Haute Southern cuisine has blown through the New York and L.A. restaurant scenes over the past few years like Paula Deen through a stick of butter. Fancy chefs have evangelized cornmeal-laced flapjacks paired with buttermilk fried chicken, shrimp with cheese grits and breaded pork chops on collard greens to a whole new group of diners who eat their down-home vittles with a healthy sense of big-city irony.
And like any fashion, it's already on its way out, replaced by a Manhattan obsessed with barbecue. They are fickle folk, New Yorkers, but they know their food.
Normally, the Bay area has to wait a good decade or so before our local chefs start seeding menus with national culinary trends, but when it comes to Haute Southern, we have a leg up. We are — technically, if not spiritually — in the South, after all.
The past couple of months have already seen two restaurants hit St. Pete's Central Avenue serving upscale versions of low-country fare: Tedesco's Grillside (reviewed last month) and Savannah's Café.
At Savannah's, the "haute" comes in the form of exceptional ingredients, a skilled kitchen and an elegant setting. Instead of meddling in classic dishes to stamp her big personality onto the food, co-owner Edyth James — formerly of Saffron's — largely lets classic Southern cooking speak for itself. And it speaks with a big voice.
Collards are a revelation of balanced flavors, the greens tender but crisp and glistening with an earthy glaze of reduced cider vinegar, the entire mess tinged with smoke from a long visit with a piece of ham. Simple ingredients, but Savannah's twists those into a complex dish that all but defines what great collards taste like.
Savannah's grits are piles of massive, fluffy grains stuffed with moisture and ideally seasoned, the kind of grits that don't need any help from butter or cheese but, just for good measure, are engorged with butter and cheese anyway. The simplicity and depth of flavor in a basic bowl of black-eyed peas is astounding. I'm amazed to find that I could come to Savannah's and order just this — peas, grits and collards — and leave full and happy and right with the world.
Savannah's is housed in a building that held the first car dealership in St. Petersburg and most recently was home to a jazz club. It's been beautifully restored by co-owner John Warren. There's a pressed tin ceiling high above the dining room, cool copper sconces and a French Quarter-style balcony in the back that can host private parties.
The floor is original tile, which is pretty and traditional but means the restaurant has a lot of hard surfaces that reflect sound. Even with only a half-dozen tables occupied, Savanah's is loud. Another problem: The doorless archway leading to the kitchen is smack in the middle of the back wall, showering the dining room with clanging pots, bright lights and bickering prep cooks.
Not everything is as straightforward as the heavenly sides I mentioned above, but most of it is just as good. Catfish ($17) here has a flakier, richer crust than the flat cornmeal coating I anticipated, the batter thick and brown and crenellated with crisp outcroppings of dough. Seafood Jambalaya ($17) is low on tomato and a bit soupy, but the deeply flavored roux at its base — and a massive amount of andouille sausage and tender shrimp, mussels and scallops — holds the dish together.
At first, fried chicken ($16) seems a rather simple and remarkably tasty treat. The juicy boneless breast is coated in salty breading cut by the tang of buttermilk and topped by rich, café au lait-colored milk gravy that tastes like nothing other than chicken and happiness. Collards sidle up to the chicken — a perfect match — as do roughly smashed potatoes loaded with cream and butter and drizzled with more heavenly gravy.
Maybe because the piece of chicken is a notoriously bland boneless breast, Savannah's feels the need to stuff it with goat cheese, onions and mushrooms. It's unnecessary and distracting: Gravy, crunchy breading and fine cooking more than justify the cut.
The only haute-speak on the menu may be the pork "Napoleon" ($19), which is really just a fancy word for piling moist, herb-infused pulled pork onto flaky puff pastry, along with some superfluous caramelized onions and a sweet and slow-cooked mushroom ragout. The ingredients are damn tasty, but the dish never seems to come together.
When it comes to appetizers, if you love Savannah's collards — only the certifiably insane wouldn't — you'll likely love them just as much crammed into a fried "low country" egg roll ($9), with chunks of chicken and rich Tasso ham. Goofy, yes, but the flavors are more authentic than you might think.
Savannah's other apps continue the crowd-pleasing trend: golden fritters dotted with corn and chopped oyster ($7); twin cakes — one of crab, the other of pink crawfish ($9), and classic pimento cheese spread on basic flatbread ($7). Extremely tasty, nicely accomplished, but nothing too haute about it, thank you.
That's the real joy of Savannah's. Sure, I seek out innovative chefs and reward restaurants that push the culinary envelope. But I'm always happy to find a restaurant that serves exactly what I'm expecting with panache and skill.
Savannah's is that kind of place, a menu loaded with a slew of reliable, expertly executed and reasonably priced dishes that are easily at the top of an underrepresented culinary genre.
This article appears in Aug 8-14, 2007.