IMHO, grits are best when they are freshly cooked, which is probably not true of the ones at Big Boy. Also, you really need to use lots of salt and butter or cheese or whatever. On their own, they are bland, but as a base for other flavors, they are pretty good.
Nobody I ever knew growing up in middle Georgia EVER ate their grits sweet, but apparently it happens elsewhere in the South. Maybe I’ll actually try it some day. 
Y’all have enlightened me once again.
Grits are like oatmeal in a lot of ways. If they’re not seasoned well, or if they’re old or cold, or too thick or too thin, they’re just not good.
Y’all’s recipes for cornbread make me wonder: do all y’all use white cornmeal?
Because I grew up eating yellow cornmeal and yellow grits, and much prefer them for their richer flavor. (This may be like preferring brown eggs for their superior flavor–i.e., it may be all in my head. I don’t care: they taste better!)
The first I ever heard of anyone denigrating them was from Hawk Littlejohn, a family friend from Cherokee, NC. (Also a medicine man whose work is on display at the NC Museum of History, but that’s neither here nor there). He burst out laughing when my mom said we ate yellow grits, and told us that yellow corn was for animals, not for people; people, he said, oughtta be eating white corn.
So what about it: do y’all use white cornmeal exclusively? What about white grits? I wonder if there’s any correlation between using yellow cornmeal and sugar in the cornbread: white cornmeal may be naturally sweeter or something.
Daniel
For me, an adopted Southerner, cornbread has been yellow, and grits white. However, I prefer my tortillas to be made from white corn.
Got that right. In college I worked at Waffle House, and we’d make about five gallons of grits at the start of a ten-hour shift. By the end of the shift some of those grits were looking far from good.
Anyway, the thing for non-Southerners to remember about grits is that they’re exactly the same as the “polenta” you see in trendy restaurants, except grits are prepared far more simply (not a bad thing) and cost about five bucks less per plate.
They’re bland by themselves; as a kid I liked them with butter and sugar (yes, sweet), and as an adult I like them with cheese and Tabasco sauce. In fact, sometimes on Thanksgiving I make a big mess of cheese-grits instead of mashed potatoes.
I use whatever corn meal I can find that has the right grind. Stone ground or water ground = nice fluffy corn meal, nice cornbread. (I use the exact same recipe whether I’ve got white or yellow, it makes no difference). In contrast, wanna see some really bad corn meal? Open a canister of Quaker corn meal (yeah, it comes in canisters not bags). Stuff’s about as fluffy as poppy seeds or beach sand. Might be OK to fry fish in, I dunno, but truly miserable for cornbread.
In addition to the grind, you have to watch out for the spreading plague of “self-rising” corn meal. This is actually more of a southern plague. There was a time about two years ago when my rural Georgia parents were complaining of the difficulty of getting regular rather than self-rising corn meal in the local grocers (of which there weren’t all that damn many in simple driving distance — you get three grocers all stocking mostly self-rising corn meal, you’re in for a drive to the next county over just for one thing). I told them to explain to the grocers that if they didn’t stock some regular corn meal they’d have to import real corn meal from New York courtesy of their nouveau-Yankee son, following which they’d write a little article for the local (6-page) rural-area newspaper about what the world is coming to when a southerner has to import corn meal from New York. That appears to have done the trick.