Oh! Charlie

Aiken added another chain eatery to its lineup the other week, O’Charley’s. Tonight Donna and I sam­pled the place. The menu was pretty much like all the oth­ers in the casual din­ing cat­e­gory. There wasn’t any­thing there that you couldn’t get iden­ti­cally or really sim­i­lar some­place else. What­ever their sig­na­ture dish is, the one every one thinks of when they think of O’Charley’s, I hope we didn’t have it, because our din­ner was totally for­get­table. Mat­ter of fact, we have after one meal decided that we may not ever need to go back. The place was packed, but that is more attrib­ut­able to the fact that it is new, than the food and or atmosphere.

Not that the food was bad. We split a side salad, whole rack of ribs, fries and slaw. We started off with a bowl of potato soup that no less than two co-workers said was to die for, and I wouldn’t suf­fer through a paper cut for any more. More ched­dar cheese and bacon pieces than pota­toes served luke-hot. The ribs were adver­tised as “Fall-Off-The-Bone”, but they needed some coax­ing to let go of the bone. Fries are fries and the cole slaw was slightly bet­ter than average.

Within a mile of O’Charley’s is a Chili’s, a Ruby Tues­day, an Applebee’s and they are build­ing a Fatz Cafe which are all the same kind of eatery. Also within the same radius is an Out­back, a Red Lob­ster, an Atlanta Bread Com­pany, a Ryan’s, an IHOP, about a dozen dif­fer­ent fast food places and the usual smat­ter­ing of Chi­nese, Mex­i­can and Pizza places. I wish them luck, put they prob­a­bly don’t need it because although Donna and I prob­a­bly won’t ever darken their door again there are def­i­nitely enough oth­ers that will.