Frank Stitt in the NYTimes: Sweet Home Cooking Alabama

Highlands Bar and Grill gets a tip of the hat for longevity from the New York Times:
Sweet Home Cooking Alabama - NYTimes.com:

Excerpt: "More than three decades later, the Highlands is still crowded every night from 5 p.m. onward with ruddy-faced local salesmen in golf shirts and blue blazers, businesswomen in blowouts and Prada, lawyers in suits, gentlemen farmers and city councilmen, even the mayor, William A. Bell. White and black alike socialize at the Highlands, and have since the start, Stitt said. The restaurant is a kind of social bazaar, the town square, a club where the dues are paid nightly.

Such longevity is notable amid a dining culture slavishly devoted to the new. Most restaurants fail. “Thirty years is infinity,” said Alan Richman, the restaurant critic for GQ. “Old restaurants get eccentric, cranky, difficult, like old people. Like me.”

Best Quote: “There is no more reliable predictor of divorce,” a man there told me, “than a married person coming to the Highlands bar alone on a Thursday night twice in a month.”