→ December 14, 2015
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Nashville eats, December 2015.

In what may be the last MLB winter meetings at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel outside of Nashville – praise be – I got to four new places, although I did add successful revisits to a couple of old favorites.

I’ll start with Two Ten Jack, an izakaya/ramen house in east Nashville that I’d visited solo back in April and thought would be perfect for one of our writer group dinners during the meetings. It was a huge hit across the board, and this time around I got to sample much more of the menu, including many of the yakitori (grilled skewer) options as well as many of the small plates, although I wasn’t going to skip their amazing pork-broth (tonkotsu) ramen either. Highlights included the tuna poke, JFC (Japanese fried chicken, which was thigh or oyster meat, with a negi dipping sauce), crispy Brussels sprouts, seaweed salad (not your ordinary one), the yellowtail sashimi with jalapeñ, and the pork belly yakitori. I also tried their sweet potato sh?ch?, a distilled liquor with a rather distinctive aroma but very mild flavor. The executive chef, Jess Benefield, is a big sports fan, and popped out to the table to say hello; she and her staff deserve extra praise for making many items gluten-free for the member of our party with celiac disease.

I finally made it to Barista Parlor, the ultra-hipster coffee joint in east Nashville that offers pour-over options from six different micro-roasters from around the country (including Four Barrel and Intelligentsia) and roasts their own blend, called Slayer, for espresso. The space is huge for a coffee shop, and the coffee options are fantastic, although the one pour-over I tried, an Ethiopian from Supersonic roasters, ended up kind of blah – if someone had handed me that cup blind, I would have guessed it was a blend of several beans because I didn’t pick up any notes or character in it. But the Slayer rocks, pun intended, and they offer pastries from Five Daughters Bakery, including the “100-layer donut” that most folks would recognize as a cronut before they inhaled it. I did make it over to Crema, my favorite local roaster in Nashville, before leaving on Thursday, but since they’re in the Gulch it wasn’t a reasonable commute from the Opryland.

Cochon Butcher, an offshoot of the two Cochon places in New Orleans, is all about the pig – if you don’t eat pig, I suggest you give it a miss – with various cuts of pig available in small and medium plate preparations. I was there for a quick lunch between appointments and had the pork belly sandwich with cucumber and mint along with a side of marinated Brussels sprouts. The pork belly was spectacular, not too fatty, and a reasonable portion of meat for one person (although I’m a small person so perhaps others would say it wasn’t enough), although I wish it had been on better bread – it came on white bread, better than store-bought but still a bit lacking in character to stand up to the strong flavors of the pork and the mint. The Brussels sprouts were salty and a tiny bit spicy, a bit more than I’d usually eat by myself but fine for sharing with another person.

Biscuit Love was the big letdown of the trip, especially given the name and my affinity for that very southern breakfast staple. Also located in the Gulch, Biscuit Love operated a food truck and has now expanded into a sizable space for breakfast and lunch, but what just killed it for me was that the biscuit was very plain and was very flaky, more akin to puff pastry than to the crumbly kind of biscuit I expect when I’m in the south. They also offer a number of options that douse the biscuit in things like sausage gravy, which is probably delicious but something I eat about once a year because it’s just so heavy. (I do love it, though – if you’re a carnivore, how could you not?)

And then there’s Avo, a brand-new spot near Vanderbilt’s campus, housed in an old shipping container, with an all-vegan menu with almost nothing cooked beyond 118 degrees. Our server gave us the tired shpiel about how serving the food in this raw or not-really-cooked state would “preserve the nutrients,” even though this is total bullshit, but the food was actually quite good. I had the falafel wrap, sprouted “raw” (but warm and clearly somewhat cooked) falafel wrapped in collard greens, served with raw tabbouleh and mint crème fraîche. The collard greens were the one mistake in the dish – they are way too tough to enjoy when raw and could use even a quick blanching to soften them up – but if I hadn’t known that falafel was sort-of-raw I would never have guessed it. The tabbouleh was solid, if a bit heavy on the parsley, and I don’t know what they used in the crème fraîche since they don’t use any dairy. My vegetarian friend said the vegan lasagna, made with a cashew-based ricotta, was also excellent, and her dish looked like it contained was about two days’ recommended allowances of vegetables. If you’re looking for a vegetarian or vegan option and/or just need more vegetables in your diet, I recommend Avo … but I can’t say I’d be racing to go there over Two Ten Jack.

