THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 23, 1995 TAG: 9507210266
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Random Rambles
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Tony Stein
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
Some years back, I interviewed veteran TV host Art Linkletter, and he dropped a dandy quote on me. He said, ``Things turn out best for those who make the best of the way things turn out.''
Art Linkletter, meet Patti Patillo. She proves your point. Her job burned down 10 years ago, and she made the best of it. Her thriving Chesapeake restaurant, the Courthouse Cafe, just celebrated its 10th anniversary.
Until the phone rang at her house at 5 a.m. the morning of March 19, 1985, Patti was a waitress at the Second Alarm, a place on Shore Drive in Virginia Beach. She was a 34-year-old Roanoke native on her own after a divorce. She'd been at the Second Alarm for eight years.
Then the phone rang. The message was that the restaurant had burned. ``It had,'' says Patti. ``Almost to the ground. I had a very sick feeling. I was out of a job.'' But she wasn't out of ideas and ambition.
``For years, I had wanted to own a restaurant,'' she says. She geared up her ambition and got the word that a tavern in the Wilson Village shopping center in Great Bridge was for sale. Patti borrowed $15,000 from her brother and financed another $35,000 with a company called Southern Amusements.
``The day I opened, I was broke,'' she says. It was July 8, 1985. The ex-tavern had been converted into a family restaurant. Goodbye, pool table. The front of the place had been opened up with a big window, and Patti had installed a no-ball cap rule. The name came from her lawyer, Pete Babalas of Norfolk. ``Courthouse Cafe. I hated it,'' Patti admits now. But Babalas figured it might attract people from the courts and city offices a few blocks away.
So Babalas gave her a name, but nobody gave her a smooth first day. When the doors opened at 11 a.m., there were no printed menus. The cash register wasn't working and the kitchen had definitely not gotten it all together. Patti remembers that Circuit Court Judge William Forbes had to wait an hour and a half for his tuna cold plate. Forbes obviously tempers justice with mercy. Despite that start, he's still a customer, Patti says.
She spent that first day being sick. With good reason. ``For instance, the back door kept blowing open, and the wind put out the fire on the gas stove. We could hardly even boil water.''
But she and the restaurant have survived. Much better than survived. Ask her to characterize the business today and she firmly calls the Courthouse Cafe ``very successful.'' One factor, she thinks, is that the menu stands on tried-and-true ground. The food isn't going to be fancy, but it's going to be good. Her particular prides are the prime rib, the stuffed flounder and the she-crab soup.
I spent several years as a restaurant reviewer, and I know that it's a mountainous challenge to keep the quality of the meals up night after night. But consistency is one of the Courthouse Cafe's true virtues, maybe because there are two guys in the kitchen who have been with Patti a very long time. One cook, B.J. Jackson, was there right from the start. His brother, Larry, came a month later. Another really long-term employee is waitress and bartender Rita Walck, who signed on two months after the opening.
As for Patti herself, away from the restaurant is never quite away from the restaurant, mentally anyway. ``I'm famous for calling while I'm on vacation,'' she says. ``It drives my people wild.'' She notes that if there is a real constant in the business it is that catastrophe always comes on a busy weekend night.
Like one woeful Saturday when an employee put Drano down a stopped-up drain. Another employee didn't know that and started cleaning the sink with a Clorox solution. The mix produced fumes that routed the clientele and brought the poison-control folks on the run.
It has been a good 10 years, though, and if I'm going to eat in Great Bridge, it's usually the Courthouse Cafe. Or HoHo for Chinese, or Chesapeake Pizza for pizza. However, I will admit that your stomach and my stomach may not agree. I have learned that reviewing restaurants can be hazardous duty.
Case in point: My favorable review of a new restaurant came out in the afternoon paper. At 1 o'clock the next morning, my phone rang. Before my brain fog lifted, the caller told me he eaten at the restaurant at my recommendation and it was terrible. Therefore, I was a dunce, a dolt and a disaster.
If you disagree with my opinions, please don't call me at 1 a.m. I'm just as much of a dolt, dunce and disaster at, say, 9:30 a.m., and I'm a lot more cheerful. by CNB