Three Southern Meals December 21, 2012

2 eggs and pork chop special – $5.38

1. Tommy’s Country Ham House

Tommy’s is a solid no-fuss place, the kind of place where – literally – Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney go for photo opportunities with “the regular folk”; where the fried chicken lunch special comes with biscuits and choice of two vegetables; and the vegetables themselves are all kinds of Southern: “Macaroni & Cheese, Creamed Corn, Rice & Gravy, Pole Beans, Fresh Butter Peas, Squash Casserole, Steamed Okra, Sweet Potato Souffle.”

My breakfast at Tommy’s was a bowl of grits, a country ham and egg biscuit, with red-eye gravy ordered on the side. The place was so absolutely welcoming, down-home and friendly, with the waitress topping off my coffee before it ever got down to a half-cup, that it satisfied everything I might have wanted to feel about eating Southern. But boy, the food was salty. And as great as the biscuits were, the grits and gravy were uninspiring, at best. I walked in with the idea that I might end up here a couple times during the week; but my parting thought was, “I thought I would like this stuff more than I do. Maybe eating Southern isn’t that important to me.”

2. Soby’s New South Cuisine

Coming in from the airport, the shuttle driver took an interest when I asked about food. When I asked about the local food, he said, “It’s fried. It’s all deep fried. It’s disgusting.” He missed the fresh food from North Carolina’s Outer Banks. He allowed that among local, regional restaurants, Soby’s New South Cuisine was good: “It’s kicked-up Southern food.”

I started with a wedge salad. When it came, I wondered if I should have ordered something else: it was a hunk of iceberg, a bit of bacon on top and some tomato confit on the side. There was a thin dressing over the top and on the plate. It looked pretty minimal for $7. But I lit up as soon as I tasted the bacon, which was crunchy and naturally smoked and thick and good. The tomato preserve was good and everything together was just right, a dish that was truly composed, not just assembled. It was delicious.

For a main course – motivated by the heady smell of smoked meat in the lobby – I ordered “Grits and Grillades – Slow Smoked Beef Tenderloin, Mushrooms, Roasted Garlic, Anson Mills Grits, Fried Quail Egg.” It was thin medallions of the smoked beef – smoked and slow-cooked, though somehow still rare in the center – lying on a small deep dish of grits, with a layer of vegetables and two tiny quail eggs on top. The eggs seemed superfluous, but again, everything tasted wonderful together. In my notebook I wrote: “smoky, meaty, buttery, creamy. . .” The grits were fabulous, and I would have actually liked more grits to less meat. Because the food was so good and consciously crafted, I’m guessing that things in the dish that I thought were superfluous (like the eggs) really added to the whole thing.

3. A Final Breakfast

On my way out of town, I had time for breakfast – one last Southern meal. I was choosing between giving Tommy’s a second chance, or going to a take-out arm of Soby’s for the sure thing of their wonderful grits.

I wound up at Tommy’s. And while I enjoyed the restaurant for its sense of place, the people, the culture – its Southernness – I have to say that I wasn’t completely looking forward to actually eating the breakfast. I pictured myself chewing on a tough, dry, overcooked pork chop and eating the non-distinctive grits.

But I was wrong – so wrong:  the pork chop was a boneless, real chop, cooked country-fried to crisp, browned and juicy; their biscuits just terrific; the two over-easy eggs cooked right with voluminous yolks for dipping chops and biscuits. (And the grits? Well, I was right about the grits.)

The waitress kept coming with the coffee. She was eating her own breakfast at the end of our communal table, sitting with her daughter and granddaughter. She was constantly getting up to make rounds of her customers and I said, “You don’t have to interrupt your breakfast for me.” “I’m used to it,” she said. “Be sure to let me know if you want another biscuit.”

I enjoyed every bite. I probably had five cups of coffee with it. It was a grand and amazing breakfast.


Tommy’s Country Ham House – 214 Rutherford Street
Soby’s New South Cuisine – 207 South Main Street
both in Greenville, South Carolina

Tao Yuen Pastry December 6, 2012

I will ask this twice: is life too short for average food?

I was walking through Oakland Chinatown and there were so many restaurants, as there tend to be, in Chinatowns everywhere. It was lunchtime, and for a fan of cheap food, the world was my oyster – quite literally, at times – or clams, or geoducks. I wandered up side streets, main streets; read menus; looked at the busy and not-so busy. And I wound up at Tao Yuen Pastry.

I based my choice on three points:

1. the food in the window looked amazing, especially the full tray of head-on shrimp with strips of jalapeno peppers;
2. there was a line out to the street;
3. in the back was a large prep area with a dozen men cooking, as if it was the small front for a large wholesale operation that supplied all the good dim sum and noodles for all Oakland Chinatown.

So I got in line. I didn’t see a menu with names or prices of either the food in the window or in the trays behind the glass cases inside. Industrious women were spooning food into plastic take-out trays. There was a very big list of dishes and prices on the back wall, but there didn’t seem to be any correspondence between the names on the wall and what was being served.

One way or another, I wound up with a huge serving of noodles and shrimp. And though I would like to say that the food was wonderful, it wasn’t. The shrimp was not spicy and was just kind of salty. (It was probably salt and pepper shrimp.) The meal was abundant, and once you got past the saltiness, the shrimp was extremely fresh and full-flavored. The noodles were. . . well. . . noodles.

I think I paid $2.20 for the noodles and $2 for the shrimp. I never did figure out the pricing.

I usually get pretty lucky. I eat a lot of amazing food for little money. And this was not a bad meal. In the right light, it could be taken as a more than decent lunch. And what’s wrong with eating one meal that is merely good? Can I really complain?

Is life too short for average food?

Tao Yuen Pastry – 816 Franklin Street, Oakland