I also ate at the Pharmacy (ate too much, to be exact) and brought a small and very appreciative group to Mas Tacos, where everything was a hit but nothing more so than their elote, grilled corn with cotija cheese and paprika. I could eat that three meals a day and be quite happy about it. And the Pharmacy’s tater tots and German potato salad are both superb, although I might have gone too far getting both of those as well as their farm burger, which comes with bacon and an egg on top. I don’t know how I was even able to move the rest of that night.

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→ March 24, 2014
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Arizona eats, March 2014 edition.

My last spring training dispatch went up Monday morning, and I’m reposting the link to my review of the awful Downton Abbey boardgame in case folks missed it.

I tried a handful of new (to me) restaurants on my two-week trip to Arizona, but was a little limited in choices because I had the family with me and we chose to stay further out of town to be closer to friends near where we used to live (and to save the company a little money too). I did get to a few spots I’d been dying to try, and have a few new recommendations for those of you still out there.

Isabel’s Amor is a brand-new authentic Mexican restaurant in western Gilbert, on the northeast corner of Williams Field and Val Vista, and it’s spectacular, offering what I interpreted as Mexican comfort food with very fresh ingredients. We went with two starters, starting with their salsa trio, featuring a fresh vegetable salsa, a tomatillo-avocado pureed salsa, and a chunkier mango-jalapeño salsa; all three were good, none as spicy as the thin red salsa that came gratis, with the mango salsa my personal favorite for the perfect sweet-sour-spice balance and brightness of the mango flavor. Their Mexican street corn (elotes) was outstanding, roasted corn kernels served with cotija cheese, chili powder, cilantro, and a dollop of mayonnaise on top; you’re supposed to stir it all together to form the sauce, which I found produced a better result than the standard version where it’s mixed in the kitchen and can end up very watery by the time it reaches the table. For the entrees, my wife ordered the chili verde, made with beef braised in a dark green chile sauce, mildly spicy, a dish my wife compared favorably (and accurately) to pot roast, Mexican-style. I ordered the pescado de la parrilla, a fillet of corvina drum (fish) heavily marinated in lime juice and tequila and then grilled, served with that same mango-jalapeño salsa, along with sides of rice and your choice of beans. The fish tasted of lime and tequila more than anything, and had the slightly translucent look of fish that has been marinated for a long time before cooking, so the flavors were amazing but the texture wasn’t quite up to the same level. I was very impressed by the black beans, which were al dente rather than the mush I’m used to getting even at decent Mexican restaurants, and the fresh flour tortillas are incredible – someone’s grandmother is clearly making these by hand every morning, probably with lard given how good they taste. I was shocked to find out that the family behind Isabel’s is also reponsible for Someburros, one of the many chains of mediocre Mexican food that pollute the valley, but it appears that someone grew a culinary conscience and decided to offer the public a higher-quality product.

The Welcome Diner is a hipster spot – there’s no other way to describe it, that’s not even an insult, it just is. There are a couple of seats inside at a counter but most of the seating is outside at picnic tables, and the menu is short, mostly burgers and fried-chicken-and-biscuit options. The fried chicken on a biscuit is a bit over the top, really, even the fairly simple option I got – local honey, mustard, and bread and butter pickles, piled on a huge chunk of fried chicken breast, served on a very rich biscuit that couldn’t hold together when I tried to cut the whole thing like a sandwich. The components were all good, but eaten together were too rich and very heavy. My wife ordered a burger well-done – I’ve told her that this is a cardinal sin, but she won’t listen – and received something short of medium. The fries were excellent, though, clearly just cut and fried to order. Remember to wear your vintage clothes, though.

Republica Empanada in downtown Mesa was the other great new find of the trip, serving a number of perfectly-fried hot pockets pastries filled with a variety of meats, traditional and otherwise. I stuck with the traditional options, one with pernil (slow-roasted pork shoulder) and one with chicken and vegetables. Both came with a green dipping sauce that I believe contained tomatillos, cilantro, and a little chili pepper. They also make wonderful maduros, the fried sweet plantains that are among my favorite foods on the planet, serving eight large pieces for just $5. The mere fact that the empanadas are fried and not greasy makes them above-average, and the fact that they had a chicken offering that wasn’t dry or bland pushes them even higher. Two of them and the maduros was a small lunch; three might have been a little too much for me.

I didn’t get to try noca, one of the best-reviewed restaurants in Phoenix proper, but did swing by to grab lunch at nocawich, where they offer a handful of artisan sandwiches every day, including the Dolly, a giant fried-chicken sandwich (thicker than a cutlet but still on the thin side) with house-made pickles and a very flavorful, tangy/creamy cabbage slaw. I shouldn’t have eaten the whole thing – it was at least a portion and a half for me – but I did anyway because it was way too good to let one bite go to waste. I’d really like to get to noca for dinner to try the house-made pastas, but it’s the location that gets me – we didn’t live close, we never stay close when we’re visiting, and it’s not really near any ballparks.

