Southern Belly

by John T. Edge

  That greaseless chicken and those downy biscuits are testaments to a host of cooks who have called Beach Road home. Josephine Barberry, known as Mama Jo, was queen of the kitchen for more than thirty years, working the bread board, cutting dough into biscuits with an empty Carnation milk can. Although Barberry still stops off for an occasional after-church visit, her niece, Gloria Bartley, is now at the center of the kitchen maelstrom.

  An engaged owner is also important, acknowledges Gloria, who’s been on the job since age fifteen. She can remember the days soon after founder Earl Majors retired. He was still living across the street from the restaurant, Gloria tells me, as I butter another buttermilk-scented biscuit: “He would watch the place through his bathroom window, watch the line of people waiting to get in. He would time the wait and if we weren’t getting them in fast enough—remember now, he had already sold the place—he would pick up the phone and call the hostess and bless her out. That’s the kind of man he was, the kind of place this is.”

  4132 ATLANTIC BOULEVARD / 904-398-7980

  WHITEWAY DELI

  The Sheik on North Main Street, in business since the 1970s, is one of six fast-food shops in a Jacksonville chain. Like the unaffiliated Desert Rider downtown and Desert Sand on Beach Boulevard, they serve sandwiches—club, ham and cheese, bacon and egg, that sort of thing—tucked into pita bread. By my count, a couple dozen or more sandwich shops around town share a similar bill of fare. Come breakfast, pita cheese toast is a favorite. So is the link, egg, and cheese sack. Not to mention the breakfast in a cup, a sundae-like stack of grits, patty sausage, and eggs. At lunch, the steak-in-a-sack and the cold cut–stuffed camel rider are the main events.

  Pita and grits, a peculiar Jacksonville tradition.

  The term camel rider might play as a pejorative in most cities, but here in Jacksonville—which has among the largest Arab Middle Eastern communities on the East Coast—it’s a marker of influence among immigrants and the descendants of immigrants who, fleeing the economic decline and religious persecution of the Ottoman Empire, began settling in the area in the 1890s.

  Many Arab immigrants made their way as peddlers. Some opened groceries, which in time evolved into sandwich shops. Assimilation was the watchword. Mohammed became Mo. Saliba became Sal. Men with surnames like Hazouri built houses of worship like Mount Olive Syrian Presbyterian Church. By 1915 the Syrian American Club was thriving. The Ramallah American Club followed in the 1950s.

  For reasons that are unclear, pita bread—and sandwiches stuffed into pita bread—function as totems of both assimilation and enduring ethnic identity among Arabs of Jacksonville. Even sandwiches like the Anne Beard (turkey, tabouli, feta, peppers, and Italian dressing), served by Sam Salem, owner of the Whiteway Delicatessen in the Riverside neighborhood, broadcast Middle Eastern origins by means of the customary envelope.

  Sam, who took over the 1927 vintage café from his father, Paul, a native of Ramallah, probably serves the best pita sandwiches in town. Though he’s proud of his desert rider, I dote on Whiteway’s tabouli omelet. Served in a cardboard boat, it’s a puff of egg layered with slabs of feta and a cool scoop of parsley, bulgur, and tomato, the whole affair stuffed inside a warm pita pouch.

  When I ask Sam whether he considers the term camel rider a pejorative, he changes the subject and directs my attention toward the archive of candid customer photos he has taken over the past thirty-odd years. Sam’s chronicle of life at Whiteway is exhaustive, filling dozens of scrapbooks, scores of boxes. By way of an answer, he picks a box up at random and begins sifting through what he calls his “collage of people,” calling every second subject by name, reciting their life stories, telling me who they are, who they were, and where they are now.

  1510 KING STREET / 904-389-0355

  That famous chifforobe smoker.

  Pasadena Beach

  TED PETERS FAMOUS SMOKED FISH

  This roadside haunt, in business since 1951, comes by its shabby-chic look and old Florida credentials honestly. The namesake was a New York native, a plumber by trade, who, like many a snowbird, came south in search of warmer climes. “They called him ‘the Bear,’” Mike Lathrop, current proprietor and nephew of the late Peters, tells me when I belly to the bar one morning. “He was bigger than life, a man of immense physical strength and presence. His first place was the Blue Anchor out on St. Pete Beach. He would set up out front, smoking fish to sell to people driving by. That’s how it all started.”

