Posts (page 2)

Being a bit at a loss for where to eat dinner tonight, I suggested that we try South, a new restaurant in Raleigh from the Urban Food Group. I read today at Raleighing that tonight was the grand opening, and trying something new sounded fun. South is an upscale restaurant that offers traditional southern food. It replaces another restaurant with the same concept in the same location, called Savannah. I never ate at Savannah, which closed within a year of opening. Obviously Stacey and Kevin Jennings, the owners, are betting that the problem with Savannah was the execution.

I was well aware of the risks of visiting a restaurant on the first day, but the other restaurants under the same ownership are excellently run, so we went for it. As it turns out, in spite of the Raleighing publicity, the restaurant was nearly empty. There was a good crowd at the bar, but there were only two other tables of customers in the dining room. I'm pretty sure the waitstaff outnumbered the customers, but they didn't make the common mistake of smothering us (or the other tables) with excessive service. The food arrived hot and in a timely fashion, the service was great, and the decor is tasteful and appealing.

The menu at South features the sorts of favorites you'd expect at a southern restaurant in North Carolina. She-crab soup and fried green tomatoes were on the appetizers list, and the dinner menu featured fried chicken, fried catfish, shrimp and grits, and frogmore stew. Even the bread basket is southern-themed. It comes with hush puppies, bacon cheddar biscuits, and beer bread. The hush puppies and bread were fine, and the biscuits are on the light and fluffy side and very good.

My wife ordered the she-crab soup as an appetizer. It's one of those things she has whenever it's on the menu, and to me, this version (which also featured something biscuit-like submerged in it) was better than most. It was a bit lighter than you find in some places, but the flavors were also a bit bolder and richer. There was also plenty of crab meat in it, which is not always the case.

For dinner, my wife ordered the fried chicken and I ordered country fried steak. (I grew up in Texas and consider myself an authority on country, or as we call it in Texas, chicken fried steak. My tastes have expanded, but I still have a weakness for it.)  The chicken fried steak at South is outstanding. Normally chicken fried steak is a cheap piece of meat, pounded into submission, dredged in flour and shallow fried. The usually accompaniment is bland cream gravy. That may sound unappealing, but I love it. South puts a fine dining spin on the traditional southern dish, so the meat was a nicer cut, still tenderized, and the gravy was something browner and fancier than you usually find. To make this short, the steak was great. It was very well seasoned, the crust was perfect, and the gravy was tasty.  I couldn't tell you what seasonings were added to the steak, but I found the flavor surprising. The sides were mac and cheese (decent enough) and collard greens (excellent). I'd order it again.

I also tried my wife's fried chicken, which I'd also order in a heartbeat. The chicken was perfectly fried, and the flavors were more interesting than you'd expect. The sides were creamed spinach (incredibly rich) and mashed potatoes (well executed).

The entrees were filling, so we skipped dessert. That said, I'm anxious to go back and try their blackberry cobbler. They also have something called a pimento cheese beignet on the appetizer list that I'm anxious to try.

Hopefully as word gets around about South, business will pick up, and the owners will be vindicated in their belief that such a restaurant can work in that location. They won at least one regular customer on opening day.

People magazine shuffles through a bunch of candids and picks out items you've been photographed wearing three times, then whips up a feature called I Really Love My. If someone took my picture every day, they could easily come up with a page for every item in my wardrobe. There are shoes I've worn hundreds of times, and the sky's the limit on belt reuse. Half of the people in the feature are busted for using the same purse. Many normal people use the same purse every day for years. I can't imagine living under that kind of scrutiny and not being driven completely insane.

Peyton Manning and Prince were both so good in the Super Bowl yesterday that I think it made people forget how hard their jobs are. People are complaining that Manning was good rather than great, but I think that they are judging by clear, sunny day standards, rather than playing in a driving rain standards. Prince didn't help the players out at all in that regard. If the halftime show had been horrible due to the inclement weather, people probably would have been more impressed with how hard it is to play in that kind of rain. But Prince was great, just wailing on the electric guitar, standing in a rainstorm. Sometimes people are undermined by their own greatness.

Based on my last.fm profile:

1. Old 97's
2. Johnny Cash
3. Minutemen
4. U2
5. Chuck Berry
6. R.E.M.
7. Neko Case
8. Jerry Lee Lewis
9. Alice in Chains
10. Whiskeytown

These numbers are as much a function of how many tracks from each artist are in my music collection as they are a description of how much I like the artist in question.

I have no good reason to care about the AFC Championship game this afternoon, but I still want the Colts to win. Peyton Manning is the best quarterback in the NFL by any objective measurement, other than Super Bowl wins. Super Bowl wins are nice, but they really don't say much about a quarterback's individual performance. Plenty of mediocre quarterbacks have won Super Bowls, several truly great quarterbacks never won the big one.

Because Peyton Manning has never won a Super Bowl, some people refuse to acknowledge that he is truly great. I find this widely held opinion jarring, and if the Colts win today, and even better, if they win the Super Bowl, it will no longer exist. So even though I don't really care about Peyton Manning one way or another, or the Colts, or the Patriots, I have a strong rooting interest in seeing the universe become slightly more ordered.

The emcee at this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner will be Rich Little. Stephen Colbert's appearance last year apparently left the people who run the show with a newfound level of risk aversion. Is there any greater testament to the forcefulness of his monologue than that?  Maybe nobody else wants the job because Colbert's performance last year would make anyone else look timid. I still marvel at the fact that Colbert said those things while standing within reach of the President. 

Here's a column from John Clayton at ESPN. In the column he explains why the Patriots beat the Chargers in a playoff game this weekend. Note that both teams have had excellent seasons, and that the game was decided by the barest of margins. The Patriots won 24-21. As in any close game, the outcome turned as much on freak bounces of the ball as it did on anything else. For example, on one of the key plays in the game, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady threw an interception on fourth down, and one of the Patriots receivers stripped the ball and the Patriots recovered, giving them a first down that led to a score.

But the idea that the outcome of close games hinges on luck more than it does on character is boring, so sports writers ignore it. It's much more entertaining to think of games as soap operas where the guys with "heart" win and the guys who are "playing not to lose" go down in defeat.

I think that this kind of sports writing taps into a basic human impulse that forces us to deny the fact that many things in life are basically beyond our control. The idea that we might be hit by a bus on the way to work through no fault of our own is terrifying. The idea that we have hundreds of people confined at a detention center in Cuba because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time is unthinkable. And the idea that one team wins a football game and another team loses because a ball bounces in the wrong direction is fundamentally unsatisfying. So we make up fairy tales to discount this uncertainty and go on with the illusion that things are well ordered. Whatever gets people through the day, I guess.

Reports are that David Beckham is getting $250 milllion over five years to play soccer in America. $50 million from the actual soccer league and the rest in endorsements and so forth. Unfortunately, nobody in America cares about David Beckham. The soccer fans here know he's washed up, and the David Beckham fans aren't interested in the fact that he actually plays soccer. 

Raleigh, North Carolina is a wonderful place to live, but it's not tourist bait. Need proof?  Check out the local paper's list of the seven wonders of the Triangle. One of them is a local freeway. Another is a fancy strip mall.

Today I read a story about a coach who was fired for punching his players in the crotch in the name of humor. As an athlete, you're conditioned to put up with this sort of thing, so I'm surprised that it got out. I remember when I came to football practice one day and heard one of our coaches tell a teammate, "Last night I dreamed I saved you from a shit eating dog."  Wonder where he came up with that one?