Defalco’s was one of two Italian markets I wanted to try in Scottsdale – the other, Andreoli’s, was a little more out of my way but I understand is very good – and it’s very convenient to Old Town, further south on Scottsdale Road, near Los Sombreros. Defalco’s offers a pretty long list of sandwiches, mostly traditional New York-Italian options. I’ll pretty much always choose a sandwich with fresh mozzarella, prosciutto, and roasted red peppers on it; Defalco’s has something like a half a dozen bread choices, and while the focaccia was really good (not too greasy on top), it couldn’t exactly contain what was in the sandwich. Service is a little strange, like they’re doing you a favor, although I wouldn’t anyone was rude, just not the norm for Arizona where, if anything, you get people who seem a little too happy to help.

Taco Haus, the new spinoff of Scottsdale’s Brat Haus, is a little more remote from Salt River Fields than I’d realized, all the way up at Scottsdale Road and Shea Blvd, worth a visit if you want to eat and drink, but not a destination if you just want good tacos – I’d send you to Otro or Gallo Blanco for that. Taco Haus’ tacos are small, street-style, and the various fillings are all high-quality but overdone, too many elements on the plate so that the meat, which should in theory be the star ingredient, gets overwhelmed by acidity or mayonnaise.

Among return visits, the most notable meal was one at crudo, one of the two best restaurants I’ve tried in Arizona (Virtu in Scottsdale is the other). I branched out a bit this time, and would specifically cite the squid-ink risotto with tuna as an absolute standout dish, one that transcends the gimmicky nature of squid-ink dishes (“oooh! black food!”) with the perfect combination of texture, flavor, and presentation. I also love their cocktail menu’s inclusion of many local products, including spirits from the AZ Distilling Company in Tempe.

We split our breakfasts between the Hillside Spot and Crepe Bar. The Hillside Spot has switched from using Cartel Coffee to another vendor, espressions, whose beans I don’t like as much, and we actually had one kind of disappointing meal of about seven breakfasts we had there – a busy Sunday morning when nothing was quite up to par – but every other time it was consistently excellent. Crepe Bar’s menu is more limited but they use heart coffee from Portland, Oregon, which is among my favorite roasters in the country. The regular staff at both places were great, especially once they saw us a few times and got to know my daughter.

I didn’t make it to several spots I wanted to hit, including Atlas Bistro (tried to go without a reservation but they were booked up past our daughter’s bedtime), Bink’s, El Chullo, Beaver Choice, and Draft House in Peoria. There’s always Fall League…

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→ March 2, 2014
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Nashville eats, 2014 edition.

Nashville is awesome. If they had a major-league team there, I could live in Nashville very happily. The food scene is amazing, I hear the music scene is pretty good, the city is full of vibrant neighborhoods with distinct identities, and it’s growing – having a great university right in the city doesn’t hurt. It’s a shame its reputation has to be scarred by the proximity of the Gaylord Opryland Hotel & Gouging Center, but that’s well outside the city limits anyway.

The centerpiece meal of the trip was the new location of Husk, Sean Brock’s second outpost under that name after the flagship restaurant in Charleston. Like the original, the Nashville Husk is located in a converted house, but it’s roomier once you get inside and has a large bar area in the basement rather than in an adjacent carriage house. The menu changes daily, so what I describe here may not be on the menu even if you choose to go soon.

I went with a friend and because we were seated 15-20 minutes after our reservation time, we ended up with a starter compliments of the kitchen – Carolina rice griddle cakes with a pimento/jalapeñ cheese spread. The cakes were ridiculously good, with the crispy texture on top of cornmeal cakes (thanks to lots of sugar caramelizing in some sort of not-good-for-you fat), soft and steaming in the center, but not flat or dry like a lot of pancakes that don’t use much wheat flour. There was, however, a greater chance of Dan Vogelbach playing shortstop in the majors than there was of me liking that cheese spread. I contented myself with the Parker House rolls served as starters. That’s a traditional New England roll made with milk and baked all stuffed into a pan so that you only get a crust on the top and bottom, with the sides of the rolls all touching and coming out in a sort of square-like shape. These were the best I’d ever had, the lightest and the most flavorful, with the benne (we call them sesame) seeds on top a nice touch.

