The last time Country Junction posted anything on the internet was four years ago, when it changed its Facebook profile picture to a blurry photo of a line cook standing near a bag of sandwich bread.
The restaurant does not have a website. It’s not on DoorDash. Save for a snapshot that someone uploaded to Tripadvisor a while back, there’s no real way to see the menu online.
Yet all the people coming through the door of the Carrboro institution on the day I visit are picking up food they ordered ahead of time, grub that’s been boxed up and stacked under a lightbulb to keep warm.
From my seat in the empty dining room, I contemplate how this is possible. People are clearly calling things in, but how do they know what to get? Is there a hotel down the street with a binder of menus in the lobby?
This is my first time at Country Junction, a diner housed in a low building on West Weaver Street. I’ve driven past it many times but never fully registered its presence before today, in that way fixtures of the landscape evade perception.
The diner is spare but cheery inside, with something of a mess-deck-on-a-ship quality; the booths and counters are matte crayon-box colors, the windows porthole-shaped.
There seem to be two separate menus. One, printed on a board over the cashier counter, features old-school Southern fare: homemade biscuits, hotcakes with steak or sausage or fatback, burgers and sandwiches, breakfast and lunch plates with vegetable sides. The other is made up of colorful paper squares taped to the wall scrawled with dishes like huevos a la mexicana, chiles toreados, and chorizo breakfast sandwiches.
When I got here I ordered chicken and waffles and a sweet tea for $14.34. Now I’m sitting in a booth listening to the fryer burble.
I fiddle with the bottle of Texas Pete on my table and look around. If I were a detective who just worked an overnight shift, this is where I would come for breakfast, I think. If I just buried a body, this is also where I would come for breakfast. Near the counter, two older women waiting for takeout murmur to each other and a guy in a yellow OWASA vest picks his cuticles. Regardless of whether I were a detective or a murderer, my order would be the same. I would get eggs.
Someone else finally sits down in the dining room: an elderly man wearing dog tags and a cross around his neck. He’s chosen to take the booth right in front of mine, and he sits on the far side of it, so we’re face to face. This has to be the restaurant equivalent of someone sitting directly ahead of you in an otherwise empty movie theater.
“You come here often?” I ask him.
“They make the best bologna sandwich in town,” he says, nodding. He pauses. “You don’t know what bologna sandwiches are. You aren’t old enough.”
“I’ve read about them,” I say.
We look down at our phones. A moment later, our food arrives on styrofoam plates. My chicken and waffle comes with an entire jug of Hungry Jack syrup.
“Are you a UNC student?” the man asks, after we’ve each taken a few bites. I tell him I’m not.
“I’ve lived in this area for 87 years,” he says.
“Have you seen it change?”
He seems to mishear my question as simply, “Have you seen change?” because he laughs and laughs then points at his phone and says, “Well, I never thought I could be deep in the woods and talk to somebody in Africa!”
“Who are you talking to in Africa?” I ask.
“I just mean I never thought I’d be able to.”
We get back to our food. The individual components of my meal are lovely—the chicken a plump boneless slab, the waffle shattery and dusted with powdered sugar—though I screwed up by not getting coffee; with the syrup and the sweet tea, everything is eye-wateringly sweet. I pour some hot sauce on the flat of my plastic knife and lick it off.
The man asks me what I have planned for the rest of the day. I’m getting ready to move, which I’m stressed about, I tell him.
He shakes his head.
“Trouble don’t last always,” he says.
He tells me he’s planning to spend the afternoon in his rocking chair.
We fall quiet after that. I sit back and let my eyes wander. Above the man’s booth there’s a still life of a violin and a purple lamp. Through the porthole windows I see a tree, leaves shimmying in the breeze.
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