Southern Beach Diet

Woo, buddy! I'm back and feelin' great. There's nothing a week-long pimento cheese and wine cleanse won't cure!

I'm doing my Charleston, SC vacation in three installments:

• Restaurant Food Porn
• Banana Pudding Smack Down
• The Most Mind-Blowingly Best Thing Ever
  

Let's start with the restaurant food porn, since it's the longest post. (Yeah, I'm making you wait for the freakin' fantastic deliciousness, because I'm afraid to tell you about it before I drop the goods into my safety deposit box.)

I ate out, on average, only about once a day, and, of course, that doesn't even scratch the surface of the good food available in and around Charleston. When not dining out, I thrived on pimento cheese sandwiches and leftover potato salad and coleslaw from the Fourth of July cookout. I ain't complainin'.

The Glass Onion, a new soul food restaurant in West Ashley, was our first stop after landing. The term soul food always gets me. To me, what people call soul food its just simple Southern food, and that's what I'd say The Glass Onion serves in their casual, order-at-the-counter restaurant.

If every bar and restaurant in Philly would add deviled eggs to their appetizer menu, I'd die and go to heaven. Of course, then I couldn't order them. At 75 cents apiece, I was tempted to order a dozen, but the two I did order were filled with perfectly tangy devilish-ness.

The Glass Onion's homemade, inch-thick, bread and butter pickles are amazing. So much so, that the counter person recommended them first when we asked for help with ordering a side.

Grilled Pimento Cheese sandwich with a side of homemade pickles. Gooey from the grilling, their pimento cheese is good, but a tad salty for me. Take away a pinch of salt, add a pinch of sugar, and call it good.

Boy ordered the mustard fried catfish po-boy. Good stuff.

Out of all the places we ate, you'd find me back at the Glass Onion first. It's my style of restaurant - my comfort food done well at a reasonable price in a relaxed atmosphere.

Next up is Al di La, a Northern Italian restaurant and bar in West Ashley. It was dark inside, so I didn't take pics of the beet salad, portabello pizza, and butter bean linguine that the three of us shared. The butter bean and handmade linguine ordered without the pancetta might have been the best thing I ate the entire trip.

I did snap a picture of our toast to the butter bean -- a most amazing, creamy little bean that is difficult to find outside of the South and, apparently, the UK. The boy had some butter beans in London and is in love. We somehow forgot to smuggle a bag of butter beans on to the plane, so if anyone out there knows where butter beans are hiding in Philly, let me know.

Since the bean-lovin' boy had never heard B-52's song Butter Bean, an ode to the buttery little bean, we played it for him. He doesn't get the B-52's, but it's still great.



I had lunch on the porch of Cru Cafe in downtown Charleston because my sister mentioned that they had the best macaroni and cheese. I'm there!

The menu only has a couple of veggie options. I got the butter lettuce salad with candied pears, walnuts, Gorgonzola, and honey sherry dressing salad. I was surprised to see it all shredded and already dressed. Shredded is kind of fun, but there was too much of the dressing that didn't quite jive with the other ingredients.

A couple of days after eating Cru Cafe's four cheese mac and cheese (Fontina, Parmesan, Mozzarella, and Pepper Jack), I saw their mac and cheese highlighted in an article about, I don't know, I think it was something like "The 50 Best Foodie Finds in Charleston." My verdict -- Not!

Is it good? Yes, you'll love it! My sister loves it, and she's a food snob. But this is what I call restaurant mac and cheese - a crock of baked shells (not macaroni! Cru used orecchietti) swimming in a cheese sauce (I like mine without sauce).

Next is Fleet Landing, a touristy seafood restaurant that sits on the water in downtown Charleston. Somehow, this makes my second trip to this restaurant in two years, but we went on the Fourth with a friend's family and their small children for the sole purpose of watching fireworks from the prime viewing location.

Fleet Landing does not have many veggie options, and their kitchen is not flexible. On a previous visit they refused to take an ingredient out of the dish that could have easily been taken out. This visit, they refused to deliver a bunless hot dog to one of the children, and the waiter reported that the kitchen yelled at him for asking about vegetarian accommodations. Like I said, we were there for the kids and the fireworks.

Pimento Cheese and crackers. Again, too salty.

Lettuce wedge with blue cheese dressing. It's hard to mess this up. Simple and nice.

The wood in the lower left corner is the edge of our bar table at Vickery's. Nice view!

Vickery's in Mt. Pleasant is another touristy restaurant and bar, but you can't beat the view while dining! And the food is actually not that bad.

I had the fried green tomato tower. This was really good with the salty feta cheese and tangy tomato sauce with basil.

The artichoke dip, pimento cheese, and tomato and feta topped bruschetta at Vickery's were good, too. When you hear bruschetta, you don't normally think artichoke dip and pimento cheese, but if you live in the South you'll get used to these bastardizations. The pimento cheese was very mayonnaise-y.

Our last lunch was at Boulevard Diner, a Southern foods diner in Mt. Pleasant. I went for the vegetable plate of sides, but be careful! Like most Southern restaurants serving up veggies, they're often seasoned with meat. Collards and most beans (green, butter, black eye, etc.) will usually have meat in them. Our server assured me that the stewed okra and tomatoes didn't have meat, but they did!

The squash and onions were right on! (If anyone know where to get yellow crookneck squash in Philly, let me know. The straight neck yellow zucchini-like squash around here is not the same!) The fried okra was good, but I really prefer okra stewed and slimy. The coleslaw and cornbread were decent, but nothing to write home about. On the whole, classic Southern sides done well.

The boy got a grouper cake with sides of sweet mashed potatoes (awesome! should have ordered that), fried okra, and cornbread.

Cupcake in downtown Charleston makes cute cupcakes like this red velvet cupper, but they're impossible to eat. Pretty, but not functional. I suggest you peel off the wrapper, grab all of the icing with the wrapper, then slather icing on cupcake as needed. Or how about icing the cupcake traditionally so it can be eaten normally?

Up next: Banana pudding smack down!