Double meat and limeade at Doumar’s (East Coast Trip part 6 of n)
Doumar’s is awesome. The menu is awesome. The prices are awesome. The food is awesome. Even the service is fairly awesome. I had a minced pork sandwich, double meat, hold the coleslaw. Sandwiches come wrapped in plastic, mostly to keep all of the meat and sauce inside the sandwich.
Doumar’s is famous for inventing the ice cream cone, a dubious claim that several others also make. Nevertheless, they do have a really old ice cream cone machine that looks more like a medieval munchkin torture device, of which I assume there were many during the Middle Ages (munchkins and torture devices, I mean).
The tradition at Doumar’s is to order from and eat in your car. It’s amusing to see a fat woman pull up in a new Jaguar, flash her high beams, and order a handful of pork laced with mayonnaise. Makes me patriotic just thinking about it. We decided to eat inside the restaurant since there were five of us, and five people eating messy food in one car seemed like a bad idea. But we passed many, many cars parked in front of the joint stuffed with people trying to eat as much BBQ as possible.
The menu is simple, and the prices are low. The most expensive single item of food is a banana split, and I saw a military man at the next table get one. It looked quite good. Because of the ice cream cone connection, Doumar’s also has rightfully famous ice cream: I tried some with fudge and it was outstanding. The BBQ sandwich was decent, very simple, with hot sauce that was fairly hot but not offensively so. I think my sandwich cost $3.80 or thereabouts. The quart of limeade that I ordered, and that arrived in a huge styrofoam cup, cost about $1.85. The limeade is mostly soda water, sugar, crushed ice, and lime syrup, with some fresh lime squeezed in and a chunk of lime dropped on top of the ice. It’s pretty good; it sort of sneaks up on you. It reminded me of the fresh lime sodas they served me in India last November.
The service at Doumar’s is good in an efficient sort of way. The portions aren’t all that large, so the beefy waitresses are able to tote several things at once. They take orders quickly and ruthlessly, but with some patience that must be a Southern thing. Waitresses in New York do not act this patient. It also takes less than 3 minutes to receive whatever you ordered (usually), so the waitresses bust their respective butts at Doumar’s. Many of them must run outside, back and forth between cars, to deliver food. That has to be thirsty work in the summertime.
I ended up regretting the fact that I ordered just enough food. I should have ordered about 4 other things to see what they’d taste like and look like. I didn’t even get dessert, which was a huge mistake once I tasted someone else’s hot fudge sundae. So I suppose I need to return to Doumar’s one day. Perhaps I’ll get the souvenir jar of ice cream cones. Only $8. I think I’ll have it delivered to my car.