City Cafe Diner

City Café Diner
Huntsville, Madison County

This joint is not on the AL.com list of 22 Greasy Spoon Burger Joints in Alabama you have to visit before you die. 

This restaurant is part of a small franchise that has two more like this in Georgia. Nothing wrong about that, it is always nice to see when an idea evolves into a concept and with a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck the whole thing takes off and spreads to other places. The building in Huntsville they are in has seen its good share of restaurants. I still can remember the time when that was my favorite Mexican place. It was cozy and kind of dark in there, with wooden walls, gaudy decoration, and a lot of nooks and crannies where you could sit virtually all by yourself. The interior of the City Café Diner is the total opposite – bright and streamlined, with two distinctive dining areas, one with booths and one with tables. The decoration consists mainly of neon signs and the ubiquitous flat screen TVs in the corners. This might resemble a classical diner design, but for my taste it is a bit sterile.

Their specialty seems to be cakes, of which they have an impressive array displayed in some glass cabinets near the entrance. Also, they have a mix of American food, like Burgers, and Greek food, like Gyros, on the rather convoluted menu. It took me ten minutes to go through it and decide what to order.
I eventually ended up ordering a Memphis Burger – that is an 8 oz beef patty with cheese, topped with diced “pulled” pork and BBQ sauce. . It comes open faced, with onions and tomatoes on the side. You also get a small cup of mayo-based cole slaw, which is actually very tasty. The fries that come with the burger are of the ordinary kind and nothing to write home about. There were also a pickle spear and two fried onion rings.

The burger patty was actually very flavorful and succulent. I prefer my burger meat to be cooked well done, and that sometimes lead to it being a bit chewy. Not in this case though, the beef was tender and perfectly cooked. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the “pulled” pork. That was a very chewy affair, with big blotches of fat on the diced, not pulled, pieces. And, of course, it was by no means slow smoked pork. It was clearly cooked and nothing else. The BBQ sauce was of the thick red sweet’n’sour Kansas City variety you can get at every supermarket.

Together with all the fixins’, the beef patty, and the BBQ sauce smothered pork between the two buns, the overwhelming flavor was that of the BBQ sauce, with the two meats contributing next to nothing to the taste. That was not what I had expected and although the burger was by no means a bad one, except for the chewy-ness of the pork of course, it was clearly lacking the sophistication the menu seemed to promise.