Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [104]
Another fine way to eat pork is streak o’ lean, served with brown gravy and biscuits. It is a dish Elvis loved: bacon-lover’s bacon. You get four pieces of it on a plate, each about a quarter-inch thick, fried crisp. The word “luscious” does not do justice to the overwhelmingly rich quality of this pork, streaks of which are chewy but most of which just melts away on your tongue.
Waysider lunch is good café fare: fried chicken or steak with slews of such satisfying southern vegetables as fried okra, field peas, collard greens, squash soufflé, candied yams, and fried corn. Warm fruit cobbler and cream pies top things off with a super-sweet exclamation mark.
Wintzell’s Oyster House
605 Dauphin St.
334–432–4605
Mobile, AL
LD | $$
Wintzell’s is goofy but great. A downtown Mobile institution since Oliver Wintzell opened it as a six-stool oyster bar in 1938, it has survived hurricanes and floods, rebuilt and expanded into a modern, comfortable seafood restaurant with four other branches in the area and franchises available to entrepreneurs. The old place still has an oyster bar where you can sit and knock ’em back by the dozen; and it continues to keep score in the ongoing contest to see who can eat the most raw oysters in one hour. The walls are plastered with thousands of little signs offering bons mots and politically incorrect rules of life put there by the late Mr. Wintzell, starting in the 1950s. For example: “When a wife looks high and low for her husband at a party, she usually finds him high.” Bits of Wit and Wisdom (The Signs at Wintzell’s Oyster House) and Oysters and Politics, Mr. Wintzell’s self-published books, are available for sale at the cash register.
Aside from impeccable, opened-as-you-watch raw oysters and the vintage bar-room charm, Wintzell’s is a worthy place for sampling many of the dishes that define Gulf Coast cookery: seafood gumbo and crisp-fried crab claws, oyster po-boys, and crusty-fried catfish, and a definitive version of the unique Mobile specialty, West Indies salad. No one knows how West Indies salad became such a favorite dish of the city’s, but it’s one every visitor must try: hunks of crabmeat marinated in oil and vinegar with grated onions. It is simple, rich, and ocean-sweet—so addictive that many customers, rather than ordering it as an appetizer (its usual role), get a couple of large orders for their main course, accompanied by saltine crackers.
Arkansas
Cotham’s Mercantile
5301 Hwy. 161 S
501–961–9284
Scott, AR 72142
L Mon–Weds, L&D Thurs–Sat | $
In the Grand Prairie about a half-hour southeast of Little Rock, Cotham’s Mercantile is perched on stilts above a slow-flowing river. Built in 1917, it has been a general store, a jail, and a military commissary. Contemporary Arkansans know it as a plate-lunch destination.
The old wood building is fronted by a broad porch. Enter a swinging door into a dining room packed to the ceiling with vintage home and farm bric-a-brac, from garden tools to vintage television sets. Remote the restaurant may be, but it is rare to see an empty chair. Bare wood tables are surrounded by customers who come for hearty noonday meals built around catfish, chicken-fried steak, or chicken-fried chicken, and such daily specials as fried pork chops (Monday), chicken and dumplings (Tuesday), meat loaf (Wednesday), and southern-fried chicken (Thursday). Side dishes include corn fritters, hush puppies, collard greens, and fried green tomatoes. There is a long list of sandwiches, too, the king of which is known as a Hubcap Hamburger. That is an immense circle of cooked ground beef—close to a foot in diameter and a half-inch thick—that comes in a bun that nearly fits, dressed with a salad’s worth of mustard, lettuce, tomato slices, pickles, and hoops of onion. Incredibly, it is possible to lift it with two hands from plate to mouth. The outlandish specialty has earned such renown that the store’s push-pin map