Donna’s Old Town Cafe

FOOD

The lunch-and-dinner buffet is where Donna’s most clearly earns its place in a Southern-food guide. The hot bar does not depend on one fixed roster; it rotates through the kind of dishes that turn a plate into a meat-and-three supper. Fried chicken is often joined on different days by fried fish, beef tips in gravy, chicken and dumplings, chicken livers, garlic-Parmesan chicken tenders, meatloaf and Salisbury-style steak. The point is not novelty. It is the ability to build the sort of full home-cooked meal that usually requires choosing one entree and a few sides, then go back and build a completely different one.

The vegetables are as important as the meats. Green beans, cabbage, turnip greens, creamed corn, carrots, pinto beans, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese and potato cakes have all belonged to the rotation, and this is where Donna’s feels most recognizably Southern. Fried green tomatoes deserve special attention: hot, crisp-edged and substantial enough to function as more than a garnish. Hush puppies, cornbread and fresh-baked rolls give the plate the starch-and-bread finish that this style of meal expects.

Soup and salad are not afterthoughts. Hot homemade soup is a lunch-and-dinner staple, useful either as a first course or as the beginning of a lighter buffet pass. Donna’s has rotated in a very memorable cabbage and beef soup that cannot be missed. The salad bar is compact but genuinely useful, with fresh vegetables and composed additions that balance the heavier hot food. Cornbread salad is the distinctly regional curiosity to look for when it appears, combining the familiar flavors of cornbread and vegetables in a dish that makes much more sense on a Southern buffet than almost anywhere else.

Breakfast operates as its own full buffet rather than a token morning spread. Biscuits and white or pepper gravy, country ham, bacon, scrambled eggs, pancakes, cooked apples and breakfast potatoes fit the same home-cooking vocabulary as lunch. Saturdays extend the breakfast buffet later into the day, and Thursday has one of Donna’s more unusual rituals: after the lunch buffet ends, breakfast returns for the evening. That schedule alone makes it possible to build an unapologetically large breakfast at a time when most cafes have long since put the griddle away.

Dessert keeps the homemade character going. Peanut butter pie is one of the cafe’s longstanding signatures, while blackberry cobbler has been part of its identity for years. Buttermilk pie, strawberry cake and other rotating sweets broaden the finish, and special holiday buffets can expand the dessert side even further. This is one of those buffets where leaving room is less a suggestion than a practical problem to solve.

The best way to approach Donna’s is not to hunt for a single must-order plate. Start with the fried chicken or another substantial entree, then give the vegetable side of the bar equal attention. Add soup if it catches your eye, use the salad bar to reset, and return for whichever meat has just been replenished. Because the lineup changes, repeat visits can feel meaningfully different without the restaurant changing what it is: a genuine Southern buffet built around familiar recipes, generous choice and the pleasure of going back for one more spoonful of something that tastes like it belongs at the table.