→ April 1, 2018
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Raleigh and Durham eats, 2018 edition.

Downtown Raleigh has seen a huge renaissance over the last few years, especially in the area where Ashley Christensen’s main restaurants are. Now just one block over on Blount Street are two of the best new restaurants in the Triangle, according to Eater, in Mofu Shoppe and Bharvana Brewery.

Mofu Shoppe grew out of the Pho Nomenal Dumplings food truck whose owners won season 6 of something called the Great Food Truck Race and invested their winnings in their first brick and mortar location, with their signature pork and chive dumplings on the menu. I went with small plates so I could try more things at every place I tried for dinner this week, which here included those dumplings, crispy Brussels sprouts with sweet sriracha sauce and bacon, and the pork belly rice bowl. The dumplings are superb, pleasantly chewy, with the right amount of filling and very even flavors of chive and garlic. The Brussels sprouts were my favorite, even though they’re about a grade spicier than I would typically eat; the bacon lardons are thickly sliced and stand up to the sprouts well, but I didn’t care for the crème fraîche served underneath, which was too tangy, like sour cream. The pork belly rice bowl is a great concept, although I ended up liking it less than I expected. The idea seems to be to take the flavors of German potato salad and put them into a dish similar to bibimbap, so you get rice, a poached egg, pork belly, and a slaw with a mustardy vinaigrette. The dressing on the slaw overwhelmed the other flavors in the dish, unfortunately. For dessert, I went with the Vietnamese coffee mousse, which is just what it sounds like; imagine the texture of softly whipped cream and the flavor of good coffee ice cream.

Just across the street is Bhavana Brewery, a combination brewery, restaurant, book store, and flower/home decor store. (That’s not an April Fool’s Day joke.) The owners also run a Laotian restaurant next door and this menu is heavily East Asian-influenced, although it doesn’t adhere to any particular tradition from that continent. Again going with small plates, I took my server’s suggestions and ordered the steamed soup dumplings (xiao long bao), the vegetable gyoza, the seafood dumplings in mushroom sauce, and the duck egg rolls (that was my one pick among the four). The soup dumplings were the best dish, filled with a mixture of crab and pork meat, with a good balance of broth, meat, and dough, with the crab balancing out what could have been a fairly heavy filling had it been only pork. The vegetable dumplings were my least favorite, with a grassy note and a flat flavor that needed some heat and probably more salt/umami to boost it. The server did recommend the scallion pancake with bone marrow, but that sounded way too heavy for me. They do indeed brew their own beers, with a wide and rotating selection, but unfortunately their limited book selection did not include Smart Baseball.

The Lakewood is the new restaurant from the chef-owner of Scratch Bakery, which closed its downtown Durham location about a month ago and reopened in the space adjacent to this new restaurant just off Chapel Hill Road a little west of downtown. The Lakewood has a straightforward menu of small plates and sides that are more vegetable/seafood-focused and a half-dozen meat-centric main plates, plus, of course, fantastic desserts. I stuck with small plates once more and went with the roasted cauliflower with salsa verde, the parsnip pierogis with radishes, and the shrimp toast, the last of which was the star of the meal, coming drenched in a slightly sweet soy-sesame sauce. The cauliflower was a bit of a miss, as it was unevenly seasoned and underdone in the center of some of the florets; I probably should have caved to my baser instincts and ordered the Brussels sprouts with bacon jam instead. I chose the weirdest dessert on the menu, a rice tart with roasted carrot sorbet, which came in a traditional French tart crust with a thick custard in it that had some broken rice grains and was not terribly sweet, since the sweetness came from that carrot sorbet. That was the best thing on the plate, with a deep, earthy sweetness and a gorgeous deep orange color.

Jubala Coffee in Raleigh serves Counter Culture Coffee with multiple single-origin options, even offering two for espresso drinks in addition to the regular blend. They also offer sweet biscuits with various options, including egg and bacon or sausage sandwiches, with the eggs cooked to order; I prefer biscuits without that sweetness, but the texture of these was still excellent and the over medium egg was cooked perfectly. On the Durham side of the triangle, Cocoa Cinnamon, a recommendation from a co-worker of mine, roasts its own coffee (under the 4th Dimension label) and offers a couple of pour-over options, as well as churros at their Lakewood location, although I went to a different shop and didn’t think churros for breakfast was the most sensible plan.

