Carol’s Restaurant, Bakery and Inn

This place led me to get a Unilocal account. I had always gone to Unilocal for help, but Carol’s really made me want to sign up and get the word out. There was a buffet thingy and my coworkers loved everything they ate. There was chicken and noodles. I am vegetarian and was very content with my food as well. We are roofers who, throughout the course of our careers, have tried every locally owned eatery in Franklin, Hardin, Hamilton and Grundy counties. This is where it’s at.

I went here one night to meet all of the people who share genes in common with my boyfriend… on his mom’s side, anyway. I would love to give this place 5 stars, because it’s kind of cute and quaint, and it’s on a kind of cute and quaint street in a kind of cute and quaint town. This might come off as patronizing but I don’t mean it that way. I’m from LA where everything is bustling and loud, and so this restaurant and town were quite different from what I’m used to. Anyhow, I can’t really give anything better than 3 stars for a couple reasons.
Firstly, the food. I ordered something that wasn’t technically on the menu so I’ll put that aside for a moment, but the people around me didn’t seem too pleased with their selections. Dan’s sister ordered the cheese enchiladas, and her opinion was that they tasted like nacho mush with no texture, and not much flavor. Dan ordered some kind of giant sandwich (they make their buns in house, so that’s a credit to them), which he classified as fair. I’m not sure what his mom ordered, but I believe she was less than thrilled with hers as well. As for me? I ordered black olives, tomato, and lettuce on toasted wheat bread. I’m sure it was originally a BLT or something, and I just swapped out the bacon for olives, but I liked it. I’m a simple girl, though, and I’d like this anywhere. What I didn’t appreciate so much was the way the server stared at me. Open mouthed.
Which brings me to the service. I am quite used to being looked at like I’m stupid when I order turkey sandwiches with no turkey, or when I order a tomato caprese with no mozzarella, or a BLT with no bacon. It’s strange, I know. I get it. I understand that I am asking that the main part of the sandwich be kept off of it. Can we just let me deal with that, though? Do you have to stare at me like that? I can empathize with the confusion, but there comes a time when we just need to move on. Other than that, a few of us were made to wait quite a bit longer than others for our meal… to the point where half of the party was done eating by the time some people even got their plates. This, maybe, can be attributed to the fact that we were quite a large group; we took up almost the whole room. The younger server did seem a bit bewildered by the whole affair.
Now, I don’t want to be one of those «poison the well» reviewers. The server who had not taken my order did make a point to approach me and ask how my sandwich was, which I take to mean that the whole staff thought the request to be odd. I thought this was funny and I appreciated her caring enough to ask. The dining room was clean, if a little bare feeling, and the bathroom smelled like soap. So, there were things I liked, and I’m sure out of the 40 in my party that night, there were people who enjoyed their food and experience very much.