Doolittle’s Country Steak, Garlic Mashed and Butter Beans = Fine Home Cooking
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
There’s no shortage of places to grab lunch in Anderson, but everyone has those spots they turn to—no debate, no hesitation, just habit and happiness on a plate. Lunch Favorites isn’t a ranking or a review, and it’s definitely not another “best of” contest. Think of it more like a neighborhood conversation that wandered to food, as they always do, and someone said, “You know where I had a great meal the other day…”
These are the personal go-tos from someone who knows his way around town and a lunch menu—the sandwiches that never disappoint, the soups that feel like a small victory over a long morning, the places where the iced tea always tastes right. Because around here, consistency counts, and lunch—done well and done often—is worth celebrating.
This week’s choice: Country steak and gravy with garlic mashed potatoes and fresh butter beans at Doolittle’s.
To encounter country steak and gravy in its natural habitat is to encounter the South not as an abstraction, but as a kind of culinary geography—a tactile tradition conducted from pan, fire, and the deep memory of reclamation. The dish, neither aristocratic nor ostentatious, reigns in its own right as a monarch of utility and want, the treasured byproduct of what was once affordable and available, a reminder that comfort is never merely a question of excess, but of patience and the poetry of transformation.
And on Thursdays (the only day it’s currently available), the ultimate plate of country steak and gravy can only be found at a single location in Anderson: Doolittle’s.
It’s their current special on Thursday, one of the five daily home cooking treats at the downtown establishment.
It begins with fresh, unassuming cube steak—beef pounded thin, the fibers ruptured by the blunt insistence of the meat mallet. Each slab is a landscape, rough-hewn and threadbare, destined to be coated in flour, seasoned with salt and the minor chorus of black pepper, garlic, and perhaps a spectral hint of cayenne. The dredging is not an act so much as a ritual, from a gifted chef in a busy kitchen, hands flour-dusty and intent. From there the journey into the waiting pan, brittle hot with oil shimmering at its surface, becomes the locus of transformation.
The dredged steak crackles upon entry, issuing that most evocative aroma—the perfume of anticipation. A golden shell blooms along each surface, fragile yet assertive, holding inside the cut’s remaining tenderness. The cook, presiding over this alchemy, finds the patience to turn each steak just so, allowing heat and time to collaborate in the creation of texture that lingers somewhere between crisp and yielding.
But it is the gravy where the metaphysics of Southern comfort asserts itself most dramatically. Into the same pan goes flour and fat, commingling into a roux quietly and lightly bronzed by the drippings of the recent fry. It smells, briefly, of history: browned bits loosened by the addition of milk, the slurry whisked devotedly until gravity surrenders and a creamy thickness is achieved. A proper gravy is a hybrid—simultaneously rustic and celestial—marked by flecks of black pepper, those minuscule constellations adrift in a milky expanse.
To plate the steak is to gravy it atop of mouthwatering homemade garlic mashed potatoes and perfectly seasoned garden-fresh butter beans. The only thing missing is a chunk of cornbread oozing with butter. The gravy oozes, unsentimental, across the boundaries imposed by sides, unifying them in a warm, homespun congress. Despite the challenge, it is a meal to be eaten slowly, a reminder it’s one of the secular sacraments of the Southern table.
It is a meal that evokes the wonderful home cooking of my grandmother, who spent her entire life on a farm, cooking every day of her life until she left us at close to 100 years old.
I eat this lunch regularly, and recently Honea Path Mayor Dr. Jimmy Smith (who was eating a healthy salmon salad) said he caught the aroma of my meal as it passed his table prompting salivating jealousy.
It has become a favorite of every friend and family member I have asked to join me for this lunch treat.
The iced tea is a perfect choice to wash down this hearty lunch, one which can make Thursday one’s favorite day of the week.