I did hit two places I’ve been before: Durham’s Nanataco, which has never failed me yet and had one of my favorite special meat options, hog jowl, as a monthly feature; and Raleigh’s Beasley’s for fried chicken.

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→ March 30, 2014
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Raleigh eats.

Two new ESPN posts from Saturday – my report on Carlos Rodon and some more prep bats, and my 2014 MLB predictions.

I decided to make this trip to the Triangle into a tour of Ashley Christensen’s Raleigh restaurants, after receiving several recommendations from scout friends and (I think) hearing of her via Hugh Acheson. Christensen has four outposts in downtown Raleigh, three of them on the same block of Wilmington Street, which served for all three of my dinners plus a breakfast/coffee stop.

Poole’s Diner is her high-end shop, with a menu that changes weekly or daily and focuses on local products, meaning it’s very heavy on vegetables even in the mains – which was a positive since I took my cousin, a vegetarian, for dinner. The best item was actually a side dish, sauteed Brussels sprouts with oyster mushrooms and a sherry cream sauce. Mushrooms and fortified wines like sherry or madeira are great friends, and mounting the resulting sauce with cream (saute the mushrooms, deglaze with the wine, finish with just enough cream to thicken) adds flavor and mouthfeel that goes with almost everything … but I’ve never had it with Brussels sprouts or any other brassica before. The combination was unexpected but provided great balance to the slight bitterness of the sprouts, with the cream limiting that bitter note and allowing the umami of the mushrooms to move to the front.

My entree was a seared halibut over farro with a roasted tomato relish, everything perfectly cooked, with the farro actually the best part of the dish. Farro, an “ancient grain” in the wheat family that can refer to spelt, emmer, or einkorn; the hulled berries are cooked until al dente and can substitute in many recipes for rice or barley, but with more flavor than plain rice and less of that good-for-you taste of barley. We shared a dark chocolate/mocha pot de crème with coffee shortbread, served in a wide-mouth mason jar, my kind of dessert – bittersweet, not cloying, with the consistency of a thick mousse so that even a half portion was very satisfying.

Poole’s also has its own house cocktail menu; I couldn’t pass on a drink based on Mount Gay XO rum (especially after I heard rumors, unfounded as it turns out, that Mount Gay was shutting down). The cocktail included Mount Gay, sweet vermouth, and orange bitters, served with a strip of orange peel, and for a drink that had no non-alcoholic components it was surprisingly smooth, and the dark rum provides a hint of sweetness without any added sugar in the drink. The entree, the side, my cousin’s salad (an entree portion size), dessert, and the cocktail came to about $75 before tip.

Couple of important notes on Poole’s: They don’t take reservations, but there’s a large bar where you can get happy while you wait; there’s a large parking lot across the street that’s free after 5 pm; and their website discourages diners from bringing children.

Beasley’s Chicken + Honey, Christensen’s fried chicken restaurant – I know most of you are already sold at this point – actually shares a space with Chuck, her burger place, separated by a wall but with staffers going back and forth between the two. Beasley’s was the better place by far; the chicken was excellent, among the best fried chicken I’ve ever had, served with a very slight drizzle of honey over the top – just enough for the taste, not enough to make it sticky. But the sides are absolutely incredible; one friend of mine who lives in the Triangle says he only gets the $9 plate of three sides and skips the chicken altogether. I went with the roasted beets with pickled onions and an orange & white balsamic vinaigrette, and the green cabbage slaw with malt vinegar, roasted tomatoes, and what I think was a celery seed mayo dressing that may have had dried mustard as well. The beets came cold, both red and golden, with the vinaigrette thicker than a typical dressing, somewhere between the consistency of a regular vinaigrette and that of pure maple syrup, with the onions on top, giving two elements of acidity to brighten and balance the sweetness of the beets. (Disclaimer: I love roasted beets in pretty much any form as long as they never saw the inside of a can.)

The cabbage slaw was also strong, maybe a little overdressed, but the celery seeds in the dressing were a surprising and effective touch; I might have though of crushed caraway seeds or mustard seeds, both of which work extremely well with cabbages, but the celery seeds were a note I kept coming back to after eating. Also, they have bourbon chocolate pecan pie for dessert and that was hands-down the best pecan pie I’ve ever tasted, maybe the first time I’ve had one where I never thought for a second, “this is a little too sweet.” The predominant flavors were the dark chocolate and the bourbon – the booze wasn’t there for nomenclature, but you actually get that smoky/sweet flavor in the finished product.

