The old-fashioned restaurants are dying out fast.
The Old Meeting House, a Tampa institution on Howard Avenue, closed recently after 56 years of serving Southern-style fare and handmade ice cream; the once-popular buffet-style cafeterias and their groaning platters of fried chicken and mashed potatoes have given way to sushi joints, salad bars and fancy chain restaurants.
Even some of the Latin stalwarts are history, such as Pepe's on Kennedy Boulevard, which closed not long ago.
An unusual survivor is Goody Goody, and its redoubtable manager, Yvonne Freeman, who has worked there in various capacities since 1947. On the strength of a little luck, a good hamburger and eight kinds of pie, the little hole in the wall is still struggling along.
The restaurant first opened in 1925, when Tampa was in the midst of the Florida land boom. In 1930, it moved to its "new building" on Florida Avenue downtown, where it still operates. Its ancient drive-in stalls, once bustling with young carhops, are deserted. The takeout window, once cluttered with orders, is emphatically locked. An occasional street person wanders by.
Freeman has spent most of her life, day after day, within its confines. She started in 1947 as a "curb girl" a couple of years after she graduated from Hillsborough High, and now, at 75, she is the manager, baker and half-day server.
"When I first came to work, the whole area was full of car dealers; it was an unbelievably busy place," she said recently. In those days, "curb service," or dining out of one's car, was popular, in part because women dressed up in hats and gloves to dine out, and when they weren't dressed up, they wanted to hide in the car.
People ate less during the meal itself — and more dessert, she said. "People used to come in and order a hamburger, a cup of coffee and a piece of pie. Now, they order a double hamburger basket, with fries and everything. I'm not surprised people are so heavy."
Inside, the restaurant is almost always empty, but it is bright with new paint and framed newspaper clippings detailing its long past. It still has its original tables and chairs, and the original green tile flooring.
The menu hasn't changed much over the years. Printed on a single sheet of paper, it offers hamburgers, cheeseburgers, chili dogs, BLTs, tuna-egg-and-macaroni salad, cool milkshakes and freezes. Mrs. Freeman bakes eight flavors of pie by hand, including apple, coconut, banana, lemon, butterscotch, pecan, chocolate and pineapple cream.
The restaurant offers breakfast, but it was so awful I suggest you skip it entirely, unless you're fond of gut-wrenchingly bad coffee and greasy eggs and grits.
Stick to the restaurant's signature dish, the proletarian hamburger. I tried the hamburger basket ($5.25), a hot, plain beef patty accompanied by french fries and coleslaw, with a sliced tomato and fresh lettuce. The burger was very good, made from quality meat, cooked just right so it was juicy and tender, served on a simple white bun. The french fries should have been hotter and crisper, and the fine-cut coleslaw tasted slightly bitter, but I downed both anyway.
I also tested the chili dog, a simple hot dog ladled with an equally unremarkable chili ($2.75). The dog looked as if it had been in the pot too long because it was wrinkled, the way your fingers look if you sit too long in the bath. Its chili covering was the color of used crankcase oil and bereft of any spice. However, I ate the whole thing quite happily because, although its individual parts were unremarkable, when joined together, the dish worked.
Alongside sat five fried onion rings, a menu item that used to be commonplace but now is a rarity. They were dipped in batter and flash-fried, and when I bit into them, they emitted a little column of steam and gave off a satisfying crackle.
A companion and I split a fat slice of coconut cream pie ($2.05), its meringue glistening and its thick filling the mellow tint of winter sunlight. It sat on a nearly perfect crust that reminded me of the pies I enjoyed at a Primitive Baptist church event — expert pie made by farmers' wives.
It turned out the pie was no coincidence; Freeman grew up in the country town of Zephryhills, northeast of Tampa, before moving here at age 13. The years have been awfully good to her. She's still trim, rosy and smooth-skinned, with a ready smile and beautiful white teeth. Long ago, she married and had five boys; she quit the Goody for 10 years to raise them. Then one day, she wanted some piece of furniture for the dining room and decided she'd go back to work.
"People said, 'Why did you come back to work?'" She laughed. "And I said, 'So I wouldn't kill those boys of mine!'" That was 1959, and she's been there ever since. Nineteen years ago, the Stayer family, which had owned Goody Goody for decades, sold it to local accountant Michael Wheeler, who now leases it to Freeman.
Her son, Douglas, managed to avoid early death at the hands of his own mother, and now spells her as Goody Goody's cook.
Does she ever think about retiring?
She paused to consider the question. "I'm not ill or anything," she said calmly. "I still make the pies and the onion rings. I've told my landlord: 'I'll stay for now.'"
This article appears in Nov 13-19, 2003.