Samos Taverna (Mt. Pleasant)

The unassuming concrete building is, on closer inspection, purposefully so; featurelessly crafted just enough for you to wonder what's inside. And the tease, aesthetically, delivers. The deeply designed metro-Mediterranean interior calms with dark walls punctured and gashed by white chairs and a marble-slab bar. The wine cellar is plainly visible behind plate glass, the bottles stacked on their sides, end to end and floor to ceiling, the effect like a Escher tessellation come to life on the wall.

Samos is owned by a Greek family that purportedly keeps close tabs on the authenticity of the dishes. To whit: the bulk of the lengthy wine list is Grecian. Maggie and I settled for a simple white table wine that made us feel right at home. Sometimes it's a pleasure not to think too hard.

Our waitress was very knowledgeable, though slightly disengaged. I'm not expecting that we become Facebook friends, but a little eye contact goes a long way. But she is redeemed by a great recommendation of a mussel appetizer. Served in a hot cream & garlic brother, they were as good as we've had anywhere in Charleston, including Rue De Jean (which regularly churns out pots of mussels that shame established seafood restaurants).

I had a hardily-portioned Moussaka that I think was actually quite good, but I had sort of forgotten how Moussaka tasted, and I didn't like it. I'm almost sure this is entirely my fault, and not the Moussaka's. The allspice and cinnamon flavors reminded me a bit too much of Christmas, and it wasn't what I was expecting.

Maggie's orzo & shrimp appeared discombobulated: the orzo on one plate and the shrimp on another for no discernible reason. But the flavors were fresh and distinctly Mediterranean, some assembly required.

For the quality and size of the meal, I was happy to have paid just under $70. Oh wait. That's not quite right. I forgot I had to tip the valet. There is mandatory valet parking at Samos. In Mt. Pleasant. I repeat - mandatory valet parking in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. For anyone who lives outside the area, Mt. Pleasant is the type of place where driveways have their own turning lane. It is not hurting for space. I have no idea why Samos requires valet parking. The Taco Bell next door seems to do fine without it. So, $74.

I've spent some time wondering what the "scene" is at Samos. And there is definitely some sort of scene. Between the sleek interior, and a clever indoor/outdoor patio with real fireplaces, there just has to be some kind of crowd that frequents the place later at night. Singles? Couples? Cougars? I'd like to know, but I'm not curious enough to valet my car again.

Samos Taverna

819 Coleman Blvd
Mount Pleasant, SC 29464
(843) 856-5055

Restaurant Week Wrap-up (Blossom & Tristan)

Restaurant week has come and gone in Charleston. Being a mid-priced city, restaurant week here is a fragile thing. The espoused purpose of a restaurant week (or at least what my interpretation of its purpose has always been) is to offer a representative sampling from the nicer restaurants on the cheap.

In Boston, New York, DC, et al, this works well - a $35 dinner at 21 Club or Cafe Boulud is quite the bargain. But in Charleston, things just aren't as pricey. For $35/person, one can escape from most restaurants in town with at least two courses. The vehicles to spend $800 on dinner simply don't exist.

So restaurant week in Charleston toes a fine line. Falling on the successful side of it were both Blossom and Tristan.

Blossom, part of the HMGI-owned East Bay triumvirate that includes Cypress and Magnolias, purports to "take seafood with Southern sensibility to the next level", whatever that means. Marketing pitch aside, if forced to pigeonhole Blossom I would say this - they know how to cook a piece of fish. Both Maggie and I ordered a fish entree - hers a healthy chunk of salmon on tomato-basil risotto, mine an elegantly blackened Mahi Mahi on a grit cake with pickled green tomatoes.

Both were at least 2 inches thick and both were cooked perfectly. And I mean perfectly. There is perhaps a five-second window of perfection when cooking fish - a window I blindly and luckily stumble into every few months on my stove at home, but is otherwise nearly mythical. Blossom's kitchen is apparently capable of cranking out fish like this with the precision of an atomic clock and the regularity of a Metamucil addict.

