Birmingham eats, 2015 edition.

I had to get up at 5 am and connect through Orlando to get to Birmingham for the Vanderbilt-Alabama game on Saturday, so once I got to my rental car I headed straight for Octane Coffee in the Homewood neighborhood, the best coffee place I’ve found in Birmingham. It’s not on par with my favorite small roasters – Intelligentsia, Four Barrel, Counter Culture, Cartel, etc. – but it’s a lighter roast of higher-quality beans than your mass-market chains offer. I hung out for a while to write a few things, including starting the mock draft post for Tuesday, and ended up chatting about SSRIs with a few med school students sitting at my table, then chatting boardgames with a young couple playing Rivals for Catan (who also suggested a newish game called The Duke to me).

I was there long enough that I ended up going next door to the Mexican/BBQ place Little Donkey for lunch. Their midday menu offers plates for $8.75 with two tacos of your choosing, most of which contain large piles of smoked meats, and one of their sides. (You can also get a burrito, a salad, or tamales instead of tacos.) I also added a grilled corn on the cob for $2, and the total was more food than I could consume because the tacos were so much larger than I expected. The pork al pastor was the better option, although I did like the smoked brisket too; the latter probably just had too much meat relative to its toppings. The chipotle slaw was perfectly flavored, with the egg in the dressing cutting some of the sharpness of the pepper, and the elote (corn) was solid-average other than (I’m nitpicking) a very uneven distribution of the paprika on the outside. They make their tortillas by hand, and it was evident as they were worth the trip all by themselves. Reader Aaron, who lives nearby, says dinner isn’t quite such good value, but I thought it was very reasonable for the size and quantity of the lunch.

While I was sitting in Octane, Alton Brown sent out a tweet to his favorite road eats from the southern portion of his national tour, and on it was Steel City Pops, which is located right next door to Octane. Serving large paletas in fruit and dairy options for $3 a pop from five (soon to be seven) area locations, Steel City has a great assortment of straightforward and clever flavor combinations that change from time to time. I went with guava, which tasted like … guava. It was good, though. I wanted to try the caramel or the coffee, but didn’t think I could handle that on top of lunch.

My last meal was a substantial disappointment, due to what I think was a process breakdown in the kitchen. Hot & Hot Fish Club is one of the top-rated restaurants in the city, winning a James Beard Award in 2012, offering a menu full of farm-to-table that reflects seasonal produce as well as any I’ve come across. The menu on Saturday was loaded with spring vegetables across the starters and mains, and I was quite optimistic after seeing the salad, with young lettuce leaves still on the head along with English peas, shaved Parmiggiano-Reggiano, and a tart dressing that might have contained anchovies (although the menu didn’t say so, and that would be an odd omission). Even the breads to start the meal, served with fresh butter and their own green salt with dried herbs, were superb, especially the soft white bread, with the crust of a sponge bread but the tender crumb of a highly enriched loaf.

Then I waited. It was somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes before my entree arrived, and that only because I finally asked my server (the bartender) for an ETA on it. He later explained that when he asked the kitchen to fire the dish, they hadn’t done so, and when it did arrive less than five minutes after he made the second request, it wasn’t right – edible, certainly, not worth sending back, but not right, either. The dish was duck breast with “crispy” duck confit served with creamy grits, a blueberry gastrique, grilled peaches, and pecans. The duck breast was almost too tough to chew or even cut; the confit thigh wasn’t crispy in any way and its meat didn’t want to come off the bone. The gastrique was absent, although there were maybe a dozen cooked blueberries in two pockets on the plate. I dislike sending food that is edible back to the kitchen; something has to be unsafe to eat or cooked beyond palatability for me to take that step. This wasn’t at that level; it was just done wrong. The bartender had the kitchen send out a small cup of their spring pea soup, pureed with fresh mint and creme fraiche, but that was – and I don’t use this word often or lightly – terrible. The peas tasted both raw and underripe, so the soup was grassy and very bitter. We grow English peas in our backyard every spring, and when ripe they are juicy and sweet and perfect right out of the pod. Sometimes we pick a pod that isn’t ready, and that was the flavor in the soup. The kitchen just had an off night.

Birmingham eats, 2009.

