Two Kinston Restaurants Dish Up More than Just Home Cooking
christopher's restaurant, food, kinston, lovick's cafe,
If you want to know what’s really going on in Kinston, sidle up to the counter of Christopher’s restaurant or wander on over to Lovick’s Café for breakfast. These two downtown eateries have been feeding folks in this city for generations.
People like Kelly Albritton say they’re known for more than just scrambled eggs and bacon or biscuits and gravy.
“It’s the place to be,” says Albritton, a local businessman who has breakfast at Christopher’s three days a week. “You’ve got to have your ear to the ground on local politics and what’s going on, and you’ll find it here.” The food and the service, he adds, are also quite good.
Christopher’s has been operated by four generations of the same family for the past 70 years.
It’s known as a hub for local lawyers and judges, but it also serves a diverse crowd of young and old patrons.
“We feed people from all walks of life,” says restaurant owner Chris Maroules Jr. “Everybody you can imagine comes to Christopher’s.”
Because every member of the staff has been at Christopher’s for at least 10 years, the waitresses know who likes their eggs poached and who likes them sunny side up.
Christopher’s has several dishes on the menu to please regular customers (although not for everyone’s taste) including pork brains and eggs. But traditional breakfast fare, such as waffles, French toast, bacon and eggs are also
on the menu. The fried chicken is also very popular.
Christopher’s serves 600 people for breakfast on any given Saturday, Maroules says. The restaurant strives to have great food and friendly service that is reasonably priced.
They live by the same motto over at Lovick’s Café . Milton Lovick opened the restaurant in 1941. Back then, it seated 12 people. Today, it can seat 150 on a busy shift.
Lenoir Community College listed Lovick’s Café as one of the top places to eat lunch in Kinston. And it summed up its rave review in two words – “dough burger.”
The signature menu item was created by Milton Lovick and a friend as a way to stretch hamburger meat during the Great Depression. It’s a mix of hamburger, flour, onions, salt and pepper that is fried and served on white bread. Patrons even eat it for breakfast.
“That’s what they line up for,” says Steve Lovick, the grandson of Milton Lovick. “They start buying them at 5 o’clock in the morning.” That’s a busy hour at Lovick’s, which stops serving food after lunch.
Steve Lovick and his sister, Susan Turner, run the restaurant now. But their father, 78-year-old Mac Lovick, still stops by.
Like Christopher’s, regular customers at Lovick’s Café are also used to seeing the same members of the staff year after year in this unpretentious diner that once made up one of only five businesses on now-busy Herritage Street.
“You can probably come in here three out of five days at the same time, and you’re going to see the same people – a lot of regulars,” Mike Lovick says.
Generations of families have been some of those regulars. “The old people come in and tell me about how they used to come in when they were little,” he adds. “I like to listen to those stories.”
