CLT Eats – A Charlotte Restaurant Review

The Plaza Midwood area of town has a great collection of awesome little places to dine. One of the newer additions is Zada Jane’s. This funky little restaurant is kind of like an Asheville restaurant transplant resplendent with a hippie-food extravaganza.

I’ve been over here a couple of times shortly after they opened and I have to admit that I liked it but didn’t love it. There were apparently a couple of kinks that needed working out because today I really loved the place. It’d been a while since I’d been over there and the potential that I sensed it had has now blossomed.

This really is a cool place with a shuffleboard area outside next to a good sized outdoor dining area. On the inside there’s a decent although not terribly plentiful amount of seating and bar dining as backup. It’s brightly colored but not the full-on visual assault that the Flying Biscuit is but the color scheme is a little similar. The atmosphere is very “real” as opposed to the somewhat manufactured feel of the Flying Biscuit. There really isn’t much to compare between these two restaurants so I don’t mean to imply they are similar other than their color scheme and the fact that you can get breakfast options at both.

Parking is fairly limited which is probably the only real downside to this restaurant. This part of town is densely packed with older shops that just weren’t originally designed to handle the kind of vehicle traffic it now supports so plan on having to get a little creative. There is a parking area across the street in addition to the small lot. You can also park down the neighborhood street behind the restaurant.

I ordered the Booker T. which is Scrambled Eggs with Sausage, Cheese and Chives laid on top of Sweet Potato Hash Browns and choice of Toast or Biscuit. I hadn’t ordered this before and I was blown away with how good it was. I opted for the local sausage from Denver, NC and me not being much of a biscuit guy and loving wheat bread I had to go with the wheat toast. Both of those were very wise choices on my part. The bread was excellent and the sausage was awesome. I’m also glad to see that Sweet Tea is on the menu now. That was oddly absent on my previous visits. There was some sort of weird alternative available but it just didn’t cut it. The Sweet Tea is also really good by the way.

Service was good as well. Nothing particularly outstanding but my tea stayed full and our food showed up fairly promptly. It did take a few minutes to place our order but nothing out of line. When we got there it looked like things were just starting to get busy. We didn’t have to wait to be seated but shortly after we got there no seats were left to be found except maybe the lone stool at the bar.

I’ve definitely found my favorite new breakfast-for-lunch destination. I’ll be back again soon.

Pros

• Excellent Food
• Good Service
• Good Bang for the Buck

Cons

• Can get busy sometimes
• Parking is a little challenging

Rating: Recommended