The pork ribs starter was meager at two regular-sized ribs and a runt, but the sweet/hot glaze along with a little crumble of peanuts stuck to the top was a winner. It felt a little awkward to eat ribs in such a nice restaurant – the only correct way to eat ribs is primally – but Husk prepared them in a way I hadn’t had them before, with plenty of bark on the top and texture contrast from the peanuts that, now that I’ve had it, I’ll miss the next time I have plain ol’ smoked ribs.

For my entree, I chose the grilled catfish, in part because I had a catfish dish at my first visit to the Husk in Charleston. The fish on my plate was incredibly fresh, as Brock is among the leaders in using high-quality local ingredients and making sure the diner knows where his food came from, but it was a shade too rare, so the top didn’t have much in the way of grill marks or the texture that comes from the Maillard reaction, while the interior was just a bit too soft. The deconstructed hoppin john, with the rice and beans cooked and served separately, was superb, with a citrusy flavor to the beans reminiscent of the Brazilian black-bean dish feijão.

I also tried a local beer, Jackalope’s Bearwalker Maple Brown Ale, where the brewers add maple syrup to the beer during the “conditioning” or secondary phase of fermentation. By this point, the remaining yeasts are working on the more complex sugars, so adding maple syrup, which contains mostly sucrose with a few monosaccharides as well, at that stage is … well, I’m not quite sure how that works, so if someone out there knows brewing chemistry I’d love to get an explanation. I do like the idea of adding sweet flavors where the yeasts will consume the sugar but the beer will contain the flavor so that you get the “memory” of the sweetness (associated with that flavor) without making the beer sweet.

Pineville Social is one of two Nashville restaurants nominated for a James Beard Award this year – the other is called The 404 Kitchen, but I couldn’t find it – and it’s as notable for its space as it is for its food. The restaurant itself is huge, in a converted warehouse of some sort with high ceilings and a giant, gaudy square bar in the center and six bowling lanes in the back. I managed to sneak in there for Saturday brunch before the Vanderbilt game that afternoon and tried the fried chicken and biscuits you saw on my Instagram feed that day. It was as good as it looked – perfectly fried hunks of chicken breast on a tender biscuit with a smooth, rich white gravy on top. There were no gimmicks, no hot sauce, no pickles, nothing that didn’t belong there. I actually never ate dinner that night.

Crema is a new coffee roaster located very close to Pineville Social Club, which uses their beans for its in-house coffee bar, and the locals seem to have caught on that Crema is very serious about coffee prep. They offer seven or eight varietals for pour-overs and two blends for espresso, and the baristas take their time to make sure each drink is prepared correctly. I preferred their espresso, which had great body and moderate acidity, to the pour-over I had with their Kenya beans, which was a little underextracted. According to one of the baristas, they purchase directly from farms, but their trade is truly direct only with farms in Central and South America, where someone from the shop is actually traveling to those estates. Based on conversations with one of you in the business, it seems like Crema was roasting and selling beans from last year’s harvest, which isn’t ideal but still miles ahead of what you’ll get at Corporate Coffee. This is also the first artisan roaster I’ve seen in a while with beans from Yemen.

I also ate two meals at Fido, one lunch and one breakfast. The latter happened when I called an audible; Buster Olney, who doesn’t like to talk about it much but actually went to Vanderbilt, recommended the Pancake Pantry, which unfortunately had a line at least 40 deep at 8:20 on that Saturday morning. Fido’s my favorite quick spot in Nashville, though, with a little of everything, cooked to order but served fast, including really good hash browns, and just a great lively vibe about the place. They also have a huge list of specials that is usually where I find my order, although on this trip I ordered off the menu twice as they had a lot of dishes with spinach, which I unfortunately can’t eat.

I’ve covered Nashville before, but if you want to read about The Catbird Seat, City House, the Pharmacy, or Rolf & Daughters, check out those earlier posts.

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→ July 2, 2012
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Durham eats.

My column on this year’s All-Star Game roster flubs is up now for Insiders.

Our 72 hours in Durham were very filling, even though I ended up skipping lunch one day while at the ballpark. We stayed downtown, where there’s quite a bit within walking distance (and a relative paucity of crappy chains) and a tremendous amount of variety within a ten-minute drive.

