Restaurant Review: Southbound Bagel and Coffee Shop., Hattiesburg, MS

I love to eat out. I love small businesses. And I love downtown Hattiesburg. So when a restaurant opens downtown, I try my best to give it my patronage because I really do want it to succeed. But some businesses make it hard to be supportive.

Bianchi's pizzeria is one such place (good pizza, nice atmosphere, consistently crappy service).

Southbound Bagel Shop, just down the street from the pizzeria, is another. Again, cute/funky hole-in-the-wall place with atmosphere to spare -- mismatched chairs, kitschy salt and pepper shakers, thermoses and lunchboxes lined up along ledges -- the sort of place that draws a hipster crowd in on Saturdays for bagels, omelets and sandwiches.

Now dives usually build their reputation on personality and friendly customer service as much as anything on their menu, but the vibe I get from the proprietors of Southbound Bagel is they're not terribly concerned about their patrons. I expect this in France or New York, but Hattiesburg? Whither, Southern hospitality?

The first time I tried to eat at the bagel place, the waifish, vacant-eyed barista told me they were closed -- their open door, "open" sign and still-lunching customers notwithstanding.

On my second visit, the turkey and cranberry sandwich on an "everything" bagel wasn't half bad, but the same blank-faced little counter-girl forgot to charge me and I had a hard time getting her attention afterward.

Today they were bustling with lots of too cool for school types with shaggy hair, scruffy beards and thrift shop attire. I ordered the Tuscan beef sandwich on a garlic bagel. I found a table and waited and waited and waited. Until finally the waif dropped an omelet in front of me. A Tuscan beef omelet. Not a sandwich. She seemed put out (or not, hard to tell with those perpetually vacant eyes) when I sent it back. "Well, we have a beef omelet, too" she mumbled. Silly me.

A few minutes later, she did scoot a sandwich in front of me. And it was Tuscan beef. But no garlic bagel. It was on pallid bread that had been dropped onto a griddle long enough to dry it out, but not long enough to actually toast or grill it. It looked, and tasted, like Styrofoam or that stuffing that comes out of a Naugahyde sofa. I tried to eat it, but the dried out bread kept crumbling and the beef filling (though delicious) was all minced up and I was not about to neglect my mother's teachings and pick it up with my fingers in public. There were no forks. I gave up half-way through. By this time, I had been in there trying to get fed for over an hour. My stomach was growling, and my temples were pounding from the effort of trying to communicate.

I left there hungry -- and disappointed.

Because I really did want to like it.