R.J. Barrel and Co., Canton, Mississippi ***

Great place for a beer and a pizza -- or a calzone -- or a homemade cinnamon roll. The guy who owns this place makes his own bread -- for pizza crust, for calzone, for cinnamon rolls -- from scratch -- and that's a rarity these days, especially in the South. We've never had much of a bread tradition down here except for biscuits and cornbread, and even those are either packaged or frozen these days, most places. So it was refreshing to actually walk into a restaurant and smell yeast bread baking. The place is very casual -- lots of Little Leaguers there the day we visited. Prime location right there overlooking the BEAUTIFUL Canton, Mississippi, town square. This place gets our recommendation -- if what you're looking for is casual and "Italian."

Harkin's Bakery, Canton, Mississippi **

What a neat little place, right there on the BEAUTIFUL Canton, Mississippi, town square -- what a perfect opportunity for somebody -- but Harkin's Bakery misses the mark. It's a shame, too, 'cause they come mighty close to makin' it. Their breakfast is same old, same old -- eggs, grits, biscuit, choice of bacon or sausage -- served on a STYROFOAM PLATE WITH PLASTIC UTENSILS. Serving on real china and using metal utensils would really bump the place up a knotch, and how difficult could that be? Then, if they added a little something to their breakfast offering -- something a little creative but not too -- this place COULD be a little gem. (I'm thinkin' eggs creole or somethin' like that.) As it is, it's pretty much same old, same old. The bakery offerings looked okay, but not like anything out of the ordinary. For a bakery, the breakfast biscuits oughta have been much better than they were.

Foscue House, Demopolis, Alabama * (and even one star is a stretch)

So my ol' man and I were driving across Alabama and it got to be lunchtime. We stopped at Foscue House in Demopolis to eat Sunday dinner. Big mistake. The building is very interesting -- built in 1840 -- but the food was downright awful. For $6.99 you got a choice of one meat (from among three offerings), two "vegetables," iced tea, and choice of cornbread or "roll." Dessert was extra at $1.50. The meat offerings were fried chicken, baked chicken and one other we can't remember. The "vegetable" offerings were -- get this -- rice and gravy, macaroni and cheese, "sweet potato cass," english peas, and "corn nuggets." Have you ever seen so many starches on any one menu?! Well, I had to think for a while before I figured out that "sweet potato cass" meant sweet potato casserole. I'm thinkin', Would it have been too much trouble to type EROLE? Anyway, I ordered the baked chicken, rice with no gravy, English peas and cornbread. The English peas were straight from the can. The baked chicken was the sort of baked chicken I despise -- slimey. How do folks do that -- cook slimey baked chicken? Everything about it was slimey -- the skin, the meat, the bones. Nothin' crispy about this bird, for sure. The rice was gummy and wasn't supposed to be. But the worst thing on the awfully bad plate was the thing they called cornbread. It was one of those rectangular cut-out squares, a block, of white, crumbly, from-the-refrigerator cold something-or-other. Beyond awful. Those folks either don't know or don't care what real cornbread is supposed to be. Cornbread can be a very fine thing. What I was served at Foscue House doesn't even deserve to be called cornbread. We declined the dessert, one offering of which was peach cobbler. I can't remember what the other offering was. During this meal we were not served butter, or a salad, or a slice of anything fresh or raw, as is usually the custom with Southern dinners. This whole meal was a good example of what I call "subsistence eating." It's the kind of thing I eat ONLY when I'm starving and there's nothing else to eat. Foscue House will have to change hands before we'll consider going back. And it's a shame, because the physical place is very interesting.