08-15-2005, 05:44 PM
OK, so this writer from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution decided to attempt to sample everything on the Alabama state tourism board's list of "100 Dishes to Eat in Alabama Before You Die."
Day 2 was in the Birmingham area - and here's his review (from ajc.com):
Around Birmingham, bite by bite (exhale)
By JOHN KESSLER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 08/15/05
I'm thinking death likely.
With Lynyrd Skynyrd on the radio, we pull into downtown at 11:45 a.m. and the lunch scene at Cafe Dupont. It's a storefront bistro with butter-yellow walls and a smart, professional crowd packed into the narrow room.
Everyone is eating owner Chris Dupont's fried chicken breast over mashed potatoes in a thin butter sauce. It's a tasty enough, if obvious, plate of food, and Dupont is sick of making it. He has many better dishes on the menu. But the customer calls the shots.
And the customer — the state — loves deep-fried food.
I sign the bill and, with a pang of guilt, filch the pen imprinted with the restaurant's name. Steel shaft, rolling-ball tip, twist-top action. Nice.
On to groovy restaurant G. Bright. Modern. Big art. Martinis. Alice Martin, the prosecutor in the Richard Scrushy trial, sits at the next table in a pink power suit and makeup that makes her alabaster skin look backlit against her dark hair.
We have a big, yummy crab cake that strikes the right balance between fresh crab and deft seasoning. A spicy green tomato soup with shrimp and bacon is brilliant and complex. I leave with chef Geoffrey Slate's recipe. And a fat, green pen.
At Chez Fonfon — Frank Stitt's French bistro — we delve into a lemon tart in a thin, brown, flaky, buttery crust. Dense chocolate pot de crème and crème caramel are fine, but perhaps not the holy grail of pastry.
We skip Highlands Bar & Grill next door — the city's best restaurant. Why? I've eaten the grits and ham before, and they are amazing.
But we have to run to nearby Cobb Lane — a ladies' luncheon dinosaur facing a cobblestone street in the back of an apartment building. Lawn furniture, gracious plastic ivy covering the ductwork and fading Old South murals abound. Bridal tea? Look no further.
There are two pieces of lore to consider before I trash this restaurant's she-crab soup:
1) Mrs. Virginia Cobb opened this place in the 1930s, it has been in continuous operation since, and the current owners still use her recipes.
2) Julia Child once declared the she-crab the best she had ever eaten, to the city's delight.
The soup — dense, pink, spotted with acrid dried basil — comes with a cruet of sherry to add at will. A splash helps. A bigger splash helps more.
Julia, I'm on to you.
By now, it's about 3 p.m. We're starting to fill up, and we've hit only four places. I realize that if we're going to make it, I'm going to have to limit my tastes to a bite or two. There will be no more cleaning the plate.
Soon, we're speeding south to hit the funky suburb of Homewood (old shops, new lofts, welcoming racial mix) and the classic Savage's Bakery. We resist the signature smiley-face frosted cookies and get a pimento cheese sandwich on sun-dried tomato bread to go. Run to eat it in the car and, oh, my god, yum!
Yum!
OK. Calm. Stop eating. Start planning next trip to Birmingham. We have more food to eat.
There's a baby blue salad at Franklin's Homewood Gourmet; greens, oranges, spiced pecans, soft marinated strawberries, blue cheese crumbles and a mustardy dressing that keeps it from cloying; black forest cake at Klingler's; and a signature burger at local fast-food chain Milo's.
The burger comes on a griddle-crisp bun with onions, pickles and a thick brown sauce that tastes a little like barbecue sauce and a little like a doctor-tested hangover cure. When I reach for my beloved Cafe Dupont pen to write a note of praise, I realize it has vanished. Karmic retribution? I switch to the green G pen.
We peek in at Brazil — a churrascaria in a fancy new mall — and vow to skip it. We fill up on cream pies (properly known as "Honey's creme pies") at the franchise barbecue joint Johnny Ray's — a place that smells like barbecue and looks like a diner — and then go to the hotel to lie on our beds for an hour and wallow in self-loathing. It's 6 p.m. and we've sampled nine dishes.
