Although I’m trying to eat more sensibly, I’m also giving myself permission to indulge for special occasions. One such occasion will be a week from today, when a group from the paper will be dining at Miss Mary Bobo’s in Lynchburg. I highly recommend this if you’ve never been. It’s a family-style restaurant, owned by the Jack Daniel Distillery, which serves you a Thanksgiving-size meal of incredible Southern food.

You sit at a table with strangers and a hostess, and everyone introduces himself or herself before the meal. At least one item on the table is made with Lynchburg’s famous product — often the cooked apples, which are a meal in themselves. I’ve never drunk Jack Daniel’s, but I love those apples. (Alton Brown on the Food Network claims that while some of the alcohol can be cooked out of a dish, it’s usually not all of the alcohol. And the recipe for the apples which appears at Miss Mary Bobo’s web site calls for adding the whiskey relatively late in the cooking process.)

At some times of the year, there is only one seating per day, at 1 p.m. During busy seasons or special events, there is also an 11 a.m. seating and sometimes even a 2:30 p.m. seating. If you go on a day when there is only one seating, you may be fortunate enough to get the unbelievably good fried chicken. Do not discuss this chicken with your cardiologist. Suffice it to say that the chicken is not fried in all-vegetable Crisco shortening, nor is Crisco used to make the biscuits.

The house where the restaurant is normally located used to be a boarding house, and there was a real Miss Mary Bobo who ran it nearly until her death at the age of, if I recall correctly, 102. The distillery then bought it, made it a restaurant, and installed Lynne Tolley with the title of proprietor. She also serves as a traveling goodwill ambassador for Jack Daniel’s.

For the past year, while the business has continued to operate, it has not been in its traditional location. The restaurant was moved to the distillery’s visitors’ center while the house was completely gutted and remodeled. An elevator has been installed, and the upstairs rooms — which had been boarding house bedrooms preserved as an exhibit — will now be used for dining as well. They are supposed to move back into the house just a day or two before our reservation.

I am looking forward to it.