Watkins Grill

Watkins Grill is a local favorite that serves affordable meals in a well loved environment. It's so refreshing to see customers greeted by name and settle into a comfortable regime. We ordered a lunch special of chopped bbq, and a breakfast item that included eggs, meat, home fries, and a bread option. Everything was good - however on this particular visit, a tad more seasoning would have been appreciated especially with regard to the turnip greens. We overheard someone stating business was slow due to a ball game - perhaps that factored into other areas as well. Overall, a good meal with friendly service. Cash is king, but cash app is acceptable.

Food was good and reasonably priced. They don't accept card payments though so go prepared. And it's not a place I would entertain guests especially since they don't take cards. But they take cash and cash app Company and conversation was great though. And Ashley the server was really nice and attentive.

The food was delicious and hot, the wait time was average, and there was a constant flow of customers. Staff were friendly. I recommend this restaurant for southern homestyle cooking. The ambience was original and classic.

Watkins Grill offers a true taste of the South. I stopped by for breakfast recently and was impressed by the quick and friendly service. I ordered the country ham breakfast with red eye gravy, grits, and eggs over medium. It felt like a meal straight out of my grandmother's kitchen. The red-eye gravy was delicious, and the overall experience was quite enjoyable. Whether you prefer sitting at the bar or a table, there's plenty of parking available. The crowd mainly consists of locals, both singles and couples. If you're looking for an authentic country breakfast in Raleigh, Watkins Grill is definitely worth a visit.

So understand I am from rural Eastern NC so going in this place was like going home. Good Southern food, friendly and polite staff. Is this where you go for a fancy dinner or date - no. Is this where you go to drink coffee with your family and close friend -100% yes. Think old-school Southern restaurants of your child hood if you are an NC native and those restaurants your grandparents took you to and that's Watkins. Good food that feels like home.

Have been wanting to try this little gem on the side of Old Wake Forest Rd for years and finally made our way there for Saturday lunch. Tables were available and we were told to seat ourselves. Soon after our waitress brought us silverware and menus. We were in the mood for breakfast but there were several lunch specials available and a list of the daily vegetables on the wall. I ordered the Greek omelette with home fries. The omelette was a good size with lots of toppings but didn't have aloe of flavor to me. On the flip side, I'm glad that it wasn't overly salty. The home fries were different. They were not crispy on the outside but were well cooked on the inside. Son's girlfriend ordered her omelette with a biscuit and the waitress warned her the biscuits could be hard on the bottom. She decided to get it anyway but the waitress kindly told her if she didn't like it she could have an English muffin. They had sugar free syrup for my health conscious son's pancakes which surprised me. Overall a great lunch. Everyone was friendly and prices were reasonable for the generous portion sizes. What a great place to!

Great breakfasts. The Hobo Scrambled eggs with their homemade sausage and the Southern Omelette are my favorites. Their pancakes are huge, larger than the plate!

Food is great, service is slow but everyone is really friendly. Prepare to wait 30ish minutes after ordering. Don't come if you're in a rush. Cash only but does take cash app!

Great food, everything is made there, there isn't anything I don't like, you look if you're looking at breakfast they got an excellent pancake and homemade sausage, lunch, everyday is something different as far as specials. I really like even more is there stir-fry cabbage. Service is nice and the ambience is like antique. The business has been there since the '40s I think.

There are some good things, but I'll put them at the end.I was super disappointed coming here for the first time about a week or two ago. I had such high hopes of finding a neighborhood type place that served food that I'd enjoy. And the prices looked very fair.The short of it: the biscuit was very hard and so large that the contents (bacon egg and cheese) got lost as far as flavor goes. The pancake was gummy and tough and required diabetic amounts of syrup to get it down. The sausage patty wasn't browned, and had an unappetizing texture and flavor.More Detail:I'm a pancake snob, admittedly. I grew up with my Mom making my Grandpa's blender pancake recipe for so many years. So good. McDonald's pancakes, and the box mixes were not nearly good enough to waste calories on. Cracker Barrel does pretty good, though... but still not quite worth it to me. What we have been doing for the last decade or so is making Alton Brown's pancakes from Good Eats. Those are amazing. They were thick but light, and they were great with all kinds of toppings, or just lightly buttered! You could even go light on the syrup and you'd still have a great eat. However, these Watkins pancakes were hard to get down! And i was really hungry! I wanna say that they were dense, but you could see some aeration in there. I just know that a normal-sized bite gummed up inside my mouth and made it a real chore to finish. If I drowned it in way too much syrup, that would help lubricate things to get it down. But even for me, it required too much syrup. I would have also had to reduce my bite size, to keep it from gumming up too much, and that just would have made it take too long to eat. The sausage is a "homemade" patty, and I believe it. It doesn't seem to be ground meat, but more like a fine chop. It felt like I was chewing on tough, small, pork shreds. It was cooked, but had only browned a little, so that roasty/seared taste wasn't there. Even if it was browned to the level of your average sausage patty, I don't think I'd like this, because of the texture of the "chopped" pork. but based on other folks at the table, I think this light cook on it is pretty standard. But for it to be on their menu for a while, others must really like it. So maybe you will to. I won't get it again though.Another staple I love to try is the Bacon Egg and Cheese biscuit. I love ones from Hardee's, Bojangles, Buscuitville, etc. But we all agreed at our table, who had biscuits, that they were hard as rocks. The insides were nice and fluffy, though. Pucks like these are often okay for use as a gravy biscuit, when available, though.The biscuits are so large that they make you feel like you didn't get nearly enough filling. If they're going to serve it as this kind of biscuit-sandwich, I'd almost double up on the filling quantity, or advise the customer that it will come like that, so they aren't surprised. I took off the harder of the two halves and was left with an open-faced biscuit, but one in more reasonable proportions.The sweet tea was also lackluster. Often a down-home place like this will have very sweet tea, that you write home about, and look forward to indulging in when you visit. But no, it was just average sweet tea, with actually a little less sugar than most places, I would guess. I won't be getting it again. I didn't even drink half of mine.The service was very friendly, but I'd say we were checked on a little less often than I would have liked. But it was alright. I didn't actually need much tending, since I didn't like eating any of the three things I got, and the sweet tea was the same, with me never needing a refill.The Good: I'll go back for sure, just because I love this kind of place, and generally will make a lot of effort to find something I like. Although the breakfast options are limited for me, since I'm not an omelette fan.Ummm... I interrupt this review to mention something I just found... that a photo seemingly of their menu from as late as 2016 shows that their burgers were named after Civil War events and people. I'm a proud Southerner, so I get that. Fine.However, some of the folks they chose to "honor" seem a little suspect... they seem to have been proud of their Nathan Forrest burger (the first Grand wizard of the KKK). And they named a burger after Henry Wirz, who was hung for war crimes after the Civil War because of the way he managed a prison camp. Did they know these details, or was it just because he was Swiss, and that burger has Swiss cheese on it?I don't know how this all plays out with the owners today, and of what opinion they are regarding issues like racism, etc.