The accoutrements I found somewhat questionable - oddly sweet pickled tomatoes and a bland grit cake added little to the stellar Mahi Mahi, and Maggie's risotto tasted a bit more like spaghettiO's® than I would have liked. But I chalk this up to the vagaries of restaurant week menus. The impeccable cooking, the friendly and precise service, and the casual-fine-dining atmosphere were as well executed and enjoyable as I've had anywhere. I get warm and fuzzy inside anticipating another meal at Blossom.

----

I didn't see Tristan coming. I knew only that it was smack in the middle Market Street, and that was enough for me to have avoided it until now. When I think of Market Street, I think Bubba Gump Shrimp Co and T-Bonz Grill & Grill (with apologies to the entirely decent Mercato). I didn't expect the technically-advanced cuisine of head chef Nate Whiting and the sleek interior, nearly antithetical to Charleston's aesthetic traditions.

The food is New American with an experimenter's touch of molecular gastronomy. More than Blossom, at Tristan one feels that $35 for three courses is a real bargain. The abbreviated menu was fascinating, yielding enough information to intelligently order, but leaving the presentation and character of each dish a mystery until it was served by our enthusiastic waiter, thrilled to have such brisk business in the middle of January.

This isn't my favorite genre of food, but there is nothing else like it in Charleston. Tristan reminds us that every now and then it's refreshing to break from the charm of the Holy City and feel a bit more metropolitan.

----


Blossom Cafe
171 East Bay Street, Charleston, SC 29401-2126
(843) 722-9200‎

Tristan Restaurant

55 South Market Street, Charleston, SC 29401-2004
(843) 534-2155

Alluette's Jazz Cafe

How to even start.

At the beginning, I suppose.

4:15pm - Maggie sends me a text. She wants to see some Sinatra-esque music and go dancing. Sounds like a plan. Except...Charleston really doesn't have anything like that. I fire up Google and discover Porgy's Other Place, a jazz cafe I dimly recall seeing while waiting in line at Trio. This is where we'll go.

5:30pm - My friend Adam calls to see if we're up to anything. I explain The Plan. He and his girlfriend will join us for dinner at 8:30pm.

7:30pm - I start getting nervous about the menu, since I haven't seen it. Many Google searches later I discover that Porgy's has in fact closed. But I swear I've seen a jazz cafe recently in that location. I Google the address (137 Calhoun St). It appears Porgy's closed and reopened in June 2009 as Alluette's Jazz Cafe. Digging a little more, there is an Alluette's Cafe (evidently of the non-jazz variety) on Reid St. downtown that serves "organic soul food". The titular Alluette Jones recently expanded to the aforementioned Calhoun St. location, opening the jazz cafe with an abbreviated version of the original cafe's menu. The reviews for the original location are great, but I cannot find a single review of the new location. Odd, but I am assuaged.

8:30pm - We arrive. There is no band in sight and the place is abandoned, save two customers seated at opposite ends of the bar. I make up elaborate backstories for them. Tony and Will used to be friends (played together in a billiards league, in fact) and would often get a postprandial cocktail together at Alluette's to escape their wives. But after a Craigslist lawnmower deal went south (what a coincidence that it was Will anonymously selling his mower, and that it was none other than Tony who replied!), they aren't on speaking terms, though both continue to frequent Alluette's, preferring the improvisations of the Oscar Rivers Trio to their wives complaining about window treatments.

My daydreaming is interrupted by a woman in an overcoat who asks us why we are here. I realize she is a waitress, though she looks more customer. We tell her we're in for dinner. She seems genuinely shocked, but recovers quickly and leads us to a table in the back, near the stage.

8:40pm - Adam and his girlfriend, Carly, arrive. Adam didn't bring a jacket in spite of the cold weather. As the evening wears on, this proves an ill-fated decision.

8:45pm - We order drinks. I ask what types of beer are available. Our waitress starts slowly naming the standard domestics, but also lists something called "Red Fire" that I've never heard of, and wind up ordering.

8:50pm - My "Fat Tire" arrives. Surreal service experience begins in earnest. We order some lamb sandwiches and tilapia off the sparse menu.

