By John. T. Edge | Nov 08 | Features

100 Southern Foods

From meats and sweets to seafood and sides–dig in to our interactive food map! 

SIDES & SUCH

Beans All the Way
The Bean Barn
Greeneville, Tennessee
Beans are a working man’s feed. A food born of poverty, refined by generations of home cooks, best served with a coarse tile of cornbread and a slice of onion. At this chicken-coop-size diner, the owners honor both tradition and innovation, serving a bowl of soup beans with a floater of beef stew. (423-638-8329)

Deviled Eggs
Sally Bell’s Kitchen
Richmond, Virginia
Step up to the glass-fronted case and order the box lunch of a chicken salad sandwich, a cup of macaroni salad, one half of a deviled egg, a pecan-crowned cheese wafer, and a pineapple cupcake. All will wow, but the deviled egg, with that satiny bull’s-eye of yolk, will slay. (sallybellskitchen.com; 804-644-2838)

Egg and Green Olive Sandwich
Trowbridge’s
Florence, Alabama
Wrapped in tissue paper, sandwiches at this 1918 lunch counter and ice cream parlor are comparable to crust-trimmed home-style jobs. Begin with the creamy egg and olive, then move on to salty chicken salad. For dessert, orange-pineapple ice cream. (256-764-1503)

Fried Black-Eyed Peas
Ashley’s, Capital Hotel
Little Rock, Arkansas
They crunch when you think they should go smoosh. They taste earthy and righteous. They reference acarajés, the black-eyed pea fritters of West Africa. And they taste great with a martini. (capitalhotel.com; 501-374-7474)

Fried Green Tomatoes
Arnold’s Country Kitchen
Nashville, Tennessee
That’s craggy Jack Arnold, wearing a foulard bow tie and overalls, shuttling pans of collard greens from the kitchen. His wife, Rose, works the register, dealing butter pats from her cornbread deck, pouring sweet tea by the gallon. Kahlil, their son, a hipster with a megawatt smile, runs his knife through a haunch of garlic-studded roast beef, draping slices onto plates heaped with creamed potatoes and braised collards, spooning oily jus over all. Set in a cinderblock building on the industrial fringe of downtown Nashville, the Arnold family restaurant sets the standard for Southern meat-n-threes. Button-down bureaucrats on a break from paper pushing. Tar-splattered roofers. Bed-headed Vanderbilt coeds craving a taste of home. All slide their trays along the steam-table track, angling for an order of herb-battered fried green tomatoes. Fresh from the oil, sour-sweet, and brittle as can be, they taste like indictments of the lowest-common-denominator norm. (615-256-4455)

Grits with Butter
Zada Jane’s Corner Café
Charlotte, North Carolina
The place is earnest, and a little fey. But never mind that. They serve two-buck bowls of stone-ground Anson Mills organic grits. Cooked until thick but not pasty, they come gobbed with butter. (zadajanes.com; 704-332-3663)

House Salad with Comeback Dressing
Mayflower
Jackson, Mississippi
A nest of torn iceberg leaves. A couple of olives. Three grape tomatoes. And a clump of feta. Boring stuff, until you drench it in Comeback, the Jackson dressing of choice, the bastard child that legions of Greek restaurateurs have honed from that Thousand Island stuff. (601-355-4122)

Italian Salad
Mary Maestri’s
Tontitown, Arkansas
Powdered garlic, left to steep in vinegar for two weeks—that’s the secret. The smell will knock you flat. And pave you over. Although the restaurant has gone country club staid, its collapsed iceberg salad bullies its way onto your palate and announces its Italian-American heritage. (479-361-2536)

Kool-Aid Pickles
Eastend Grocery
Cleveland, Mississippi
Beverly Boddie pierces her dills like pincushions before pouring on the sugar and double-strength Kool-Aid. That aids the seep and catalyzes the process whereby a onetime vegetable shades toward sour candy. (662-843-1111)

