“That place is as old as dirt and twice as good” is what a retired UA facilities worker told me about City Café on a Tuesday morning, and he wasn’t being cute about it. He was sitting at a table he’d been sitting at for thirty years, drinking coffee out of a white mug, not looking at his phone.
City Café sits on University Boulevard, a short walk from campus, in a building that hasn’t tried to be anything other than what it is: a meat-and-three lunch counter that opens early and closes when the food runs out. Most days that’s sometime around two in the afternoon. Some days it’s earlier.
The man who runs the front of the house — the one refilling coffee before you know you need it, who greets the UA professor the same way he greets the construction worker, who remembers that you took turnip greens last Wednesday — is Clarence. He’s been working that room since the early nineties. That kind of tenure doesn’t happen at a place people don’t care about.
The menu changes daily, written out on a board. You pick a meat and two or three sides, you pay at the register, and you find a seat. Prices are low enough that it surprises people who’ve gotten used to paying fifteen dollars for a sandwich elsewhere in town. A full plate with a drink runs you somewhere around nine to eleven dollars, depending on the day’s choices.
The food is Southern in the plainest, most serious sense of the word. Fried chicken on Fridays draws a line. The butter beans are cooked long and slow with something smoky in the pot. Cornbread comes out in a cast-iron wedge that isn’t trying to be artisanal — it’s just correct. The mac and cheese has a crust on top. The sweet tea is very sweet.
What’s worth paying attention to, beyond the food itself, is what the dining room actually looks like at noon on a weekday. A table of nurses still in scrubs. Two city workers in vests. A couple of law students. An older woman eating alone who clearly comes in every week. Nobody is here performing lunch. They’re just eating it.
Clarence moves through all of it with a particular calm. He’ll wave you toward an open seat when it’s packed, which it usually is. He’ll tell you what’s good today without any salesmanship behind it — just the way you’d tell a friend. When I asked him once how long he thought he’d keep doing this, he looked at me like the question was a little strange. “Long as they need me, I suppose,” he said, and picked up a coffee pot.
City Café doesn’t have a website. It doesn’t need one. The people who need to know about it already know. If you’re new to Tuscaloosa or just haven’t made it in yet, go on a weekday, go before noon, and don’t walk in expecting anything to be fancy. Walk in expecting to eat well and be treated like you’ve been coming for years. That’s more or less what happens.
