The South Wins at the Southern Kitchen

Southern Kitchen
9576 S. Congress St.
New Market, VA





Southerners will still argue over The War Between the States.

Just a mile from the Southern Kitchen here in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, 247 young, green cadets from Virginia Military Institute drove the Yankee invaders out of the valley in the Battle of New Market 149 years ago.

The South may have ultimately lost The War of Northern Aggression, but even the most fervent Lincoln-worshiping, federal-government-loving A-Rod fan must concede the one battle (besides New Market) the South won hands down:

Good cooking!

And the victory that is good Southern cooking is celebrated every day here at the appropriately named Southern Kitchen.

Tourists and locals alike pile into this quaint small town café just off the tractor trailer-clogged I-81.

No meal at the Southern Kitchen is complete without starting off with that only-in-Virginia concoction known as peanut soup.

Granted, the beautiful Shenandoah Valley isn’t exactly known as a peanut growing region. But the family that has run the Southern Kitchen for generations somehow snagged a recipe from Virginia’s peanut-growing Southside many years ago -- and the good folks traveling I-81 have been grateful ever since.

I expected peanut soup to be thick and goopy -- like liquid peanut butter.

But instead, it is surprisingly thin and light with a delicious earthy nutty flavor counterbalanced by the sweet taste of onion. Small bits of peanut and onion provide just a touch of texture to the velvety soup.

The quintessential Southern dish is fried chicken. So there was no way I was going to pass up the opportunity to sample some at the Southern Kitchen.

The thin but crispy crust locked in the juicy goodness of my moist tender dark meat. Not the greatest fried chicken I’ve ever had, but not bad.

Like most Southern sides, my candied yams and green beans were loaded with sugary sweetness.

Of course it would be an insult to the memory of Robert E. Lee to stop by a Southern restaurant in rural Virginia without sampling some good old Virginia country ham.

The Southern Kitchen’s version was topped with a ring of pineapple to cut the moderately salty cure in the ham.

All of the good Southern cooking I sampled was good, if not spectacular.

The spectacular part came when my waitress brought out the peanut butter/chocolate pie.

Oh. Yeah.

I devoured that piece like Grant took Richmond.

Two inches of sweet chocolate topped by three inches of fluffy meringue topped with a drizzle of chocolate syrup, this pie was the Scarlett O’Hara of roadside dinner pies.

Almost too beautiful to eat.

Almost.

After the first bite, it was clear this was no ordinary diner chocolate pie.

A barely visible thin layer of sweetened peanut butter between the crust and the chocolate produced an explosion of sweet peanutty flavor.

The chocolate and peanut butter went together like, well…

…chocolate and peanut butter.

Instant induction into the Suit757 Diner Pie Hall of Fame!

The Southern Kitchen and its blue ribbon pie made me proud to live in the South.

Sure. All those damn Yankees can gloat all they want about how they ground the heels of their boots into the throat of the South’s desire to determine its own destiny and live in freedom.

The states no longer have the right to self-determination.

The federal government won the right to dictate every detail of our lives from womb to tomb.

We are all Obamacare slaves to a growing federal leviathan.

But the Yankees can’t stomp out the Southern way of life -- or good Southern cooking.

They can’t make us cheer for A-Rod.

Or eat nothing but a steady diet of pot roast and boiled carrots.

There’s no doubt the South wins the war for good peanut soup, fried chicken and chocolate pie.

And thank God for that.

After all, as those teenagers from VMI understood a century and a half ago here in New Market, some things are worth fighting for.

Rating: Seriously Thought About Buying Shirt.

A Bite of Brooklyn

Junior's
386 Flatbush Avenue Extension
Brooklyn, NY
(also satellite locations at Foxwoods Casino, Times Square and Grand Central Station, but this is the real one)

Food: Black and Jewish food, and cheesecake
Hours: 6:30 AM-midnight Sunday-Thursday, 'til 2 AM Friday and Saturday
Alcohol: Says "Bar" and "Cocktails" outside, but no marketing of booze at tables; a friend says they specialize in "huge old-school cocktails"

When my mom was pregnant with me, my parents went to Italy, and one night in Florence, dad ate and drank too much.

They just kept bringing the food and wine.

The whole way home, my father moaned, "oh, the profits of moderation!"

Dad likes things in limited amounts.

He has a sweet tooth, but he just enjoys a little bite, or a "daddy tax," as he called it when I was a kid and he would take bits of various pies and cakes that my sisters and I would eat.

He didn't want a whole piece, so he would just take a bite out of our dessert.

