Dining at Piccadilly Cafeteria these days is like reading Thomas Wolfe: You can’t go home again.
Bidding on Louisiana’s common man culinary emissary to the South begins this week, following the company’s filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last fall.
My childhood, like so many others, is filled with countless memories of Piccadilly. There was always something about the spectrum of Jello colors that beckoned me to its geriatric filled dining rooms.
Being able to examine what I would consume visually before I was forced to eat it always appealed to my childish but utilitarian desires.
Walking into the Piccadilly on Government street Sunday night was like walking into all the other Piccadilly’s of my youth.
James Taylor’s “Country Road” played softly in the background as I chose the same combination of vegetables that I had when I was in kindergarten, sans the big bright balloons I often got tied to my wrist in the cafeteria’s confines as a child. I eyed the blue, red, green and, surprise, purple and gold combination Jello with glee.
I am surprised to the see the relatively new wall paper, happily learning the cafeteria’s color template is no longer fecal brown. Yet, Piccadilly is still Piccadilly.
I sit in what I assume is a nawgahide roller chair, the kind that I could never kick my sister over in when she shot her straw paper at me years ago. Faux vegetation decorates the sparsely populated dining room that still remains largely segregated even decades after the Civil Rights Movement.
Heraclitus once said: “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing in.” The waters at Piccadilly remind me of a fountain near the U.S.S. Kidd on River Road. Founded 60 years ago and headquartered in Baton Rouge ever since, Piccadilly’s waters are stagnant, and the restaurant remains largely as a relic of days long past, a time many people find too painful to ponder.
Perhaps that’s why I cannot think of a time when a Piccadilly dining room had a proportionate number of baby-boomers to geriatrics. The corporation has tried time and time again to attract this all important demographic but has always failed.
Neither can I remember a Sunday afternoon when the racial salt and pepper were scattered throughout. As the South’s greatest generation dies off, the number of Piccadilly patrons also dwindles.
I am saddened that Piccadilly will soon change, but perhaps the franchise’s new blood will pull the restaurant from the ashes to rise from the vestiges like a great phoenix of lore.
Yet, somehow I know it won’t. It will slip from the minds of Louisianans, as it already has slipped from the minds of most Southerners, as did K&B Drugstores. In an extremely over-saturated consumer food market, I know it is the only logical outcome.
Piccadilly’s mediocre to good food will be but only a flicker of recollection in our minds; the last generation to know the simplistic beauty of a cornucopia of Jello flavors under a funky breath and spittle shield in the state that nurtured its conception and loved it the most.
Au revoir, dear friend.