9:30pm - Forty minutes have passed. No food has arrived. Our sandwiches are evidently more complex than the menu would indicate. Our waitress has come by a number of times, not to update us re:our food, but to literally interrupt our conversation so we can talk about that various places she has lived. She is so nice and oblivious that we can't be upset. Also, it's freezing cold due to the band having propped open the door to bring in their equipment. Recall, Adam does not have a jacket. It is approximately 40° F. We swaddle ourselves in Bourbon & Cokes.

9:40pm - Adam begins to shake from the cold. We quickly order two more rounds of Bourbon & Cokes.

9:50pm - Food arrives. We are ravenous, and dig in. But wait, what's this? A few bites in, no one has said a word. Is the food...actually good? Like really, really good? Farm fresh produce? Piping hot, properly cooked fish? Yes. With lamb sandwiches for $10, this ain't 5-star dining, but against all the odds, the food is super fresh and rock-solid good. It's too bad it has to be served in such a bizarre, apathetic environment. The food is compelling enough to make me want to try Alluette's original location, but the experience is bad enough that I'll never go back to the jazz cafe. It is especially disappointing because I love live jazz and there is very little of it in Charleston.

10:15pm - The Oscar Rivers Trio, the house band, finally comes on. They can really play, but it's too late and we soon head home.

Alluette's Jazz Cafe
137 Calhoun St
Charleston, SC 29401

Chappy's on Church (Nashville)

Located about forty miles outside New Orleans, Chappy's Seafood Restaurant had been a fixture of the Gulf Coast culinary scene for over twenty years. But when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, John "Chappy" Chapman lost both his restaurant and his home. Less than a year later, Chappy was resettled in the West End area of Nashville, TN and reopened his restaurant as Chappy's on Church - a high end restaurant specializing in traditional Creole and Cajun seafood dishes.

Maggie and I both went to Vanderbilt University, so we have a bond with Nashville and decided to spend New Year's Eve there, visiting a few old friends and enjoying the live music that pours out the door of nearly every restaurant and bar in the city. We picked Chappy's for our New Year's Eve dinner.

Ducking into Chappy's from an unseasonably cold Nashville night, the first thing we noticed was the size and scale of Chappy's main dining room. I have no trouble believing the web site's claim that they can seat 220 for dinner. It's a giant rectangle of a place with French Quarter-inspired lights dangling from the ceiling and red and green taffeta curtains draping the windows in front, and the booths in the back.

Open and boxy with a huge aisle flanked by tables running down the center, if it were empty there couldn't be a more depressing layout. The word "intimate" would just bounce around the place laughing like a poltergeist. But on this night, Chappy's was packed. I don't know what a normal dinner service looks like, but at capacity Chappy's ambiance is cheerful enough, even if it feels a bit impersonal and, as one of our dinner companions pointed out, looks a little bit like a Chinese food restaurant.

Our waitress came over sniffling and fanning herself with her notepad, obviously sick. A friend asked what types of gin were available, and after hemming and hawing confessed she had no idea. She had a similar amount of knowledge about the specialty martinis. How long had this woman been working at Chappy's? Twenty minutes? When your waitress is too incompetent to take a drink order, there is a problem. We requested a new server.

From then on, service was fine - a slightly too-friendly (slightly drunk?) waitress with decent knowledge of the menu flitted ably about.

Chappy's serves a nice crusty loaf of bread to the table with four house-made butters. There is a garlic butter, a sweet cream butter, a strawberry butter, and an alligator butter. Admittedly, this is sort of a gimmick - the alligator butter just tastes a little extra salty and leathery - but it's a gimmick I got really excited about.

I this point I started forgetting about the bizarre service experience for all the right reasons.

An appetizer of seared tuna in Cajun spices was beautifully cooked and presented, with a generous portion for the table to share. A dark spice rub was complex and savory, with the tongue-satisfying tingle of salt, without tasting the least bit salty. Fried green tomatoes were as light as can be, while still staying Southern and fried and homey. Finding small crawfish tails hidden in the accompanying Creole hollandaise was a pleasant surprise, like a hazelnut in chocolate cake.