  As Lathrop and I talk, traffic swishes by, and the cement-floored restaurant begins to fill. At a trestle table, two policemen dig forks deep into bowls of bacon-flecked potato salad. Nearby, a father, clad in a surf-print shirt and flip-flops, shows his young son how to twist a backbone free from the sweet flesh of a smoke-blackened mullet that’s splayed open like a cheap paperback. At the end of the bar, a woman in tennis whites slathers relish-spiked smoked-mullet spread on a saltine, spritzing each swab of fish pâté with lemon and hot sauce.

  “He was a great salesman,” says Mike. “Bear would fan the smoke up when he saw people coming. Of course, he wasn’t the first guy to smoke a mullet—that goes back to the Indians—but we’re pretty sure he was the first guy to move the smoking of mullet from the backyard to the front, the first guy around here to put it on a restaurant menu.”

  Peters made his reputation on mullet. He did not single-handedly rescue the fish from ignominy, but he did, over the course of a forty-odd-year career, convince a goodly number of locals and tourists that mullet was worthy of a taste. Three bites into a tub of Peters’ smoked mullet dip and they were converts.

  And so it goes. Sitting at the bar, I dig into my tawny-hued fish. (Like bluefish and mackerel, mullet is an oily fish that stands up well to the heat of a wood-fueled fire.) Between pulls on my beer, I swivel and spy the adjacent cookhouse where Lathrop and his team smoke mullet—as well as mackerel, mahimahi, and salmon—in what appears to be an oversized chifforobe, outfitted with wire-lined drawers and fueled by smoldering oak logs.

  My mullet is a bit drier than I recall from previous pilgrimages. Maybe the broiler cook, the fellow who reheats the smoked fish before serving it on a platter with coleslaw and potato salad, was distracted while running my mullet under the flame. More likely, the mullet is as good as ever and the culprit is my own outsized expectation. No matter, I take solace in a bowl of moist and creamy mullet dip, which I smear on saltines and eat until my belly aches.

  1350 SOUTH PASADENA AVENUE / 727-381-7931

  Pensacola

  THE COFFEE CUP

  Cleora Rutledge stands facing the grill. Her back is to the tile-floored restaurant. She has a spatula in one hand, a trowel for cleaning the flattop in the other. A dozen or so spin stools line the counter behind her. “A lot of them come in to harass me,” she tells me, with a gold-toothed smile and a head toss in the direction of my fellow diners. “And I give it right back.”

  Wayne Cage opened the Coffee Cup in 1945. His vision was a “place where you can bring your friends and be proud of your coffee cup.” It worked. By the 1950s the Coffee Cup had taken its place alongside Jerry’s Drive-In as a fulcrum of Pensacola life. And so it remains, a de facto clubhouse, the place where cops and attorneys, drywall hangers and artists, dilettantes and debutantes gather to eat grits and eggs in the morning, smothered liver and onions at lunch.

  Much of the Coffee Cup’s success is testament to the service of longtime employees. Willie Ladd worked here forty years, honing a reputation for the best chicken and dumplings on the Gulf Coast. As for Rutledge, she came on board as a dishwasher in 1968. “Back then I could work here but I couldn’t eat here,” she tells me, her smile still bright, her manner matter of fact. “Now everybody belongs.”

  Although I love Rutledge’s puffy sausage and cheese omelets, and I admire the wrist flick she employs when turning out two over-easy, it’s her way with grits—and her way with quips—that keep me coming back. When I ask her the secret, when I tell her that I believe her re
gular buttered grits are so rich they must be laced with lard, she responds “Whole milk and real butter.” And she moves on. Nassau grits, a local specialty thick with tomatoes and various cured pork products, merit little more. “Gotta have both,” she says, which I translate into meaning both ham and bacon.

  Although I’m not that big on T-shirts, I buy my son a Coffee Cup edition on my way out the door. The breast is stamped with their logo, a cup swirling with coffee steam. It’s the back, however, that captivates by way of a bold slogan, “No Grits, No Glory.” “Cleora was wearing a shirt just like this when she served me,” I tell my son, when I present his shirt with a flourish and a promise to stir a pot of grits soon.

  520 EAST CERVANTES STREET / 850-432-7060

  For a riff on the Coffee Cup’s Nassau Grits recipe, see page 73.