Dad also never really liked New York Jewish delis -- the sandwiches are enormous and they'd try to charge you extra if you wanted to split your meal with someone.

And dad was never really into touristy stuff when I was growing up in Brooklyn.

So despite living in New York City for 18 years, I never went to the Statue of Liberty or a game at old Yankee Stadium.

Museums, yes, but not the tourist traps.

So needless to say, despite its being "as Brooklyn as it gets," I never went to Junior's for cheesecake as a kid.

Dad went once for breakfast after my mom gave birth to my youngest sister, since it was down the street from the hospital where my sisters and I were born, and he was tired and hungry and it was open.

That sister, being a bit more sentimental and touristy, dragged my more moderate sister to Junior's once "because you have to go" once, but I was out of town, and missed out.

So I was hanging out with friends, and one of them asked if I was going to do anything touristy during my time back in New York for the holidays.

I told him it wasn't likely, since I'd grown up in New York, but then my friend Dan from college called to schedule dinner.

We couldn't decide on a place, but we figured out that Junior's is about halfway between his place and my parents' place, so we decided to do dinner there.

I didn't really know what to expect, since you just see cheesecakes and pies with enormous meringues in the window.

But they've actually got a full restaurant back there with a real menu.

The best way of expressing the cuisine is to talk about the breads they run out: a clearly-Jewish poppyseed roll, and then Southern sweet cornbread.

It's half black Southern food and half New York Jewish food (place isn't kosher, though) with a little Caribbean thrown in.

So you can get catfish with corn and collard greens. . .

. . . or you can get pastrami on rye.

Or you can do Jamaican jerk chicken.

And on the wall, there's a picture of Eddie Murphy right near a picture of Barbra Streisand.

And they've got a whole wall dedicated to Ebbets Field.

The menu's extremely varied, even for a big restaurant, but it's all Brooklyn.

Dan did the matzoh ball soup followed by baked ziti.

I decided to go with that New York classic, pastrami on rye.

We both decided to wash down our meals with egg creams, that classic Brooklyn mixture of chocolate syrup (Fox's U-Bet, of course), milk and seltzer.

Before the main meal was served, our server brought out some pickles, beets, cole slaw and the above-mentioned cornbread and poppyseed rolls.

The pickles were good New York deli pickles, and the bread was great. I didn't try the beets or cole slaw because that's just too much veggie for one meal.

The matzoh balls in the soup were absolutely enormous -- at least an inch across, and they looked pretty tasty.

As for the pastrami on rye, unlike some other places I've been to, there was definitely enough meat -- it was a real Jewish deli serving.

Trying to figure out how you're going to have enough bread for all the meat on the sandwich is a good problem to have.

And they serve it with good brown mustard, though again, with that much meat, it's hard to put enough mustard on to get the proportions right.

The service was a little slow, and it showed with the pastrami not being quite as hot as I like it.

And the pastrami wasn't the most flavorful I've ever had, but it was solid.

In any event, meals aren't why anyone goes to Junior's -- it's the cheesecake.

I'm not really a cheesecake guy, and I was absolutely stuffed from my sandwich (not to mention the previous week's gluttony), so Dan and I decided to split a piece of cheesecake.

Since there's numerous different types, I asked Errol, our server, what he likes, and he said he likes the carrot cake, devil's food and strawberry ones.

Since I was in the mood for a "classic" one, we went with the strawberry one.

Like everything else here, it was huge -- four full strawberries on top of my half piece.

I'm not usually a cheesecake guy, but it was pretty darned good. The crust was tasty, and the filling was much better than what you usually get. It was creamy without tasting like I was eating a block of cream cheese.

I ate a whole three bites instead of the one or two I had room in my stomach for.

I'd definitely go back for another piece, and I'd even try their other cakes, which is saying a lot for someone who doesn't like cheesecake.

It's a little pricey, but you get a ton of food, and what do you expect at a landmark restaurant in New York?

And they didn't charge us for splitting the piece, which is better than a lot of places I know.

Rating: Seriously Considered Buying the Shirt

Getting Lucky in Natchez

Biscuits & Blues
315 Main St.
Natchez, MS
Visited August 19, 2010

Beer Selection: Unusually good variety of national and regional beers.

Food: As good as Southern cooking gets. (Real good)




I don’t believe in luck. At least not when it comes to finding good places to eat on the road.

No, you’ve got to put some effort into it if you want to avoid eating all your meals from a Taco Bell sack.

Trust me, I’ve learned that one the hard way.

