less luck than anything.”

The restaurant serves up fried chicken every day, and many people have made compliments about how good the chicken is, said Britt.

“I’ve always been a fan of fried chicken and we modeled the recipe of our fried chicken on this famous fried chicken place in Memphis called Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken,” he said.

The restaurant’s daily selection of fried chicken and four additional meat entrees, as well as a different daily selection of accompanying side items, came about through a conversation Britt had with his friends.

“We really just sat around the house one day, had some drinks and I asked some friends what they’d want to eat for lunch,” said Britt. “Guys love meat so that’s why we have so much meat on our menu.”

With the restaurant’s array of side items such as mac and cheese, turnip greens, cornbread and many others, there’s sure to be something there to appease any taste buds.

The restaurant also offers a different kind of complimentary grits each day — such as cheese grits, sausage grits and even jalapeno cheddar grits — and soon the restaurant will be cooking up grits recipes from customers and naming the day’s selection after that customer, he said.

The restaurant also hopes to put together a cookbook that will include more than 50 different recipes for various types of grits, he said.

Despite the abundance of food that’s offered, the price is just right. A plate with one meat selection, two sides and a choice of bread will only cost you $6.

If you’ve got room for dessert, an additional $1.79 will buy you one of the restaurant’s two daily selections of classic, Southern dessert items such as peach cobbler or pecan pie.

Grits is open from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday and 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Sunday.

The restaurant has two private dining rooms and offers catering for events such as weddings and other special occasions. For more information, call 453-2520.