East River Fish That Won't Kill You

Deciding where to eat along River Street in Savannah shouldn't be as difficult as it is. Save one random Greek restaurant, the fare here is simple: seafood, seafood and more seafood.

After a long day of walking around in 92 degree heat, we settled on The Shrimp Factory on East River St. Across the water from the Westin and convention center, The Shrimp Factory could use a makeover. Walls that seem to have been mortared in far apart stages and a muskiness that takes away from what should be the smell of fresh seafood frame the slightly pricey restaurant's atmosphere.

The food, however, was mostly on the mark. All entrees are served with warm and crispy sourdough bread and the place's spin on Caesar salad. I can't say for certain if The Shrimp Factory is jumping on the flavored butter bandwagon or if it's been a staple there long before the trend, but their cheese-infused butter option served with the sourdough is tasty yet a bit unrefined. Like a lighter, more whipped version of the random cheese spreads a far removed family member might include in a Christmas food arrangement, the butter was pleasant but could have benefited from something bold like chives or been improved by a cheese more nuanced than cheddar.

The Caesar was high-calorie salad perfection. Like any good Southern restaurant, The Shrimp Box refuses to lighten up its dressing, instead opting to sprinkle actual bits of bacon (not that imitation stuff) throughout the salad. Tossed tableside by our server, the greens were well balanced between romaine lettuce, bacon, radish and carrot shreds, and the amount of dressing was precisely enough.

From Another Cook in the Kitchen

We decided on the oddly named seafood strudel for an appetizer. Far more like spanikopita than anything you'd find in a bakery, the dish's phyllo was oily for my taste, and the lone shrimp (and we're talking shrimpy shrimp) in each triangle was a little bit like a joke. Yummy regardless, the spinach was bright and the sauce lemony without overpowering the meal.

From Another Cook in the Kitchen

Not interested in doing anything too low country two nights in a row, I opted for a dish with crab. If only based on what I've seen in the gift shops here, it seems these people take their crabs as seriously as the Marylanders closer to my home. The baked stuffed flounder comes with two flounder filets enveloping a tasty and distinctly Savannah-style crab meat, denser than what you'll find around the Chesapeake and with a spicy (dare I say more interesting or actually better?) touch. I'll leave that war for the purists to fight, but my vote is for Savannah.

From Another Cook in the Kitchen

The fish half of the dish was fresh and delicious, but I think the full conception of the plate is a little unfinished. Served atop a bed of angel hair pasta and topped with randomly placed scallop cream (think bay-flavored New England chowder), the dish as a whole is boringly monochrome, and it's a little hard to figure out what to do with the cream. Far chunkier than an alfredo-style sauce, the dish requires a descent amount of mixing for the pasta to taste like anything. While the meal as a whole seemed a little disjointed, if I had to pick half of a dish to shine while the other half floundered (awful pun, I know), I'd prefer the lacking half to be just a bunch of dollar pasta. On the river, the fish is what matters, and that made the meal worth it.

High Eating in the Low Country

From Another Cook in the Kitchen

Savannah, Ga., is everything I recall it being. A charmingly small city located on the U.S. Intracoastal Waterway, everywhere you look is a town square studded with statues and fountains. Pure white churches and rotundas tower over a mass of trees heavy with Spanish moss. The humidity not as thick as it should be this time of year, my coworkers and I walked quite a few blocks from our Hilton DeSoto looking for a good yet casual meal.

So it's fitting after eating breakfast in Arlington at Luna that I ended my day in Savannah at Moon River Brewing Company. Half-bar, half-restaurant, Moon River is just two streets away from the water on Bay Street (and one door down from what apparently is a pretty kickin' bar judging from the thigh-high boots a patron was wearing outside).

While we waited for a table (20 minutes on a late Wednesday night), we mulled over the many brewed beers available on tap. The beers range from $7-$9, mostly a mix of IPAs, a stout or two and some wheat beers. Sadly as soon as we'd made our selection, it was time to be seated.

And in retrospect, I'm glad I didn't get the beer, because this place was true to its Southern roots: This food is heavy. After going back and forth between the crab stuffed chicken and the chicken and sausage creole, I figured it'd be best to go for the gumbo. After all, I can get all the crab I want when I go home.