But just because I don’t believe in luck, doesn’t mean that Lady Luck doesn’t shine on me every once in awhile.

Tonight was just such a night as I stumbled into Biscuits & Blues, quite by default.

My research led me to a famous Southern restaurant, Cock-of-the-Walk, that started right here in Natchez but has branched out to tourist spots throughout the South.

By the time I checked into my hotel and ventured out to eat, it was 9pm.

I knew my best laid plans were in deep trouble the moment I pulled up next to the only lonely car in the vast parking lot down by the Mississippi River.

I caught the last waitress on her way out the front door who just laughed at me when I asked if they were open. “Honey, we’ve been closed for an hour and a half. But I think Taco Bell is open.”

Ugh.

I should have known. I live in a small Southern town that makes Natchez look like a metroplex. Quite simply, if you are hungry after 8pm, you are out of luck.

Before resigning myself to a run for the border, I gave my rental car one more spin through downtown Natchez.

That’s when I spotted the glimmer of life emanating from Biscuits & Blues.

I couldn’t believe my luck as I slammed the car into park and walked through the front door to find actual people actually eating and drinking at the ungodly hour of 9:15pm – when most self-respecting Southerners have been soundly asleep for hours.

At this point I was thrilled just for the opportunity to order a beer and some non-fast food.

But I felt almost like an Obama bailout recipient when I fully recognized the name of the place into which I had stumbled.

Biscuits & Blues.

I’d been here before. I was sure of it.

Sure enough, the front of the menu said “Natchez & San Francisco”.

How’s that for a far ranging restaurant chain?

Over a decade ago I spent one of the best nights of my life listening to a great blues band and dining on genuine Southern fried chicken and biscuits – all in the left coast city better known as the home of Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer and tax-payer-funded sex changes, among other things.

Wow. Come to think of it, this is even better than finding out that some other hard-working sucker is going to pay your mortgage for you!

Alas, there was no rocking live blues band at this version of Biscuits & Blues. In fact, the bar tender had just popped in a Don Henley concert DVD the moment I sat down.

I mean, Don Henley is okay, but the blues he ain’t.

While the music may not have quite lived up to my decade-old California dreamin’ memories, the food certainly didn’t disappoint.

First out of the kitchen was a basket of what had to be the best biscuits I’ve ever had – warm, light, fluffy, crisp on the outside and greasy through and through – and even better when smeared with sweet apricot butter which instantly melted into the fresh-from-the-oven dough.

My Southern fried catfish were crispy and simple. A few dashes of Tabasco livened up the corn meal batter perfectly.

On the side were garlic mashed potatoes and a half of a tomato lovingly hollowed out and hand-carved into a work of art that was stuffed with creamed spinach.

It never ceases to amaze me how normally nasty sounding vegetables like spinach, broccoli, butter beans, okra and squash can go from healthy to decadent in the hands of a skilled Southern cook. No mother in America would ever have trouble getting their kids to eat spinach if it tasted like the Picasso-like creamed and spiced version served up here.

The baked beans were even better, enhanced with big chunks of BBQ pork.

Almost just as exciting as the food, was the beer selection – something you just don’t expect in the South.

One of the few draw backs about living in the South – aside from finding something to eat after the sun sets – is lack of beer variety. Most of my redneck friends won’t touch anything not in a red, white and blue can.

Coors Light? “Yuppie beer.”

With attitudes like that, any Southern microbrewery is swimming against the tide.

But Lazy Magnolia Brewing Company is doing just that right here in the great state of Mississippi. At Biscuits & Blues, I had a few of their Southern Pecan Nut Brown Ales, brewed with real Mississippi pecans. Absolutely delicious and the perfect compliment to great Southern cooking.

By 9:55, I had finished off an outstanding meal, the place had cleared out and the waitress was sweeping the floors and turning out the lights.

As I stepped out onto the Main St. sidewalk, only the sound of crickets could be heard in downtown Natchez. It was like the waitress and I were last two people awake in all of Mississippi.

The stars were shining brightly in the clear summer sky. As I meandered down the street toward my rental car, I contemplated the role of fate in my evening.

Instead of Taco Bell and a Seven Eleven 40 of Bud on the Comfort Inn bedspread, I had unwittingly stumbled into one of my all-time favorite restaurants – the only one in town open past 8pm.

As I looked up at the bright Mississippi moon while fumbling with my keys, I couldn’t help but notice a streak of light shoot across the Southern sky.

My lucky star? Nah, I don’t believe in luck.

Rating: Bought the Shirt!