Mrs. Wilkes' Dining Room Review

Mrs. Wilkes’ has served Southern food family-style in a Savannah row house basement since 1943, and it works exactly as it did then: no menu, no reservations, a line down the sidewalk, and communal tables where strangers sit down together and pass bowls of fried chicken, meatloaf, sweet potato soufflé, collards, black-eyed peas, biscuits, and a dozen more — as much as you can eat, all at once. Sema Wilkes ran it for decades; her family runs it still, and you bus your own dishes when you’re done. It’s one of the great communal-table experiences in America.