Originally a Yahoo! Review.
The White Eagle Banquets & Restaurant is located across from a cemetary.
We parked next to a van with an orange FUNERAL sticker. The parking lot was packed not with the cars of diners, but mild mourners slicing through light rain to get inside.
It’s not the kind of place where people sob uncontrollably. It’s more the kind of place where grown men nod and grimace, and tilt their head slightly and pat backs and say things like, "he was a good man", etc. It was a place to go after you buried an uncle whose time had come, and then the time had come for the living to eat.
I had lunch there, in the dining room, with two guys from work and a couple stray tables of others. Lunchers, not mourners. Apparently there’s a hall for them, away.
We went inside and the parlor was just like the sky– gray. The rug seemed to hold a whole fucking rain forest of moisture. My eyes thickened and reddened upon entering like it was an illustration for CSI.
Past the gift shop with last-minute sentiments, the hostess told us to seat ourselves despite signage to the contrary.
She brought us soup and everything else without asking us if we wanted it. My eyes puffed and my nose ran and we talked about 5 years ago and things like moving one’s house– I mean the whole house– so a basement could be built under it. And digging up shrubs before moving from a home that was to be torn down for a McMansion and presumably wouldn’t be appreciated or just crushed. And Big Black— how horrible and brutal they are and so beautiful. I guess we all talked about how things change, though we didn’t put it that way.
The food was excellent. We tucked into everything, without reservation, with the exception of the pasta, which seemed silently out of place on such a Polish platter.
Beef, the kind that glistens with small blue rainbows when cooked. Broasted chicken with real gravy. Kielbasi with sauerkraut. Mashed potatoes etc. Everything you’d expect at a Polish place. Pastries and cakes for everyone.
We left, and I sneezed my way out of the parking lot, trying to let the rain cleanse whatever got inside me that wasn’t food.