Our entrées arrived: seared scallops with spices similar to those found on the tuna, cooked until just past translucent. For me, two braised quails on a bed of Cajun rice that reminded me of Paella. As small game birds tend to be, the quails were difficult to eat, but just as well. I eat quickly and eating tricky food is a good way to slow down. That said, the total service time at Chappy's was 90 minutes - I think that's right on that mark for a 3-course meal at a nice restaurant, especially when the place is packed.

All of us agreed that the food was top notch. It exceeded our expectations in almost every way, but I can't help feeling that the whole evening was teetering on the edge of disaster. Only because we were able to overlook and move past the terrible initial service did we come out unscathed. It would have only taken one more mistake to ruin the dinner, but instead the kitchen did its job and sent us off for our New Year's Eve parties full, warm, and happy.

Chappy's on Church

1721 Church Street

Nashville, TN 37203-2921

(615) 322-9932

Slacking Off/Great Links

I'm not trying to slack off here, but between the holiday parties and visiting families, Maggie and I haven't had a free Thursday in some time. I have another review or two on tap, but in the mean time I'd like to share some food-related links I've enjoyed recently.

First up, here is an absolutely riveting documentary featuring Anthony Bourdain exploring the El Bulli restaurant near Barcelona. The restaurant, voted by Restaurant Magazine as the #1 restaurant in the world five times, is run by chef Ferran Adria, a pioneer in molecular gastronomy. There isn't much to the video below - Bourdain simply eats a meal at El Bulli and describes the dishes as they arrive. Yet this is seriously compelling. I'm nearly brought to tears by apple caviar.

• Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg9h5S1VW3w
• Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS0rttp9EIE

While we're on molecular gastronomy, this gallery of plates from Alinea in Chicago is stunning. Similar to El Bulli, a meal at Alinea consists of dozens of small dishes, each served on a plate/bowl/etc designed by an architect for that particular course. Alinea is the creation of Grant Achatz, who was diagnosed with (of all things) mouth cancer in 2007. Imagine, the greatest chef in the United States got mouth cancer. The New Yorker wrote a fascinating profile of Achatz, focusing on his rise to gastronomic glory and his battle with cancer. I highly recommend reading it.

Finally, I ran across this instructional video from Gourmet Magazine (RIP) detailing the preparation of duck confit. It certainly looks doable at home, but also a bit involved for those of us with day jobs. Also, I don't know where I would get rendered duck fat. I suppose I could always render it myself. Regardless, it's a lot of fun to learn how this great dish is made.

Until next Thursday!

Pearlz (downtown)

Your average twentysomething Charlestonian has consumed Pearlz's (Pearlz'?) food many times, but I hesitate to say many have actually eaten it. Among my peers, Pearlz is best known for their oyster shooters: a raw gulf oyster is shucked and dropped in a shot glass where it hovers, almost prenatally, in a slurry of pepper vodka and cocktail sauce. There's fierce debate over whether to chew the oyster or just swallow it whole, but either way probably doesn't give a fair shake to the kitchen's capabilities.

On a particularly dreary Thursday evening, Maggie and I trudged to Pearlz with our mutual friend Carly who was visiting from New York. We settled in at one of the long communal tables that form a nave through the center of the restaurant. Most days Pearlz is well lit from the bank of windows facing East Bay St, but this particular evening the restaurant was calm and moody, complimenting the dark wood furniture and exposed cement frescoes.

We ordered a dozen Gulf oysters on the half shell. The Gulf oysters are often the cheapest single oysters available, but I think they're often the best. Call me unsophisticated, but to me the most important characteristic of an oyster is size. Frankly, the really big ones freak me out. They're gross. I'm sure someone out there will try to convince me of the merits of such-and-such an oyster, with its superior flavor profile, particular texture, etc, but if it's too big, forget it. The Gulf oysters are delicious, inexpensive, and have the good sense to stop growing when appropriate.

