Chuck’s Southern Comforts Cafe
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It’s still busy, but the eight-year-old restaurant has settled into its groove since then. Many of the place’s attributes remain unchanged: the casual booths, the pig tchotchkes, the couple hundred hot sauces for sale. Most of the old favorites–beef brisket, gumbo, churrasco, and Pine’s famous Cajun green beans–are still around. So is the slow-smoked hickory barbecue and house barbecue sauce, available in mild, hot, and a new honey-chipotle version. But Pine has streamlined his offerings a bit. “The whole concept is a smaller menu and more specials,” he says.
Pine’s specials have always been a draw, so popular that the daily voice-mail message he records listing them have made him something of a celebrity. People tell him that when they call from work they put the message on speakerphone so the entire office can hear. “It’s got the craziest following,” he says. “I’m not a stud guy or anything, but I’ll go in these offices [to make a delivery] and the women will be like, ‘It’s the guy from the voice mail!’” His fiancee, another fan of the voice mails, contacted him on Match.com when she recognized him in his bio as the guy from the restaurant. (Daily specials for each month are also listed on the restaurant’s Web site, chuckscafe.com.)
