Last Sun­day Kim and I took the kids over to The Dixie House, a long­time estab­lished Dal­las restau­rant in the heart of the Lake­wood area. They were well known for their chicken-fried steak back in the day, but then they got bought out by another restau­rant chain, The Black-eyed Pea and were amal­ga­mated into the fold, only retain­ing their name and lit­tle else. After adopt­ing the same menu as their new owner they lost much of their sig­na­ture char­ac­ter and they really became just another Black-eyed Pea.

Which is sad. For the past few years or so every time I’ve eaten at the Black-eyed Pea the ser­vice has been ter­ri­ble. The food is *okay*, I sup­pose, and since there are few restau­rants around that still serve the Southern-style food that most of us Tex­ans grew up on it was like a strange oasis in a sea of Asian fusion and Cal­i­for­nia Pizza Kitchen-type places. Like I said, the prob­lem is the ser­vice is ter­ri­ble. Sev­eral weeks ago we went in, again on a Sun­day, and were sat fairly quickly, but then our wait­ress, who looked like she was charged with seven or eight tables, came by and said she’d be right back to take our drink orders. Five min­utes, then ten min­utes passed, no wait­ress, no drink order. We even­tu­ally flagged the host­ess and asked if we could just have some water and rolls, since the kids were get­ting antsy and angry.

Ten more freak­ing min­utes passed and no wait­ress to take our order. And so we left.

Jump back to last Sun­day. We’re sit­ting at The Dixie House. It’s around 1:30 in the after­noon and there are prob­a­bly eight tables full and three of the wait staff to shep­hard over them. Our wait­ress came, said she’d be right back with our drinks. Another table is sat in her sec­tion, they order drinks and then get them before we get ours. Five more min­utes pass, no drinks. We finally flag down our wait­ress and ask where our drinks are and she stum­bles over what we’d ordered. She then gets them out. The food is alright but still the ser­vice is incred­i­bly lacking.

So we’ve made a pact: no more Black-eyed Pea. Ever.

We’re never going there again. I’ve wasted far too much money on a crummy estab­lish­ment. I’m done with them.

So if any­one reads this and has a sug­ges­tion of where to find this mys­te­ri­ously hard to find South­ern cui­sine in the Dal­las area, leave a com­ment. If it’s good we might even ask you to go with us sometime.