What You'll Get
Cooking, like taking a pop quiz and defusing a bomb on national television, is often a source of stress. Disarm your hunger with today’s Groupon to Jake’s Good Eats. Choose between the following options:
- For $20, you get $40 worth of Southern fare during dinner.
- For $10, you get $20 worth of Southern fare during lunch.<p>
Tucked inside a repurposed gas station, Jake’s Good Eats’ resident chefs construct a menu of inventive and comforting Southern classics out of fresh ingredients beloved by Guy Fieri on the Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. Jake’s venison quesadillas ($13 for a full order) limber up chomping muscles, enfolding their flavorful namesake together with roasted red peppers and jalapeño jelly; the crispy towers of fried green tomatoes arrive stacked on a bed of braised leeks ($6). Lunch offerings file out of the kitchen all day long to sate diners with pit-smoked barbecue sandwiches ($6) and mayo-doused po boys ($7), which span the gap between toasted hoagie roll halves with shrimp, oysters, or edible suspension bridges. Culinary wizards begin conjuring dinner entrees at 5 p.m. with dishes such as blackened flounder ($16) anointed with crawfish sauce. Forks ferry maple-glazed pork chops ($18), roasted-garlic mashed potatoes, and candied apples into waiting mouths to traverse sweet and savory tongue-spots with a sense of culinary adventure that trumps even Magellan’s most daring attempts at Chinese cooking.
Jake’s cozy setting creates a cordial experience with tables and booths snuggled close together so diners feel encouraged to make friends with neighbors or shake their plate’s hand for serving such a good meal. Red lamps spotlight servers and dishes bustling through the dining room, and vintage decorations such as metal stars and Coca-Cola paraphernalia reinforce Jake’s welcoming aesthetic.
The Fine Print
Promotional value expires May 16, 2012. Amount paid never expires. Limit 2 per person, may buy 1 additional as a gift. Limit 1 per table, 2 per table of 4 or more. Valid only for option purchased. Not valid for the purchase of alcohol. Dine-in only. Merchant is solely responsible to purchasers for the care and quality of the advertised goods and services.
About Jake’s Good Eats
It’s hard not to feel nostalgic at Jake’s Good Eats. For starters, the cozy eatery is housed in a converted 1930s gas station, and—with vintage Coca-Cola and motor-oil signs scattered across its whitewashed walls—it's decorated to match. But the nostalgia doesn’t hit full force until the first bite of Jake and Gordon Stegall's homestyle Southern food. Bone-in, maple-glazed pork chops dotted with candied apples, free-range barbecue chicken, and blackened grouper smothered in the house's original crawfish sauce are just a few menu highlights that have made Jake's worthy of a feature on the Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives and a place on Guy Fieri's speed dial. And that’s just the Stegall brothers’ take on what they call “more refined country cooking.” They also assemble oyster po’ boys, pit-smoked barbecue sandwiches, and even hot dogs—in homage to their days as car-show vendors—topped with chili and slaw.
Best of all, from the brown sugar to the blackening rubs, the brothers make practically everything from scratch. And what they can't handle, their Mama Jean can; according to Creative Loafing Charlotte, she bakes all the biscuits and desserts, including banana pudding and chocolate-peanut-butter pies that “are everything to make your mouth happy.”