  MULLET HOLIDAY

  I thought I knew mullet. I had put in my time at Ted Peters. I was familiar with the lexicon. Along the Mississippi coast, they call smoked mullet Biloxi Bacon. Down in Louisiana, it’s Grand Isle ham. I believed that I was fluent in the physiognomy and gastronomy of mullet, by which I mean that I had gnawed my share of cornmeal-battered, deep-fried mullet backbones and had enjoyed picking the sweet white flesh from the ribs with my teeth. But only recently have I come to truly appreciate the many splendors of mullet.

  A few days in Pensacola do the trick. At Jerry’s Drive-In, a relic of the 1940s outfitted with molded plywood booths and tabletops plastered in ads for personal-injury attorneys, I order two fried oysters and a brace of fried mullet as my friend Jim Shirley, a local chef, tells me of the days when Jerry’s served draft beer in sixty-four-ounce jars that looked like propane tanks and fishermen caught mullet by the ton in oversized gillnets.

  Dale tells me that the mullet he sources it’s got to be fresh.

  Popularity begets problems. It seems that, not too long back, mullet were over-fished and in danger of depletion. As a corrective, voters passed a state constitutional amendment in 1995 banning nets larger than 500 square feet. That’s what I learn at the Marina Oyster Barn, a clapboard rectangle framed by cast-iron filigree, perched on Bayou Texar. Seated at the back bar, I talk with Dale Rooks, who took over operations when his father, Thomas, died in 1979.

  Dale tells me that the mullet he sources feed on grass. “Makes for a clean taste,” he says of the fish that are sometimes dismissed as trashy bottom feeders. “And Pensacola always has clean-tasting mullet.” When I press Dale for the secret of his sweet fish he tells me that he gets his catch delivered twice a day. And then he introduces me to sisters Eva Young and Mary Connor, who have been frying fish here since 1971 and 1975, respectively. “Ninety percent cornmeal and ten percent flour,” says Dale, by way of further explanation. “And don’t use salted meal or the fish will turn too brown.”

  My mullet holiday doesn’t turn epiphanic, however, until I settle in at Chet’s Seafood out on Navy Boulevard, where, on a good day, you can squeeze into one of the dozen or so dinette tables and eat fried mullet seven ways. By my count, that adds up to whole fish, fillets, milk-marinated fillets, backbones, red roe, so-called white roe (actually sperm), and gizzards.

  That’s right, gizzards. Like chickens, mullet have those little grinder boxes in their gullets. (In the case of mullet, their diet is heavy in hard shell algae, which they churn to get at the oil within.) Fried mullet gizzards, if you’re wondering, taste like firm calamari. And while I’m not that fond of the white roe, I like the red stuff—rolled in meal, fried gently, and set atop a pool of grits. But even red roe can’t compare to Chet’s milk- and garlic-marinated fried mullet fillets. They are among the more platonic tastes to cross my palate. At least that’s what I’m thinking when course six, fried mullet backbones, hits the table.

  CHET’S SEAFOOD / 3708 NAVY BOULEVARD / 850-456-0165

  JERRY’S DRIVE-IN / 2815 EAST CERVANTES STREET / 850-433-9910

  MARINA OYSTER BARN / 505 BAYOU BOULEVARD / 850-433-0511

  St. Augustine

  O’STEEN’S RESTAURANT

  St. Augustine, Florida, is lousy with history. Hop one of those faux-trolley buses that trundle about, navigating narrow streets that recall back-of-town New Orleans, and you’ll learn that in 1565 Pedro Menendez de Aviles staked his claim with a Spanish flag. That date, as any booster will tell you, makes this Atlantic Coast city the oldest continually occupied European settlement in the United States.

  Stay on the trolley and you’ll glide by the so-called Fountain of Youth, site of a natural spring near the spot where Don Juan Ponce de Léon first stepped ashore in what he dubbed La Florida. You’ll also pass attractions billed as the Oldest House, the Oldest Drugstore, and the Oldest Wooden Schoolhouse.

  What you won’t gain on the putt-putt train is a sense of where to eat. You see, St. Augustine boasts a tourist façade that, come dinnertime, can be difficult to penetrate.

