School is in session - for lunch only

Bill Colbert has been in high school for four years already, and it doesn't look like he's going to get out any time soon.

Actually, he's been in a (NOTE ITALICS) school, one with nothing but the ghosts of teachers and books, but where the lessons go on and on. Colbert is sole proprietor of the Old School Café in Spring Hill, a restaurant arisen from the ashes, figuratively speaking, of the old Spring Hill High School. The café occupies three former classrooms of the school that closed in 1992; a barbershop, a pottery studio, two churches and a block of upstairs apartments are the other establishments that have sprung up in the onetime hallowed halls of learning.

Class pictures salvaged from storage hang on the walls and may remind some that dine there of school days, dear old Golden Rule days, but the fare is far from the school cafeteria variety. The café serves meat-and-two or meat-and-three in the Southern style, chili and homemade soups, splendid salads and big, big burgers (from freshly ground beef, hand-patted), homemade chicken salad, and specialty sandwiches like the Hot Italian, a masterpiece made up of grilled ham, pepperoni and bacon smothered in mozzarella cheese, lettuce and tomato, on herb foccacio bread.

When Tennessee Crossroads visited a couple of years ago to do a profile, they were particularly impressed with the desserts, which include chocolate and coconut cream pies and the Derby Pie, a Louisville original that Colbert describes as "a huge chocolate-chip cookie with pecans, in a pie shell." Colbert makes everything from scratch, and though the café is open just three hours a day, he spends about 12 slaving over a hot stove. Still, that's better than some gigs he's had in the business - he's off weekends and holidays, and he gets to call the shots. Besides, he's always loved to cook.

His passion to cook professionally led him to ask Atlanta chef Paul Albrecht, the owner of 12 restaurants, if he should go to culinary school. Chef Paul told him not to waste his time but to come and work for him instead.

"I met him playing tennis, and two weeks later I was working for him," Colbert says.

Even though he was skipping school, he found himself the only non-grad in the kitchen at Pano's and Paul's - so he decided to take night courses on his own. "I took vegetables home at night to practice cutting them," he says. "I had to work harder that everyone, so as not to fall behind."

Colbert left the employ of Chef Paul to be the day chef at Atlanta Country Club, and from there went on to Lexington to be the executive sous-chef at the Lafayette Club. He then got involved with Bruno's as a chef, which brought him to Nashville.

That was ten years ago. Signing aboard with Bruno's was, in part, motivated by the need for good insurance following the birth of his son, Austin, who has Down Syndrome. There was no insurance, however, that the job would last: Albertson's took over Bruno's and told him he was no longer a chef, but a deli manager, and then Albertson's went away and he was left unemployed. That was when the building in Spring Hill came available, and Colbert went back to school.

He and his wife, Maude, run the restaurant, and she is able to be there to meet the bus when Austin gets home. It may be called the Old School Café, but the clientele is a mixture of old school and new.

"The 'lifers' get plate lunches," Colbert says. "Some of them eat here five days a week. But every day I see somebody I've never seen before. A lot of people still don't know we're here."

He says the regulars - the old-school customers - have taken them under their wing and since their arrival here five years ago, helping the business grow through word of mouth, and flourish though being open only for lunch. Its location, for certain, is fitting, as Colbert's description of the enterprise makes it sound like school:

"The restaurant business," he says, "can be really fulfilling - and sometimes the craziest days of your life."

Old School Café is at 1220 School St., one block off Highway 31 (behind the large Methodist church), in Spring Hill. Hours are 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Mon.-Fri. Call 931-486-2745.