Charlottesville’s best restaurant, the definitive winner

My aunt is visiting Charlottesville to help with the hospital vigil. Yesterday I was giving her restaurant recommendations in town – trendy sushi restaurants, pan-Asian fusion cuisine, Spanish tapas bars, and French bistros she might like. The Floridian nurse taking my grandmother’s vital signs interrupted me to tell my aunt that she had eaten an excellent steak dinner out last week.

“Where was the restaurant?” I asked. “Belmont? Downtown? The Corner?”

“No,” she said. “It was somewhere off the highway. Up there off Route 29.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Was it a Japanese steakhouse? That teppanyaki place?”

“No,” she said. “It was right good. My husband and I, we got a big dinner for $11 apiece. I can’t think of the name.”

“I don’t know what it could be,” I said, surprised there was a tasty, reasonably-priced restaurant in town where I had never eaten dinner.

“I’ll think of it,” she said, packing up her thermometer.

This afternoon the nurse came into the room to hang more bags of antibiotics on the IV. I was eating grilled vegetables on a salad and my aunt was digesting her tri-colored omelet terrine.

“I thought of the name of that good restaurant,” the nurse said. “It was called the Golden Corral.”