From Another Cook in the Kitchen

Served with one side dish (which I think is a little awkward with such a one-pot classic), the chicken and sausage were mixed into a tomatoey red roux and served on top of dirty rice. Not as spicy as advertised by the waitress, the dish was true to its roots. The sausage was mild and kielbasa-style (if I had to make it myself, I'd substitute andouille for some kick) while the chicken was awkwardly still in one piece and ever so mildly dry. The sauce was spot on though, and the dish overall was a success.

The highlight of the meal (and all of our meals since we all opted for it) was the side of au gratin-style potatoes smothered in gouda. The dish was ever so slightly smokey and unbelievably filling. You could probably order just this and soup and feel full for the night.

One of my fellow diners, whom it should be mentioned was born and raised in Annapolis, got salmon and a crab cake topped with a cream sauce. She said that while the crab cake was different than what she's used to, it was definitely 100 percent crab and got her seal of approval. The other girl ordered the low country crab melt, texas toast topped with crab salad, monterey jack and parmesan sauce. She said the dish wasn't what she suspected, but that it was tasty, as evidenced by her empty plate at the end of the meal.

The prices at Moon Brewery range from under $10 sandwiches and wraps to the fish and southern-style entrees, available for between $15 and $20.

More reporting from Savannah tomorrow!

Five Guys, a Girl and a Hamburger Place

From Another Cook in the Kitchen

Dulles Airport. Usually two words that send a cold chill through my veins and strike fear in my heart. Endless lines leading to more endless lines and a main entrance so removed from the terminals that the word terminal itself loses its true meaning. It’s the only airport I’ve ever missed a flight from.

But today is quite another story. What in the past has taken me 2 ½ hours today took me only an hour, so I sat at Gate A6 with a twinge of hunger in my stomach and a brand new kind of problem: What would airport food have to offer me?

And then I saw big, bright red lights spelling out a name that has eluded me until now: Five Guys.

I’ve lived in the Washington, D.C., metro area since 2006, yet somehow have never dined at the region’s premier not-quite-as-fast fast food joint. But I’ve heard stories of their fare, and what sets this place apart from your average McDonald’s is the focus: the french fries. Fried up in peanut oil instead of vegetable oil and available both regular and cajun style, it was clear immediately that this place took its potato prep seriously. Flanking the line of customers that arched around the counter stood sacks upon sacks of potatoes, a sign to the left proudly proclaiming that today’s supply originated from Rexberg, Idaho, wherever the hell that is.

From Another Cook in the Kitchen

In addition to the regular fries, I ordered a burger. The hamburger at Five Guys comes standard with two patties and a long list of toppings that are all no charge. The beef was better quality than what you’d get at a drive-thru window, and you could see the guys flipping actual beef patties just behind the cashiers. No heat lamps here, I suppose. The bun was a little flimsy, but anything closer to a Kaiser roll and I sense the meat would have turned the bread into a greasy, wet mess.

Five Guys immediately lets you know that this is not the place for food snobbery. Handed to you in a brown paper bag as if your mom just cooked you up something for lunch, the fries spill over the sad little cup they’re supposed to be contained in, filling the bottom of the bag and leaving it with unctuous leopard-like spots.

The taste is perhaps the most interesting mix of experiences. On one hand, the salty crispy goodness of everything I’ve come to know as a french fry shines through. Yet with other bites, I can taste distinctly that this was once indeed a potato. In all, it might be the perfect balance between food’s good and evil sides. I’ll let you decide which is which.

From Another Cook in the Kitchen

Try as I may to conquer the carb-filled mountain in front of me, I failed miserably. My cup still half full of fries, the rest of them strewn around my brown bag like delicious pick-up sticks, I gave up. If I trusted them to be able to keep for my flight, I would have taken the bag with me. But french fries tend to have a short shelf life, and even if they did hold up, that’d just be mean to whoever would have to smell them sitting next to me.

Still at Gate A6 and still 20 minutes away from boarding my plane (I hope. Six planes leaving one terminal in 15 minutes?!? These people are Nazis!), I’m glad that I can at the least say that Five Guys was worth the wait.

Brunch at Luna Grill and Diner-Shirlington

From Another Cook in the Kitchen

Luna's Grill and Diner--located on Shirlington's main drag, Campbell Ave.--might be hard to distinguish from the plethora of dining opportunities surrounding it, but one thing certainly set it apart from the crowd this morning: a breakfast menu!