Before I get to the eats:

* ESPNEWS hit coming up in a few minutes here at 3:40 pm EDT. It’s via phone.
* I filed a revised top 100 last week but it was never posted. A revised revised top 100 will go up on the draft blog tomorrow.
* Erik over at FutureRedbirds has a long and well-researched post on drafting prep pitchers in the first round. I don’t agree with his conclusions – among other reasons, I think his dataset is too old – but it is well worth your time.
* Liza Minnelli might be the next lead singer of Queen.

I only hit two new spots this trip, in part because I wanted to go back to two places where I ate last year (Jim n Nick’s and Bogues), and in part because I only ate one meal after breakfast on each of the two days of the tournament. There’s a Publix right up the road from Regions Park where I could grab yogurt and fruit to tide me over, and really, a pulled pork sandwich at Jim n Nick’s with a side of collard greens was enough to keep me full for hours.

I tried two new restaurants for breakfast. The better of the two is Edgar’s, a bakery that I guess only recently added a full breakfast menu, with everything made to order. I went with the usual EMPT, and oddly enough, the T wasn’t so hot but the EMP parts were excellent; the breakfast potatoes were small red potatoes, parboiled, then sauteed with onions and herbs (rosemary and thyme, I think), and, for once, they actually had enough salt on them. The biscuit was inedible; it was more of a biscuit-cake than a soft, Southern-style biscuit, so I bought a blueberry scone for the road. The scone was solid-average, which is weird given how bad the biscuit was, since the difference between a biscuit and a scone is minimal. They had a wide selection of cakes, cupcakes, cookies, and muffins, with two or three varieties of scones and a few other baked goods, while the breakfast menu includes breadier fare like French toast. They get bonus points for some seriously high-end bagged tea.

Klingler’s is a German bakery with a breakfast menu that is heavier on the, um, heavier fare. I went with the pecan waffle, because I find waffles very hard to resist; it tasted of pecans and a little bit of butter, but it was still on the heavy side for a Belgian-style waffle. (Belgian waffles should be light and airy with a crisp exterior and usually contain whipped egg whites to provide that lift.) The side sausage was a smoked bratwurst, split in half and grilled, kind of spicy and savory for a breakfast sausage. It was adequate but unremarkable, and I’d rather drive the extra five minutes or so each way to eat at Edgar’s.

Birmingham and Jacksonville eats.

I hate doing food writeups four weeks after the fact, but I’ll do the best I can off of my memory.

I had two pretty good finds in Birmingham. One was an accidental find, a local outpost of a growing barbecue chain – yes, a chain – called Jim and Nick’s. It looks as if they started in Alabama, so at least I was close to the First Location. First meal I had there was a pulled pork sandwich, possibly the second-best pulled pork I’ve ever had (sorry, still loyal to Eli’s in Dunedin, FL). The pork was perfectly smoked, moist, with a clear but not overwhelming smoke flavor (sorry – again – but I’m not good enough to tell you the type of wood). My number-one criterion for pulled pork is how much sauce it needs to be edible. Zero is the ideal figure. On a scale of zero to ten, Eli’s pulled pork gets a zero, and Jim and Nick’s gets a one. For a side, I went with the baked beans, which had good flavor but about four times as much black pepper as they needed.

My second meal was a bit disappointing – a big green salad with pulled pork on it. I think the problem was that I got it to go, so the pork continued to cook in its little plastic container, and ended up a little dry by the time I got it on to my salad. Serves me right for thinking healthy.

The other solid find was breakfast at Bogue’s, a slightly run-down local joint that does traditional southern breakfasts and meat-and-three lunches. They’re known for their “sweet rolls,” which are pecan rolls without the pecans, or maybe cinnamon rolls without the cinnamon: a sweet brioche-like dough wrapped around and drizzled with a sugar-butter combination. They are, oddly enough, rather sweet, so while they’re delicious, the one I ate made for a weird lead-in to a savory meal. My eggs-bacon-biscuits breakfast was solid-average, maybe one grade above for the biscuits (good texture, not buttery enough in flavor).

Moving along to Jacksonville, I was only there for one meal, and decided to hit a downtown spot called Chew that seemed to promise an upscale take on comfort food. I ordered the duck confit, which had obviously been roasted to try to flavor and crisp the exterior, but in the process dried out the meat. The one hit of the meal, for me, was the cassoulet of white beans, thickly-sliced bits of bacon, onions, and shaved fennel. I’d write more, but their website is down today, their phone number just rings and rings, and given how sparse the crowd was on a Saturday night, I’m wondering if they’re still in business.