Chuck was a little disappointing after my meals at the other two spots, mostly because the burger itself was underseasoned. Although the good folks on the Beasley’s twitter feed advised me to get the Dirty South – a burger with smoked pork shoulder and chili on top of the patty itself – I couldn’t bring myself to order it, not with an avocado and bacon-onion jam option staring me in the face. (Besides, I wanted to taste the beef, and though the Dirty South would overwhelm it with the pork flavor.) Also, the bun was kind of nondescript. The hand-cut fries were good, and seemed to have all the salt that was missing from the burger; you get your choices of two dipping sauces from a list of seven or eight, and I recommend the espelette mayo, although if you like garlic mayo theirs is potent as well. They offer unusual milkshake flavors and will spike them with alcohol, but I didn’t partake. A five-ounce burger (they offer a half-pound, but really, no one needs that) and a quarter pound of fries was more than enough for me.

Joule’s Coffee is the Christensen coffee/breakfast joint, a few doors down from Beasley’s and Chuck, using beans from Durham’s Counter Culture, one of the best roasters on the east coast. They offer drip, cold brew, pour-overs, and various espresso drinks, with your choice of two different single-origin beans for the last option. The breakfast menu includes egg dishes, croissant French toast, sausage and biscuits, and, my choice, house-made yogurt (thick, like Greek yogurt or labneh) with granola and fresh blueberries. The coffee, a Rwandan varietal, was good enough that I contemplated getting up a half-hour earlier the next morning to drive over there before my flight home – I didn’t, because I like sleep too, but I was tempted – and the yogurt was a good reminder that homemade can beat even the best packaged, authentic Greek yogurts*.

* Authentic Greek yogurt means it’s strained yogurt, without any added thickeners. The FDA has no guidelines on Greek yogurt or the use of the word “authentic” here, so you get major yogurt brands creating fake Greek yogurt by adding vegetable gums, pectin, or corn starch. Read the labels and buy the real stuff – Chobani, Fage, and Whole Foods all do it right.

My one non-Christensen meal spot was La Farm Bakery in Cary, not too far from the USA Baseball complex where I was attending the NHSI tournament. La Farm was founded by a baker of traditional European breads, including sourdoughs, dark ryes, and pain de campagne – the French bread style that can be formed into decorative shapes. They also sell a variety of traditional French pastries and do salads and sandwiches for the lunch crowd. The bread is the star, a solid 70 on the 20-80 scale, especially the Italian bread with sesame seeds and the focaccia, with the ciabatta closer to average for me. The sandwiches were a mixed bag; I loved the Mediterraneo, with fresh mozzarella, roasted tomatoes, basil, and balsamic vinaigrette, but the “award-winning” albacore tuna salad sandwich was very ordinary. The BLT was very good, better with the added avocado option, but there was about twice as much chipotle mayo as the sandwich needed. On one of those days, one MLB team’s contingent walked in right as I was finishing, so I hung out for a bit and saw what they ate, with the kale salad with eggless Caesar dressing the most appealing. If I lived near Cary, I’d be buying bread from them twice a week, at least.

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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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→ April 26, 2012
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Husk, Vin Rouge, Customshop.

Today’s Klawchat transcript, and today’s Baseball Today podcast.

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Husk, located in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, was named the best new restaurant in the country for 2011 by Bon Appetit magazine, just the best of a host of accolades earned by chef Sean Brock (formerly of McCrady’s). I had lunch at Husk, which isn’t the full experience (with a very different menu from what they serve for dinner), but loved their local-seasonal-artisanal approach to traditional southern cuisine.

Husk has a giant blackboard right by the podium showing where the restaurant obtained all of its main ingredients, from proteins to dairy to eggs, with most sources quite local, in either South or North Carolina. I overordered a little, but rational portion sizes meant I didn’t end up with a ton of food left over. The catfish, lightly dusted with cornmeal and quickly panfried, served over a broth of tomatoes, several beans (including lima beans), and pea shoots, was superb, easily the best catfish I’ve ever eaten, with none of the ‘fishy’ flavor most people would associate with that fish, instead playing up what a mild, slightly sweet-tasting fish it can be when sourced properly. The skillet of bacon cornbread was also superb, rich, crispy on the bottom from the skillet and the bacon fat, with flecks of bacon throughout; this may have been gauche, but I found it quite useful for dipping in the tomato broth underneath the fish. For dessert, Husk had a special item, a blueberry crisp with local berries, a very thin layer of buckwheat granola on top, and a quenelle of lemon ice cream; overall the dish was far less sweet than most desserts, with a tangy/sweet combination that kept the blueberries at the center of the dish.

