"If it ain't fried, it ain't cooked!"

When referring to food, this, in all seriousness, is a popular saying down here in the South (but, of course, you have to say it with a thick Southern drawl). We experienced this first hand last Saturday night when we went out to eat at Greenbrier, a very down-home, local, ma and pop restaurant. Our city guide/realtor recommended it to us when we were here on our house-hunting trip a few weeks ago. Well, we felt we needed a reward after working so hard to get our house in order after we arrived and food is the best way to reward us. So we headed to Greenbriar not sure what to expect. It's a small-town-looking restaurant kind of in the middle of some farms across the street from a tiny gas station and a little church.

The meals we ate consisted of several deep fried foods; eight - count them - eight, to be exact. For you really healthy people, this place would be your worst nightmare. They started us off with the complimentary appetizer: all-you-can-eat hushpuppies (Emily couldn't remember the name and called them "puff dogs"). Dallin really liked them, as did the rest of us with the exception of Emily. We were told they're the best around these parts. For our main dishes we got the kids chicken fingers and fries. Mom ordered BBQ pork on a bun with onion rings (dang good ones, I might add). Danny and I decided to be brave with our orders and go very Southern. He got the whole catfish meal with fries, "whole" meaning he got it all but head and guts. I got the seafood sampler: catfish filet, crab cake, shrimp, oysters, and fries. Keep in mind that everything was deep fried except Mom's meat. In fact, when Dallin took a drink of water after chowing on some hushpuppies, I could see an oil slick appear on the surface of the water! Anyway, the food was pretty good, if you can handle that much deep fried stuff. The catfish was good, not too fishy. The oysters were totally NASTY - both taste and texture were almost too much for me and I have no desire to ever try those again. The crabcake was okay, in my opinion, but Danny and Mom thought they were worse than the oysters. Mom's pork was exceptional. To top it off, the nice owner gave us some 25-cent ice cream cones on the house. Despite what I thought was fairly likely to happen, we didn't die of deep-fried-food-induced heart failure in our sleep that night, but naturally we felt really heavy all evening and the smell of the oil stayed on our hands till the next day. We had a good time, though, trying out Greenbrier and having a night out like the locals.