  Granted, you might not want to follow in my footsteps, chatting up locals of long tenure, tracking down dishes like grundiga (a tomato-thickened mull of beef liver, hearts, and lungs), mondonga (tripe and chitlins, seasoned with rignum leaves), and gopher stew (mostly tortoise and onions). So here’s a tip: rather than succumb to the lesser charms of the straight-out-of-the-box seafood houses that hug the waterfront, you should seek dishes born of Minorca, the island off the coast of Spain which, in addition to the delight known as mondonga, has bequeathed to St. Augustine a roster of peculiar and piquant shellfish chowders and pilaus.

  The first and last stop for all things edible and Minorcan is O’Steen’s Restaurant, a twenty-table concrete shoe box, in business since 1965, set across the Bridge of Lions, opposite the historic city core. Although founder Bob O’Steen was not a member of the tribe, Minorcan Lonnie Pomar, the current proprietor, has worked the fryers here for more than forty years. And his lineage shows.

  Come in on Friday and you have a good chance of snagging an order of shrimp pilau, a jambalaya-like mélange of rice and onions and such, enlivened by ground datil peppers. Thursday oftentimes means sausage pilau. Tuesday it’s chicken pilau. Every day, Lonnie dishes Minorcan clam chowder, which, were it not for the healthy dose of datil peppers that floats in the stew pot, would be comparable to Manhattan clam chowder.

  Although no one seems to be clear about why, the presence of datil peppers has come to be considered a signature of Minorcan cookery. Check that. A better phrasing might be: Datil peppers have become integral to Minorcan cookery as practiced in and around St. Augustine. You see, back in the old country, datils were unknown.

  Unraveling how Minorcans came to St. Augustine is easier than explaining datils. So I’ll start there. In 1768, 1,200 settlers departed Minorca for Florida, bound for a speculative indigo plantation south of St. Augustine at what is now known as New Smyrna. Political strife and privation followed. In 1777 the colonists fled the wrath of their overseers, seeking refuge in St. Augustine where, over the course of the next couple centuries, they distinguished themselves in, among other fields, fisheries.

  No one knows if the colonists brought datil peppers with them. Some argue that the Minorcans acquired the peppers from enslaved Africans encountered at New Smyrna. Others believe that the Minorcans, who had long cooked with peppers back home, adopted the datil as their own when the Caribbean-born pepper made a beachhead by way of Cuba. More than likely, the Minorcans did give the incendiary peppers their name, for the green to gold pods somewhat resemble dates, a linkage cemented by the knowledge that datil is the word for the fruit of the date palm in both the Catalan and Spanish languages.

  Speaking of which, O’Steen’s does not flinch when it comes to datils. Lonnie stirs the stuff into nearly everything he makes. Even his fried shrimp, lightly battered in cracker meal and cooked to an ethereal blond crisp, get their kick when you dip them in “pink sauce,” a trademark blend of catsup, mayonnaise, horseradish, house-made datil pepper sauce, and house-made datil pepper vinegar.

  And we’re just getting started. Cruets of that same peppe
r vinegar, bobbing with stubby green datils, are front and center on each table. (Locals pour a glug or two on their collard greens.) And there’s the house datil pepper sauce, the sweet-hot table sauce that Lonnie and company pour into decommissioned Grolsch beer bottles.

  Of course, there’s Datil Squeezins, made by Timmy Colee, a veteran of thirty-odd years in the O’Steen’s kitchen. Like Lonnie’s uncooked table sauce, Timmy’s cooked version gets its color from catsup, and can, after a bit of finagling, be purchased when you step to the register to pay your bill.

  Dear reader, you should know that your appearance at the register will be fraught, not because of the bill—which will be paltry—but because, when you push back from your table at O’Steen’s, full of history and hot sauce, you will be surrendering both situational citizenship in Minorca and claim to one of America’s premier trencherman restaurants.

  205 ANASTASIA BOULEVARD / 904-829-6974

  Tallahassee

  BRADLEY’S COUNTRY STORE

  The porch of this vintage 1927 institution is a hive of activity. A clutch of three county employees, each wearing blue work shirts with their names sewn above the pockets, munch foot-long sausage dogs as catsup and relish drips a Rorschach on the concrete. The screen door slaps closed behind a man who, between hitches of his pants, crab-walks down the stairs, lugging a galvanized washtub to his truck. From the top step, a grouping of picnic tables is visible, set in the sand beneath the boughs of a moss-necklaced oak.