It’s been a few weeks since my last update from the road and for that I’m sorry, especially now that we are no longer on the road. I had really wanted to post our culinary highlights in ‘real time’ but I learned that after spending a full day in the car, the last thing I was prepared to do upon arriving in a new city was confine myself to my laptop while parked atop an uncomfortable and slightly soiled motel bed. Now that we’ve been in California for almost a week and we’ve had a chance to unpack the car, do laundry and organize the 2,000 pictures that the wife and I took during our 16 day road trip, I’ve run out of excuses for updating the blog.
The first summary covered our first few days on the road up until Charleston, SC (which by the way, is an excellent place for food lovers). From Charleston, we made the short drive to Savannah, GA and spent a few hours at beach on lovely (but brutally hot) Tybee Island. On the way to the beach, right after we crossed the Georgia border, we couldn’t help ourselves – we stopped at the first roadside fruit stand we could find and bought some peaches.
Yes we were totally ripped off but yes, they were absolutely delicious. Speaking of all things delicious, we enjoyed one of our most memorable meals that night at a restaurant called Sweet Potatoes Kitchen. Not only was the food incredibly tasty, the entire meal including drinks cost us only about $20 with tip. My cornmeal crusted catfish was cooked to perfection and was served piping-hot, right out of the fryer. The wife’s BBQ chicken was one of the better cooked chicken dishes I’ve tasted in a while; even the breast meat was juicy. The walnut and brown sugar butter that was served with the accompanying baked sweet potatoes was also a really nice touch. Thank you Yelp for finding this place for us!
The following day’s meals were a bit unexpected. Being in the South, I was really looking to gorge myself on Southern and Soul food classics. We would have eaten at Mrs. Wilkes’ Dining Room, a restaurant highly recommended by both friends and Yelp, but it is unfortunately closed on weekends. We were also really looking forward to our first BBQ meal of the trip, but Walls’ BBQ, our intended lunch spot was also closed due to a long-term catering event, thus putting our BBQ dreams on hold for the time being.
Luckily for us, Yelp pointed us towards Zunzi’s, a mercifully short walk from Walls’ (have I mentioned yet that our trip to the South coincided with one of the worst heat waves in recent memory). Menu choices at this tiny cafe reflect the South African, Swiss, Dutch and Italian heritage of the owners, including the curiously spiced boerewors, a type of South African sausage seasoned with lots of black pepper, coriander, cloves and nutmeg that the wife ordered for lunch. It is served on a roll with mustard and a side of dark brown gravy and was totally unlike any other sausage we’ve ever tasted. I ordered something called Gabrielle’s Zesty Chicken, which indeed was quite ‘zesty’ thanks to its fragrant, tomato based sauce. Overall, we were pleased with our lunch and can see why Zunzi’s has earned so much praise from Savannah natives.
In desperate need of cooling off after spending a few hours walking off our lunch in the sweltering heat and humidity, we grabbed a quick snack at Leopold’s Ice Cream, a Savannah institution since 1919.
We met some new friends for dinner that night and expecting to be taken out for Southern food, we found ourselves sitting down for dinner at a British place called Churchill’s Pub. While not my first choice for place to eat dinner (I was hoping for something more ‘traditional’), the atmosphere was fun and laid-back and the wife and I were both surprised by how much we enjoyed our meals of ‘bangers & mash’ and traditional roast beef & yorkshire pudding.
The following day we drove the 630 miles from Savannah to New Orleans, but I’ll save that for another post – after all, the food of New Orleans is in a class all by itself.