The best meal we had on the trip was probably the first one, dinner at Nanataco just south of downtown towards Chapel Hill. It’s a fairly new gourmet taco place that offers a wide variety of meats, both normal and “dirty” – and, like any good foodie, I went right for the dirty menu, including smoked duck and crispy pork belly. The three taco plate allows you to go with up to three different meats, so I chose those two and then the suggestion of the woman (possibly the owner) who took my order, the fried calamari taco, which unlike the other two came with arugula and a very faintly spicy mayo. The corn tortillas are made fresh in the kitchen and threatened to overshadow the meat, where the duck was excellent (but not smoky, just ducky) while the pork belly was just fair (and not crispy). Learn from my rookie mistake, though, and eat the calamari first if you order that taco, since it started to overcook from its own carryover heat while I ate the other two tacos. The roasted plantain milkshake had a great caramel/savory flavor combo but the slightly fibrous texture imparted by the plantains ended up outweighing everything else.

Dames Chicken and Waffles is pretty clear about its mission, and while they make a big deal about the five waffle options and their various flavored butters called “shmears” (I know, it doesn’t really fit), the selling point here is the fried chicken, some of the best I have ever had. The two drumsticks that came with my classic waffle were absolutely perfect: hot, crispy, correctly seasoned, and moist on the inside. A bucket of those and I would have been quite content. The waffle was solid, a little undercooked like the waffle half of almost every chicken-and-waffle combo I have ever tried (exception: Thomas Keller’s Cafe Bouchon), but with a mild cinnamon flavor and plenty of air within it to keep it relatively light. The meals rather incongruously include a side dish; my daughter liked their mac and cheese, while I actually finished the buttered grits after adding some salt. (I’ve never had grits anywhere that had enough salt in them.) My wife ordered a waffle that came with a chicken cutlet – actually two very large pieces of egg-battered chicken breast, maybe two to three times the meat that my dish came with, if you’re all about quantity. The drumsticks are fried more traditionally and had a thinner, crispier crust.

We had breakfast twice at Rue Cler, a cafe attached to a French restaurant right downtown, probably best known for their beignets – six for $5, a dozen for $8, fried to order, with a thick crispy layer masking light spongy goodness on the inside. They also do an impressive egg sandwich, cooked to order, made on thin slices of fresh sourdough bread with eggs barely over medium and cheese and/or bacon. They offer local coffee roasted by Carborro roasters – I don’t drink a lot of drip coffee, but this was obviously freshly roasted – although their tea selection was sadly diminished the two days we visited. Everything was fantastic; the only negative is that seating in the cafe is quite limited. Really, though, it’s about the beignets.

With Rue Cler’s cafe closed on Sundays, we walked over to Scratch, just down the pedestrian-only Orange Street from Rue Cler. Scratch is primarily a pie bakery, offering smaller crostatas as part of an eclectic (and constantly changing) breakfast menu that may also include shirred eggs, fried duck eggs, and homemade buttermilk biscuits with an optional patty of local pork sausage, which is what I ordered. How anyone could order a crappy fast-food ‘sausage biscuit’ when places like Scratch offer the real thing is beyond me; even though the biscuit was a little dense, the flavor was buttery but not too tangy, and the sausage tasted of actual pork with a hint of black pepper, not the overpowering salt/cheap pepper profile of fast-food (or, for that matter, bad diner) breakfast sausage.

We spent Saturday at Durham’s Museum of Life and Science, and their new on-site restaurant, Cafe Sprout, is more than good enough to thrive even without the captive audience. The menu was designed by the chef behind the BBQ joint the Q Shack (a recommendation I didn’t get to try on this trip) and includes a lot of locally sourced items and real cooking in the back, not the reheating you’ll find at most museum or stadium food outlets. They smoke several of their own meats, including bacon and turkey, and the bread on the sandwiches and paninis is high quality; I went with a smoked turkey panini with fresh tomatoes, red onions, and local goat cheese, and other than the bread being sliced a little too thinly it was excellent. Prices are also insanely reasonable, with $8-9 getting you a sandwich and one of about ten options for side dishes, one of which was fried okra, which I can never turn down. (It was average, a little greasy and short of salt, but also piping hot when I got it.) They even offer the local paletas made by Locopops, with six flavors available; the strawberries and cream was a little too understated for me but the French tart flavor – essentially fruits de bois, with blueberries, raspberries, cherries, and red currents – was perfect.

Foster’s Market, towards Chapel Hill, apparently is the brainchild of a locally famous chef, offering a wide array of sandwiches and pastries; the service was excellent, but the food was only fair, probably not worth a return visit for me.

I should also mention Vin Rouge in Durham, which we didn’t visit because my wife declined my offer of a nice upscale French dinner, but would be a must for me any time I’m solo in Durham for dinner. Review is at that link; the executive summary is that you must get the bacon confiture starter.

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→ May 25, 2009
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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.

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→ June 15, 2008
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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.

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