At some time or another, you’ve probably been on a date at Red Lobster. Maybe it was your first date long ago or your last one over the weekend. Red Lobster can be romantic. The presentation is always nice, the seafood delectable, and those scrumptious signature biscuits glisten with butter and aromatically ooze with garlic. As long as you both have a biscuit, the garlic cancels itself out, so you can smooch all you want after dinner.
Next time you and your significant other crave Red Lobster, you can thank a Green Frog from Waycross, down near the Okefenokee Swamp in the southern reaches of Georgia.
August 1938 was hot and humid when William B. “Bill” Darden opened the Green Frog, a luncheonette in downtown Waycross, right beside an ever-humming railroad. The small restaurant had 10 stools and two booths totaling only 25 seats, plus the addition of a drive-up window. Before it closed in 1981, it had leaped from luncheonette to a lovely fine dining 200-seat restaurant.
