Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [129]
Planters around Greenwood came to know Charles “Papa” Lusco in the 1920s when he drove a horse-drawn grocery wagon to their plantations, bringing supplies from the market he and Marie “Mama” Lusco ran. Mama sold plates of her spaghetti at the store, and Papa built secret dining rooms in back where customers could enjoy his homemade wine with their meals.
Mama and Papa were Italian by way of Louisiana, so the flavors of the kitchen they established are as much Creole as they are southern or Italian. Gumbo, crab, and shrimp are always on the menu, and oysters are a specialty in season—on the half-shell or baked with bacon. The menu is best known for its high-end items. Lusco’s T-bone steaks are some of the finest anywhere: sumptuous cuts that are brought raw to the table for your approval, then broiled to meaty succulence. Pompano has for many years been a house trademark (when available, usually the spring), broiled and served whole, bathed in a magical sauce made of butter, lemon, and secret spices.
The sauce for Lusco’s broiled shrimp is nearly as far-famed as that used on pompano and trout. Firm, plump crescents are served in a silky translucent bath of buttery juice that has the zing of vinegar and pepper, and also a fusillade of strange, beguiling spices (could that be cardamom we taste?).
Lusco’s is also known for its New Orleans–style salad of iceberg lettuce dolled up with anchovies, capers, and olives and liberally sopped in a fragrant vinaigrette, but third-generation Lusco Karen Pinkston is a serious salad buff who has made it her business to concoct more modern alternatives. One evening’s choices included Mediterranean salad, made with feta cheese; traditional Caesar salad; and a salad billed as Gourmet’s Delight, made with arugula, radicchio, endive, red lettuce, and spinach. “Andy [Karen’s husband] likes to tease me about that one,” Karen said about the latter. “He tells me it’s just weeds I’ve picked by the side of the highway. But the fact is that the Delta is different now than it used to be, and the new people have more educated palates. Even this place has to change with the times.”
For its pompano, for cut-to-order steaks, for gumbo and garlic-charged Italian salads, this seventy-two-year-old ex-grocery store on the wrong side of the railroad tracks, run by a fourth generation of the Lusco family, earns highest honors in the Roadfood pantheon.
Phillips Grocery
541-A E. Van Dorn Ave.
601–252–4671
Holly Springs, MS
L | $
Located in a two-story wood-frame house built as a saloon in the nineteenth century, Phillips became a grocery store in 1919 and has earned a huge reputation for hamburgers since the 1940s. Some customers buy them to go, but there are comfy seats here, too—a short counter with stools, a handful of old wooden school desks, and a few odd tables (including one really odd one made from the cross section of a huge tree trunk). Outside on the front porch, a couple of picnic tables provide a view of the railroad depot.
The menu is written on a blackboard that lists side dishes, including fresh-from-the-freezer Tater Tots and morsels of deep-fried, bright green okra enveloped in a golden crust. Corn nuggets are something special—bite-size fritters with lots of kernels packed inside a sweet hush puppy–like jacket. You can get spicy or regular French fries. And if a Moon Pie off the grocery shelf isn’t your dish for dessert, Phillips also offers fried pies for a dollar apiece. A fried pie is a folded over half-circle of dough fried until reddish brown and chewy, enclosing a heavy dollop of sugary peach or apple filling.
Hamburgers are presented wrapped in yellow wax paper inside a bag for easy toting, and when you peel back the wrapping, particularly on a half-pound Super-Deluxe, you behold a vision of beauty-in-a-bun. It is a thick patty with a wickedly good crunch to its nearly blackened skin.