Dinner Bell rings a familiar tune

At the edge of Aiken, in a desolate lot where Charleston Highway ends, Dinner Bell Restaurant lacks cool restaurant curb appeal. To me, though, it is an evocative reminder of the diners, dives, and lunch counters that inspired the first book I wrote with Jane Stern: a restaurant guide called Roadfood. We considered these kinds of places and their blue-collar cuisine a refreshing antidote to the overwrought dining rooms and ostentatious fare that epicures then fetishized.

One qualification for getting listed in the first edition of Roadfood was that the eatery in question had to serve a decent meal for $5 or less. Mind you, that was 50 years ago.