Service overall was very attentive, if a little peculiar. When I told the server it was my first time at the restaurant and asked for her recommendations, she actually recommended the cheeseburger, saying it was “the best thing on the menu.” That may be true, but is that really what I’m here for? I’ll get a burger at a great burger place. I went to Husk for the chef’s innovations in southern food. And I hope eventually to get back there for dinner, preferably with a few months’ notice so I can actually get a reservation.

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A few weeks back, I had a postgame meal in Durham at Vin Rouge, another discovery from Bon Appetit because the restaurant had participated in a charity dinner in Raleigh that was covered by the magazine. I tweeted at the time that their bacon confiture – a bacon, onion, brown sugar confection served with thick slices of country bread – was on the short list of the best things I have ever eaten, and I admit I haven’t stopped thinking about the dish since then. It overshadowed the meal itself, trout amandine that was slightly overcooked in the kitchen and became very overcooked on its way to me because the trout – the whole fish, or about two meals for me – was still folded in half and thus continued to steam itself until I opened it up. The mashed potatoes on the plate, however, were divine, with God-knows-how-much cream/butter and a perfectly smooth texture. As a wine bistro, Vin Rouge doesn’t have much of a beer selection, which isn’t so much a complaint (did I expect anything different) as a comment for those of you who, like me, prefer barley to grapes. I will return, just with a different choice of entree.

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Kiley McDaniel and I went to Charlotte’s Customshop last night at the suggestion of a reader (I apologize, I don’t remember who passed it along). Their concept is great – local sourcing, in-house preparations (such as duck- and chicken-liver pate) – but the execution wasn’t there last night. The braised pork belly had great color on the exterior and the ale and cider reduction was a perfect complement, but the meat was tough and some of the edges of the belly were actually charred. The roasted half-duck special had a crispy skin dusted with Chinese five-spice powder, but again, the meat was overcooked and tough, refusing to separate from the bones. They have a solid selection of charcuterie items – we went with Speck, Manchego (with honey), and drunken goat (with quince paste) – and the bread pudding (with sliced apples and caramel sauce, albeit with some over-roasted walnuts) was generally strong. With ingredients this good, the finished product felt more disappointing for the lack of execution because it could have been phenomenal with a more deft hand.

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→ July 11, 2010
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Cary/Raleigh eats, part two.

Two new articles up on ESPN.com: Cliff Lee trade breakdown and brief reports on all of the players in Sunday’s Futures Game.

I took a few of your suggestions for Q and sushi in the Traingle area and stumbled on very solid frozen custard joint for my second run through North Carolina.

I’ll start with the sushi: Waraji seems to be, by acclamation, the best sushi place in the Triangle, and it may very well be that, but it’s not very good. Better than Little Tokyo, but still not good. The fish was completely tasteless; one fish, “white fish,” recommended by the chef who served me, was chewy and sinewy; they don’t offer anago or tai and were out of kanpachi; and they charged me for a nirigi I ordered but never received. The seaweed salad cost $8 and was really portioned for two, although it was the greenest I’ve ever seen, making me wonder about its legitimacy.

I tried Allen & Sons and The Pit for Q, and would unequivocally vote for the latter despite its inauthentic setting. The Pit is the only upscale Q joint I’ve come across in my travels – they even have a wine collection – and the place was filled with businessmen and -women at lunchtime. I ordered a combination plate at my server’s suggestion, getting the St. Louis ribs, the pulled pork, fried okra, and collard greens; the platter also comes with a biscuit and hush puppies, so I was full enough that I didn’t need dinner for about eight hours. The pulled pork was dry but both meats had a nice, subtle smoke flavor, and the ribs were fall-apart tender*. The okra was excellent – I’m starting to like eating in the south for the fried okra more than for the Q – and for about $12 the quantity of food was a little absurd. It’s not wow barbecue, and had a little bit of the feel of mass-smoked meat, as opposed to some guy in a shack who does it one pork shoulder at time, but it was very solid.