Not exactly hungry for dinner but still excited by the challenge, we head to Hot and Hot Fish Club, sitting at the curved concrete dining bar on the edge of the coolest exhibition kitchen ever.
Everyone here gets the signature tomato salad — a stack of heirloom slices, butter beans, corn and whatnot swimming in sauces and vinaigrette. It's a big old plate of gushy stuff, like a trip to the organic gourmet salad bar.
A customer sees us photographing the food, demands to see our list and warns us to forgo the famous, ever-praised Dreamland Barbecue in Tuscaloosa.
After dinner, we drive to the established suburb of Mountain Brook to pick at a liquid-center chocolate lava cake at the upscale Daniel George set in the old retail district. We sit in the bar and watch a group of women in stretchy pantsuits exclaim over their meal on their way out. The cake is one of those dark, unspeakably rich, poke-and-squirt gourmet gutbombs that amazed us all five years ago.
At around 9:30, I call Sol y Luna to make sure it's still open.
"Hi. When do you serve until?" I ask in my beseechingest voice.
"Ma'am?" (Why do people keep calling me ma'am?)
Deeper voice. "Dude. How late are you open?"
"Oh, sorry sir, until 10."
We get to this new tapas bar in the hip, developing but still scary Lakeview District with 10 minutes to spare. One block of old storefronts and warehouses is dark and boarded up. The next holds a twinkling row of bars and restaurants. We park behind a car with a busted-out window. Another car — with the headlights out — wheezes and shudders by the side of the road as the driver talks on his cellphone.
We find Sol y Luna among the restaurants and triumphantly open the door to a moody vision of Spanish farmhouse chic.
"The kitchen is closed," the first waiter to notice us says.
"But we called . . ." we protest.
"It was a slow night. We're closed," he says firmly, sending "Get out now" laser beams from his eyes.
Looks like I'll die before trying these tapas. I also missed the fried green tomatoes at the Irondale Cafe that Fannie Flagg immortalized as well as a half dozen other places we couldn't squeeze into the day. We're having a blast, but are we really biting off more than we can chew? Oh, well. At least tomorrow we have all of northwest Alabama to eat our way though.
Day 2 was in the Birmingham area - and here's his review (from ajc.com):
Around Birmingham, bite by bite (exhale)
By JOHN KESSLER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 08/15/05
I'm thinking death likely.
With Lynyrd Skynyrd on the radio, we pull into downtown at 11:45 a.m. and the lunch scene at Cafe Dupont. It's a storefront bistro with butter-yellow walls and a smart, professional crowd packed into the narrow room.
Everyone is eating owner Chris Dupont's fried chicken breast over mashed potatoes in a thin butter sauce. It's a tasty enough, if obvious, plate of food, and Dupont is sick of making it. He has many better dishes on the menu. But the customer calls the shots.
And the customer — the state — loves deep-fried food.
I sign the bill and, with a pang of guilt, filch the pen imprinted with the restaurant's name. Steel shaft, rolling-ball tip, twist-top action. Nice.
On to groovy restaurant G. Bright. Modern. Big art. Martinis. Alice Martin, the prosecutor in the Richard Scrushy trial, sits at the next table in a pink power suit and makeup that makes her alabaster skin look backlit against her dark hair.
We have a big, yummy crab cake that strikes the right balance between fresh crab and deft seasoning. A spicy green tomato soup with shrimp and bacon is brilliant and complex. I leave with chef Geoffrey Slate's recipe. And a fat, green pen.
At Chez Fonfon — Frank Stitt's French bistro — we delve into a lemon tart in a thin, brown, flaky, buttery crust. Dense chocolate pot de crème and crème caramel are fine, but perhaps not the holy grail of pastry.
We skip Highlands Bar & Grill next door — the city's best restaurant. Why? I've eaten the grits and ham before, and they are amazing.
But we have to run to nearby Cobb Lane — a ladies' luncheon dinosaur facing a cobblestone street in the back of an apartment building. Lawn furniture, gracious plastic ivy covering the ductwork and fading Old South murals abound. Bridal tea? Look no further.
