Spartanburg Travel Guide

The BMW Zentrum is a museum for BMW vehicles that sits adjacent to the Spartanburg Assembly Plant.

Spartanburg is where they make the X Series Trucks as well as the Z4. The museum offers a great history of BMW and has a small cafeteria as well. The Factory Tour is awesome!

While you can walk up to the museum anytime, you must call ahead and make reservations to tour the facility. Mention that you are a Member of the BMW Car Club and receive an additional discount.

If you have read many of my Charlotte restaurant tips, you may have gathered that I really enjoy good Thai food but that I also tend to be more discriminating when it comes to Thai restaurants. I cannot explain why that is so but VT has helped me realize that it is. When I was looking through the Spartanburg telephone book to find places to eat while attending a recent conference, I immediately discounted this restaurant but two days later as I was heading home, it came back to mind and I found myself "hungry for Thai food." Since BTC was "sort of" on my way home, I stopped in and had an outstanding dining experience. My custom is that during my first visit to a Thai restaurant, I will usually try a fried rice because they are really tough to mess up but can indicate the overall quality and creativity of the restaurant. The food was excellent and, overall, the service was also superior with several staff members stopping by periodically to check on me.

Favorite Dish: Basil Fried Rice was excellent. Their combination of stir-fried jasmine rice with egg, peas, carrots, corn, fresh garlic, fresh basil, bell pepper, and onion was delicious. I do not recall having fried rice with bell pepper in it before, and do not generally like bell peppers, but they seemed to be a good addition to this dish.

If you had never heard of this place or had anyone recommend it to you, you would probably never stop here. The exterior is definitely not impressive. It looks like a typical highway bar, or roadhouse as my mother and Patrick Swayze would call it. The inside doesn't look a whole lot better but the staff is very friendly, helpful, and efficient. The only reason that I went there was that my key envelope from the nearby Comfort Inn where I stayed the last few nights offered a 10% discount but I am very glad that I did go. I think that both places are owned by the same family but that is okay, too.

Coby's also claims to be the home of the fried dill pickle.
I am a Southerner born, bred, and proud of it and have lived in the southern United States most of my life but I just could not part with the $5.95 to try fried dill pickles. I did try fried green tomatoes for the first time this week, however, and am sorry that I waited this long to do that. They are delicious.

Favorite Dish: I ordered the flounder filet with fries and cole slaw and sweet iced tea, a very typical Southern meal. Most of the people around me were eating steaks and when I asked my waitress what was best, she recommended three beef meals but the flounder was excellent. I have been going pretty easy on the salt during my recent diet so the salt in the flounder breading was very obvious and very welcome. The cole slaw was also very good and, unlike a lot of Southern establishments, was not swimming in milk, water, nor salad dressing. It was just right.
The prices were fair but were a bit (10%, perhaps?) more than I thought that they should have been.