Eleven-fifteen on a Tuesday and the line is already snaking past the register. That’s the first thing you should know about Nelson’s Buffeteria on Cincinnati Avenue: if you show up at noon thinking you’ll beat the crowd, you’ve already lost. The regulars figured this out decades ago. Some of them have been eating here since 1929, or at least their families have.
Nelson’s is a cafeteria in the old-school, tray-sliding, point-at-what-you-want sense of the word. The building itself — a low, no-frills structure just north of downtown — doesn’t announce itself. There’s no marquee worth photographing, no chalkboard with whimsical font. There’s a parking lot, a door, and the smell of cornbread the moment you cross the threshold. That’s your entire welcome package.
The drill is simple. Grab a tray, shuffle down the line, and tell the woman behind the steam table what you want. She will not repeat herself. The proteins rotate — chicken-fried steak, sliced roast beef, ham, baked chicken — but the sides are the real show. Mashed potatoes with actual texture, pinto beans cooked long enough to forget they were ever hard, green beans that have clearly been acquainted with a ham hock. Fried okra arrives in a paper cup and disappears before you’ve found a table. Get two cups. You’ll thank yourself.
Cornbread comes standard. It’s the dense, skillet-baked kind, not the sweet cake masquerading as bread that you’ll find at half the restaurants in this city. A full lunch — protein, two or three sides, drink, cornbread — runs somewhere around ten to twelve dollars depending on what you choose, which in 2024 feels almost suspicious. It’s not suspicious. It’s just Nelson’s.
The dining room is big and bright and loud in the way that rooms full of people actually eating and talking are loud, not loud in the way of a bar trying to seem energetic. City workers in reflective vests share tables with architects in blazers. Older couples who probably came here with their parents sit near groups of twenty-somethings who found the place on their phones and look mildly amazed that it’s real. Nobody is performing anything. Everyone is just eating lunch.
Service is cafeteria-style, so there’s no hovering, no check-back, no upselling. You bus your own tray. This is not a hardship. The dessert case near the end of the line holds banana pudding and chess pie and a few other things that will test your resolve if you were planning to eat light. The banana pudding is the correct choice. It is not trying to be anything other than banana pudding.
Nelson’s has outlasted oil booms and busts, urban renewal projects, and roughly forty years of food trends that have come and gone while the pinto beans kept simmering. It is open for breakfast and lunch only — closing around two in the afternoon — which means it operates entirely on its own schedule and has zero interest in your dinner plans. Closed on weekends. The place has earned the right to keep whatever hours it likes.
If you want a curated experience with a thoughtful narrative about the provenance of your protein, this is not your Tuesday. But if you want a $11 plate of honest food eaten at a table next to a stranger who is also happy about the okra, Cincinnati Avenue is waiting.