It's usually hard to avoid dumbing down your weekday breakfast. The convenience of Starbucks' coffee+oatmeal special beacons! However today was special as I actually had a friend in the area for a change. Unlike my friends that work in D.C., getting people to come down to Shirlington for a lunch is a bit hard. So when I heard my friend had a dentist appointment in my neighborhood, I jumped at the chance to go to the earliest work lunch break I'll likely ever take.

Another D.C. restaurant knock off (Shirlington is home to a Capital City Grill and a Busboys & Poets) the Shirlington Luna is the restaurant's second location, the other a little off the beaten path on the north end of Dupont Circle. (And last I went to the D.C. location, both the OJ and the mimosas were $3 on Sunday. Total no brainer regardless of portions!) The inside is nicely decorated with a rural cityscape mural and celestial paintings, in keeping with the restaurant's name.

Since the D.C. metro area is actually having a mild summer for a change, we decided to eat our meal outside, which is great for people watching in Shirlington, and the sidewalk is polkadotted with water bowls for your dog if you chose to bring one along.

The Luna a.m. menu is actually available all day (pancakes stop at 6 p.m.) until the restaurant's close. There are a few special items deemed brunch instead of breakfast, different takes on eggs benedict, that are only available until 3.

To start off, we ordered our drinks (sadly no mimosas on a workday). I was pleasantly surprised to find a place that serves orange juice with pulp. While not so swamped with bits of orange that it's difficult to consume or would turn off you non-pulp lovers (read: blasphemers), it's just enough to remind you that, oh yeah, this stuff is made of oranges! My friend ordered coffee, which she said was nothing special, but it was refilled readily.

Now for a little blaspheming of my own: Father, I have a confession. It's been 18 years since my last egg. Ok, so maybe that's a little bit of a lie, but ever since my second grade teacher explained to us how chickens were made for our incubation project, I couldn't bring myself to eat the things on a consistent basis. I'd have nightmarish fears of cracking open a chicken-filled egg that somehow made it past inspection (which is actually a delicacy in China and also the nastiest Wikipedia entry I've ever found). The only thing that actually kept my egg consumption up was Easter. I just couldn't stop myself after finding all the dyed eggs scattered throughout the house from eating a few. But even then, I was through with yolks and the sickly green color they turn when they're boiled long before eating.

That little sidebar brings me to today, when our waitress told me that my two eggs any style with homefries or grits where actually not available hardboiled, since the process takes too long. She suggested that I try them hard poached, which I'd never really heard of. As far as I knew, if you ordered poached eggs, you were a hardcore egg lover. So I'm sure the notion hardpoached eggs is the equivalent of getting your steak medium well. But I'm the equivalent of a vegetarian in eggland, so I threw a little caution to the wind.

From Another Cook in the Kitchen

To my delight though, when my eggs came they were essentially just like they are hardboiled without having to deal with that pesky shell. So perhaps I will finally poach an egg (perhaps even blog about it) and turn into an egg person one day.

In addition to the eggs and hash browns, which were sadly undercooked for my taste but had decent flavor, the dish came with generously portioned toast triangles with butter and strawberry jelly.

My cohort ordered an egg sandwich--scrambled eggs, cheddar cheese and ham on a toasted bagel, substituting bacon for the ham. Her eggs completely dwarfed the bagel, but she reported it was delicious.

From Another Cook in the Kitchen

Her meal also included a cup-sized serving of fresh fruit, which I also ordered off the sides menu. And while most restaurants let their fruit slide, Luna's spread was a perfect blend of melons, apples, grapes, pineapple and strawberries. And not those BS megastrawberries you'll find at the grocery store these days. These were really strawberries, with real flavor.

Our total bill came to about $11 each, so not bad for a large step up from IHOP. The only unfairly priced item would likely be the coffee, which came in at more than $2.

Overall, the restaurant was a pleasant experience, and a great way to spend a morning outside of the office. And if you can stand the longer afternoon, I encourage everyone to take a brunch break instead of a lunch break every once in a while.

Luna's menu is available at its Web site, www.lunagrillanddiner.com/html/breaktast.html

And pictures of the food are to come.

In my next few entries, I'll explore the food of Savannah, Georgia, bake a key lime pie and perhaps even poach an egg.