A restaurant review on Yelp.com might best describe Aiken's Track Kitchen in the heart of the horse district:
“Yep, it's a concrete block, bare lightbulb, slammin' screen door kind of place.”
Tucked behind live oaks and cedars and between polo fields and horse barns at 420 Mead Avenue, the Track Kitchen has been serving Southern-style, home cooking to exercise riders and trainers after early mornings workouts at the Aiken Training Track and to locals and out-of-towners looking for a hearty breakfast since 1957.
Carol Carter and her husband, James “Pockets” Carter, took over in 1978 as owners and head chefs and have been cooking breakfast every morning during the training season ever since.
The informal, equine atmosphere has made the Track Kitchen an Aiken institution with visiting horse enthusiasts and locals, who make up most of the restaurant's customers, Carol Carter said.
“It's a good atmosphere, just good surroundings, friendly people, talkative people. That's it,” she said, taking a break between orders on a rare quiet Thursday morning. “You've got to experience it for yourself.”
And the food, of course, keeps regulars coming back morning after morning.
Carter cooks up all the Southern favorites: sausage, bacon, eggs, grits, ham, hot cakes. Her omelets are especially popular.
“Most people like the western omelets, ham and cheese omelets, egg and cheese omelets,” Carter said. “It all depends on the person.”
In spite of its out-of-the-way location on a horse friendly dirt road, the Track Kitchen is hard to miss on busy mornings. Pickup trucks, horse trailers, SUVs and luxury cars pack the parking lot, and the voices of satisfied diners greet customers before they open the screen door.
Once inside, diners order at the counter in the back and then head into the kitchen to grab a mug and pour a cup of coffee from industrial-sized urns.
While waiting for their eggs and omelets, customers sit in slat-back, wooden chairs at communal tables with a view of the dozens of framed photos of famous racehorses and jockeys and posters from racetracks that cover almost every square foot of wall space.
The photos, many decades old, tell Aiken's story as a international center for all equine sports: the Blessing of the Hounds and fox hunters in Hitchcock Woods; polo players on Whitney Field, almost in the Track Kitchen's backyard; Winter Colony resident and polo player Seymour Knox II on the tennis court; and Palace Malice, the winner of the Triple Crown's 2013 Belmont Stakes, that trained at the Aiken Training Track just down the street at the end of Mead Avenue.
The Track Kitchen is open from 7 a.m. to noon seven days a week from fall, when horses arrive in town for training, to spring, when they head to race at tracks around the country. The restaurant is closed in the summer. All meals are cash only.