There are two pieces of lore to consider before I trash this restaurant's she-crab soup:
1) Mrs. Virginia Cobb opened this place in the 1930s, it has been in continuous operation since, and the current owners still use her recipes.
2) Julia Child once declared the she-crab the best she had ever eaten, to the city's delight.
The soup — dense, pink, spotted with acrid dried basil — comes with a cruet of sherry to add at will. A splash helps. A bigger splash helps more.
Julia, I'm on to you.
By now, it's about 3 p.m. We're starting to fill up, and we've hit only four places. I realize that if we're going to make it, I'm going to have to limit my tastes to a bite or two. There will be no more cleaning the plate.
Soon, we're speeding south to hit the funky suburb of Homewood (old shops, new lofts, welcoming racial mix) and the classic Savage's Bakery. We resist the signature smiley-face frosted cookies and get a pimento cheese sandwich on sun-dried tomato bread to go. Run to eat it in the car and, oh, my god, yum!
Yum!
OK. Calm. Stop eating. Start planning next trip to Birmingham. We have more food to eat.
There's a baby blue salad at Franklin's Homewood Gourmet; greens, oranges, spiced pecans, soft marinated strawberries, blue cheese crumbles and a mustardy dressing that keeps it from cloying; black forest cake at Klingler's; and a signature burger at local fast-food chain Milo's.
The burger comes on a griddle-crisp bun with onions, pickles and a thick brown sauce that tastes a little like barbecue sauce and a little like a doctor-tested hangover cure. When I reach for my beloved Cafe Dupont pen to write a note of praise, I realize it has vanished. Karmic retribution? I switch to the green G pen.
We peek in at Brazil — a churrascaria in a fancy new mall — and vow to skip it. We fill up on cream pies (properly known as "Honey's creme pies") at the franchise barbecue joint Johnny Ray's — a place that smells like barbecue and looks like a diner — and then go to the hotel to lie on our beds for an hour and wallow in self-loathing. It's 6 p.m. and we've sampled nine dishes.
Not exactly hungry for dinner but still excited by the challenge, we head to Hot and Hot Fish Club, sitting at the curved concrete dining bar on the edge of the coolest exhibition kitchen ever.
Everyone here gets the signature tomato salad — a stack of heirloom slices, butter beans, corn and whatnot swimming in sauces and vinaigrette. It's a big old plate of gushy stuff, like a trip to the organic gourmet salad bar.
A customer sees us photographing the food, demands to see our list and warns us to forgo the famous, ever-praised Dreamland Barbecue in Tuscaloosa.
After dinner, we drive to the established suburb of Mountain Brook to pick at a liquid-center chocolate lava cake at the upscale Daniel George set in the old retail district. We sit in the bar and watch a group of women in stretchy pantsuits exclaim over their meal on their way out. The cake is one of those dark, unspeakably rich, poke-and-squirt gourmet gutbombs that amazed us all five years ago.
At around 9:30, I call Sol y Luna to make sure it's still open.
"Hi. When do you serve until?" I ask in my beseechingest voice.
"Ma'am?" (Why do people keep calling me ma'am?)
Deeper voice. "Dude. How late are you open?"
"Oh, sorry sir, until 10."
We get to this new tapas bar in the hip, developing but still scary Lakeview District with 10 minutes to spare. One block of old storefronts and warehouses is dark and boarded up. The next holds a twinkling row of bars and restaurants. We park behind a car with a busted-out window. Another car — with the headlights out — wheezes and shudders by the side of the road as the driver talks on his cellphone.
We find Sol y Luna among the restaurants and triumphantly open the door to a moody vision of Spanish farmhouse chic.
"The kitchen is closed," the first waiter to notice us says.
"But we called . . ." we protest.
"It was a slow night. We're closed," he says firmly, sending "Get out now" laser beams from his eyes.
Looks like I'll die before trying these tapas. I also missed the fried green tomatoes at the Irondale Cafe that Fannie Flagg immortalized as well as a half dozen other places we couldn't squeeze into the day. We're having a blast, but are we really biting off more than we can chew? Oh, well. At least tomorrow we have all of northwest Alabama to eat our way though.