*There seems to be some real disagreement over whether ribs of any animal should be smoked till the meat falls off the bone. I’m in the “yes” camp, as ribs have a lot of connective tissue that I have no interest in eating. When the meat falls off the bone, the connective tissue will be largely gone. This, to me, is the entire point of low-and-slow cooking, whether it’s smoking or braising.

Allen & Sons looks good in the uniform, but the tools didn’t really play. It’s in a run-down building just off I-40 in Chapel Hill, and the menu is limited to “Carolina pork” and ribs, with the pork as their signature item. What came looked like some had scraped it off the wall after a pig exploded, an oily, vinegary, sloppy mess that tasted only of vinegar and not in the least of smoke. The best thing I can say about the dish is that it came with five hush puppies, as even the cole slaw was drowning in a mayo-vinegar slurry. It’s too bad, since that’s the sort of place where I’d expect to find the sort of artisanal work I thought the Pit’s pork lacked, but if you’re not going to put smoke flavor into the smoked meat, you might as well stick the thing in an oven.

Goodberry’s is a local chain of frozen custard shops that I think would stand up well against the competition of Milwaukee, still the capital of frozen custards as far as I can tell. Goodberry’s felt a little richer, with more butterfat, but the texture was an 80 and the chocolate, despite being a little light in color, had a rich natural cocoa flavor. They offer vanilla, chocolate, sugar-free vanilla, and a rotating flavor of the day; I was disappointed that coconut wasn’t coming until the 16th, since that + chocolate is one of my favorite ice cream flavor pairings. They also offer a long list of toppings, including freshly roasted nuts (I don’t think they’re roasted on site, though), so I’ll recommend the chocolate with Oreos and almonds combo. The location I went to, on Kildare Farms Road in Cary, has no indoor seating but there are tables with umbrellas for shade.

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→ June 28, 2010
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Cary/Raleigh eats, part one.

I was in Cary, North Carolina, for a few days last week, and will be heading there again soon, so this is the first of likely two food posts on the area.

I’ll start with the one success, Coquette, a French brasserie in the North Hills mall complex in Raleigh, a recommendation of friend-of-the-dish Richard Dansky, who also met me there for dinner. Their duck confit crepes were outstanding all around, from the perfect duck leg to the three golden crepes to the just-right amount of mushroom-leek cream sauce; the only questionable inclusion were fava beans that brought color but a little bitterness and didn’t meld with the other flavors. For dessert, I tried their cashew toffee crunch profiteroles; the pastries, pate a choux with cocoa and cinnamon, were a little dry (hard to avoid), but I would order a half gallon of that ice cream, which was loaded with bits of nuts and toffee and had strong caramel notes in the ice cream itself. It’s served with a dark chocolate ganache sauce that I may have just eaten with a spoon. The only misstep was the salad recommended by our server, a frisee mix with a poached egg … but no other dressing beyond the runny yolk. Not really good eats, but they had plenty of other salad and starter options to try.

I tried two Q joints in the area, neither great. Danny’s, one of several in the area, is located in an industrial park right off Tryon Rd; the pulled pork was moist but had almost no smoke flavor and required saucing, but their sides were all very good, including outstanding fried okra and a small bean I’d never had before called “field peas” that had a little of the bright sweetness of English peas but with the firmness of black-eyed peas. Dixie Belle’s pork had slightly more flavor – I mean slightly – but was dried out, probably from being kept warm for too long. I know there’s better Q in Raleigh and Durham, but didn’t have time to head that far. The mom from one of the local host families recommended Clyde Cooper’s in downtown Raleigh, so I’ll try to hit that next time around.

I had a recommendation for a hole in the wall sushi place in Cary called Little Tokyo, which also seems to be held in high esteem by locals … and that doesn’t say good things about the state of sushi in Cary, because Little Tokyo is awful. I figured I was in trouble when I saw the menu was about 2/3 rolls, with nigiri and sashimi relegated to less than a full page without the same bells or whistles. I knew I was in trouble when I asked the chef behind the sushi bar what he recommended and he looked at me like I’d just said Yuniesky Betancourt should be the AL’s starter at shortstop in the All-Star Game. I ordered five different kinds of nigiri, none of which had a lick of taste. The nigiri fell apart when I picked them up with my hands, and the texture of the maguro was mushy. It’s clear they use the sauces and extras on rolls to cover up inferior quality fish. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

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