Krinkle Kut Fries with Milo’s Sauce
Milo’s Hamburgers
Birmingham, Alabama
Not all great food need be farm-to-fork precious. These potatoes go directly from the freezer bag to the deep fryer. Next comes a shake of seasoned salt. And a dunk in a black-as-August-asphalt sauce that owes a debt to A.1. (miloshamburgers.com)

Macaroni and Cheese
L.D.’s Kitchen
Vicksburg, Mississippi
On Catfish Row, where the Mississippi Delta peters out, L.D.’s dishes a macaroni and cheese that manages to be moist but neither greasy nor crunchy. Served by a waitress named Sweety Pie, it reveals a range of hydrologic complexities, from whorls of egg to eddies of cheese. (601-636-9838)

Okra Soup
Bertha’s Kitchen
North Charleston, South Carolina
Relaxed and luxuriant. Almost sexy in its languidness, its looseness, its ooze. Okra soup is the steam-table grail at this restaurant secreted away in industrial North Charleston. (843-554-6519)

Pimento Cheese and Crackers
Blackberry Farm
Walland, Tennessee
Silky and served in a silver chalice, Blackberry Farm’s pimento cheese tastes like it’s made from equal parts butter, cheddar, and mayo, with errant bits of house-roasted pimentos for color contrast. (blackberryfarm.com; 865-984-8166)

Pot Likker Soup
Mary Mac’s Tea Room
Atlanta, Georgia
You receive a stubby pencil and an order blank. Get whatever you like from the country-come-to-town roster of favorites, but don’t forget the pot likker soup, a kind of supercharged turnip green bouillon. (marymacs.com; 404-876-1800)

Red Beans (and Drumsticks)
Frenchy’s Chicken
Houston, Texas
Frenchy’s cooks red beans and sausage until they collapse, slumping into a piquant brown slurry. Ask the counterwoman to hold the rice when she dishes your bowl and you can dip a drumstick into what you might as well call red bean sauce (frenchyschicken.com; 713-748-2233)

Red Rice
Hominy Grill
Charleston, South Carolina
Think of it as a Lowcountry jambalaya. But don’t think it’s an act of culinary mimicry. Purloo, sometimes known as red rice, has long been cooked from St. Augustine, Florida, up through Charleston and beyond. At Hominy, a binder of eggplant is the secret. (hominygrill.com; 843-937-0930)

Soufflé Potatoes with Béarnaise
Galatoire’s
New Orleans, Louisiana
Fat and poofy and featherweight, the potatoes resemble tiny dirigibles. Dunked in a saucer of béarnaise, enjoyed in this mirror-lined reliquary of creole cookery, they are the queerest and loveliest of appetizers. (galatoires.com; 504-525-2021)

Sriracha Remoulade
Reef
Houston, Texas
Houston is a city of immigrants. It happens to be a short drive from New Orleans. That’s how Thai Sriracha sauce (the stuff in those rooster-blazoned bottles) and creole remoulade came to have a baby, with chef Bryan Caswell as midwife (reefhouston.com; 713-526-8282)

Stewed Tomatoes
Niki’s West
Birmingham, Alabama
Scalloped tomatoes, tomato pudding—no matter the name—they’re midday fixtures in the Deep South, marriages of stale white bread, heaps of sugar, and lobes of tomato. Niki’s, a second-generation Greek-owned meat-n-three, serves a sweeter (and better) version than the norm. (nikiswest.com; 205-252-5751)

Sweet Potato Casserole
Weaver D’s
Athens, Georgia
An avalanche of mashed orange tubers, kissed with citrus and nutmeg. That’s what Dexter Weaver, the gospel-singing, personal-improvement-preaching proprietor wants to heft onto your plate alongside a pork chop, a scoop of squash soufflé, and a mess of greens. (706-353-7797)

Turnip Greens
Taqueria del Sol
Atlanta, Georgia
Chile de arbol. Eddie Hernandez, a native of Monterrey, Mexico, spikes his turnip greens with those squat pods. And he forgoes pork in favor of chicken stock. The result violates all the rules and, in turn, sets a new standard. (taqueriadelsol.com)

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