Shoney's of Greenville, Alabama: a Restaurant Review Lacking Meat

Shoney's is a popular American franchise known for its casual atmosphere, home style cooking, and reasonable prices. It serves basic American food and offers both a menu and a buffet from breakfast to dinner. Used to American food buffets with a little girth such as Barnhill's, Mama Blues, and Ryan's Steakhouse, I've always found Shoney's breakfast buffet to be at least acceptable. Through my travels, I've found that the quality of Shoney's food depends entirely on its location, individual staff, and owner.

Shoney's of Greenville, Alabama, is owned by Eric Ashford, who also owns the Shoney's in Dothan, Alabama, and the restaurant appears to offer the same food specials available at most Shoney's restaurants in the south. It definitely has protein available, but it certainly wasn't found on the lunch buffet when I visited on Labor Day. With an unsatisfactory buffet, lacking service, and a slight bug problem, this Shoney's will not be on my list of restaurants to visit ever again. Here were my major problems with this particular Shoney's restaurant:

Dirty tables/Restroom

Lacking Lunch Buffet

Slow Service

Bug Problem

Lying Employees

There were a few positive points I should make known:

Good tasting chicken (when it was there)

Low Buffet Price (5.99 for Lunch)

Low Menu Prices (The average was around five or six bucks for a nice sandwich.)

A Smiling Waitress

For a proper review of the restaurant, I'll now explain how these pros and cons came to exist. Here was the circumstance surrounding my recent visit to Greenville and the less than appealing buffet I found there:

My party of four had just enjoyed a terrific Labor Day weekend at Gulf Shores, and we were headed north when we found ourselves hungry for a big lunch. It was after 2pm, past the lunch rush, when we pulled off of the interstate and into a very conveniently placed Shoney's in Greenville, Alabama. My companions and I had enjoyed Shoney's breakfast buffet at different locations in the past, but we'd never been to Greenville and never had the lunch buffet. As we pulled in, we noted that the buffet was $5.99, a reasonable price for a good portion of food. However, I now believe we would have been better off stopping for overpriced Twinkies and cold sandwiches at the convenient store across the road.

When we arrived, we immediately ordered the lunch buffet with our drinks. We found a few pans empty at the buffet where items we later found to be macaroni and cheese and fried fish belonged. The only other meat on the hot bar was fried chicken. My group was tempted to leave at that point, but we decided to stay and enjoy a fried chicken meal. Three of us grabbed pieces of chicken and the fourth made a small salad first. By the time I'd set my plate down and walked back to the bar to make myself a salad, the chicken was gone. The only meat left was the chunked ham on the small cold bar intended for the salad. However, I found the ham had a strange, slightly soured taste and that the restaurant was out of my favorite dressing, Ranch, so I was left with the lacking hot bar and the two vegetable-based soup choices.

While the chicken tasted fresh and the corn muffins (also absent after our arrival) were exceptionally good, we found the meal lacking in options. We were in full view of the bar the entire time and asked on occasion when more food would be brought out. Those who asked were told that the chicken would be finished in ten minutes. My party decided that we should wait. After all, with the drink, we had just dished out over eight dollars for our meal. KFC would have given us more quality for that price. Also, one of us had not even eaten a hot plate yet.

We waited for over thirty minutes and observed an extremely lacking service. While the waitresses gave friendly smiles, they also delivered bad news to several customers in the restaurant. For example, an elderly man sitting across from our table had waited over forty minutes for his lone slice of lasagna, and he was forced to wait another twenty for the piece of bread he requested when his food was brought to him. This seemed a common trend amongst the tables. While the restaurant was not in any way packed, there were several customers left waiting for food, most of them waiting for the buffet to be restocked.

After our long wait, a small pan of fried fish was brought out. Having cooked thin fish fillets myself, I know that it does not take that no long to deep fry. I decided to try some of it while my friends waited for chicken. The fish was not of good quality, barely close to white at its center and very strongly scented.

At this point, one of my friend's found a large flying bug in her glass. Disgusted, another from my group shyly announced that she'd been wiping ants off of her arm for the entirety of our stay.

Less than pleased, we decided to give up on the chicken. It was brought out while we were paying for our bill. When I asked the hostess about the long wait, she told us the cook had been bringing out chicken but that the "people" were snatching it up so fast that she couldn't keep it cooked. I blinked at this flat-out lie and told her that we were sitting, facing the bar, staring at the chicken container the entire time. We had made no mistake, and she made no reply. No chicken had been brought out during a forty minute period.

Having enough, I requested an opinion form. None were available. Because I could hear from the kitchen that the waitresses were trying to correct a few mistaken orders, I decided to leave the chaos behind, grabbing up a business card as I left. When I arrived home, not only did I find that I could not go to the web site listed on the business card, but I also found that the main Shoney's website does not list its Alabama locations under its opinion forms, even though they're listed under the locations section.

After such an experience, I won't be visiting Greenville's Shoney's again unless I hear directly from the owner. In review, Shoney's of Greenville, like most of the Shoney's restaurants I've visited in the past, was a hit and miss establishment with the promise of good food at low prices but, in the case of Greenville's establishment, no follow-through.