Pearlz' head shucker (I'm not sure if that's the actual title, but he introduced himself as Chief (I'm equally unsure that's his actual name) and couldn't have been nicer) judiciously inspects each oyster, either shucking it and serving immediately onto a bed of ice, or discarding it. Maggie, Carly, and I took them down as fast as Chief could produce them. Just great.

Our food took a little longer than I would have liked to arrive, but was hot and fresh when it did. Maggie's lobster roll was enthusiastically toasted to a slight burn, which I actually liked, and filled with plenty of buttery, mayo-covered lobster salad. I thought I detected a bit of crab meat, but it was difficult to tell. Either way it was decadent and fantastic. My hamburger (yes, I ordered a hamburger) was perhaps slightly undercooked, but tasted perfectly of grill char without loosing its meatiness or flavor. The wildcard dish of the night was Carly's crab pizza. Though it looked enough like a pizza, the flavor profile was something else entirely: salty, tangy, and from the ocean. While not unpleasant, it took some getting used to and wasn't necessarily what any of us expected.

Pearlz is not in the same league as the heavy-hitters of Charleston cuisine, but for the price I'd find it tough to beat their winning combination of fun, upscale atmosphere and fresh, well made food. I'll have a hard time resisting a few appetizers next time I'm there for a drink.

153 East Bay St

Charleston, SC 29401

(843) 577-5755

Flavor Tripping at Caviar & Bananas

Caviar and Bananas is not on the list of restaurants this blog intended to cover, but sometimes opportunity calls and in response you have eat obscure West-African berries. And so we did.

For the uninitiated, "flavor tripping" has been quite the rage in gastronomy circles for the last year or two. A small, red berry, known colloquially as Miracle Fruit (and pedantically as Synsepalum dulcificum), is what the excitement is all about. A chemical in the berry's flesh does something very scientific and undoubtedly complex to the tongue that makes everything taste as though it were mixed with one-too-many packets of Splenda. Flavor tripping popped up on the radar in Charleston some months back with a Guerilla Cuisine event catering to the bizarre effects of the Miracle Fruit. Caviar and Bananas has gamely brought it back to the city for a second go-round.

Settling into our table at C&B, Maggie and I gnoshed away on the flesh of a small, red berry for a minute or so, allowing the juice to coat the inside of the mouth. Most of us trippers at this C&B event were first timers. Anxious glances and hushed questions raced across the tables, each group worrying that they did not apply the berry correctly.

"Should I eat the seeds?"

"Don't eat the seeds!"

"What seeds? There's a pit - should I eat the pit?"

"I think I missed a spot near my molars."

Some more instruction from the staff couldn't have hurt, but a lot of worries proved unfounded as we slugged back shots of balsamic vinegar, mistaking it for Port, and sucked suddenly-sweet lemons to the last drop.

Ignoring the tastes for a moment, the effect itself was difficult to measure. On one hand, sights and smells did not change, so the oeuvre of the lemon was complete as I brought it to my mouth. And though the taste was utterly unlemonlike, it did not seem particularly strange. My mind was clear, my senses functioning, and all was right with the world. I found myself wondering "Might a lemon have always tasted this way? How often do I eat a raw lemon anyway? This berry is hardly doing a thing!".

In this sense, it was a trip of the highest order. My mouth didn't feel funny and there was nothing beside my second-guessable memories to indicate that a fresh lemon ought to taste of anything other than faintly flavored sugar. The unremarkableness of the whole experience tied my brain in a knot.

The highlight of the experience, unquestionably, was a simple goat cheese tart. Consisting of nothing more than pie crust and warm goat cheese, the unaromatic tart blossomed in the mouth into a perfectly balanced bite of cheesecake. Our waiter explained that diet restaurants have sprung up in Japan, serving unsweetened, low calorie food like this to patrons under the influence of the small red berries.

I wish there were more foods to sample at C&B, lord knows they have enough on hand. I've also heard great things about the berry's effects on the flavor of liquor. I'd like try it again, maybe in the comfort of home with a few friends and foods of my choosing. In the end, flavor tripping is and will always remain a gimmick, but that doesn't mean it's not fun.