Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [74]
While some herring-crazed patrons fill up on four, five, six, or more of the plush fish, we must advise first-time visitors to the Cypress Grill to leave appetite for dessert. That’s the one non-fish item on the menu worth singing about. Every morning, proprietors Leslie and Sally Gardner make pies. When we stopped to visit one day around 10:00 A.M., Mr. Gardner led us right over to the pie case—a wooden cupboard built by a neighbor to be so sturdy, he says, “you could dance on it.” He insisted we feel the bottom of a pie pan, still nearly too hot to touch. We sat down then and there and forked up a piece of chocolate pie that was modest-size but intensely fudgy.
Mama Dip’s
408 W. Rosemary St.
919–942–5837
Chapel Hill, NC
BLD | $$
Mama Dip is Mildred Council, founder-owner-chef at Chapel Hill’s beloved soul-food restaurant. Ms. Council, nicknamed “Dip” by her siblings because she was such a tall kid, wrote Mama Dip’s Kitchen in 1999, and it is a valuable cookbook that includes many of the recipes she has used in her restaurant.
Three meals a day are served in the nouveau rustic quarters to which Dip’s moved a few years ago, and while lunch and dinner offer great southern classics—fried chicken, chitlins, Brunswick stew—we love to start the day with eggs, pork chops, and gravy, sided by biscuits and grits. Other hearty wake-up meals include salmon cakes, brawny country ham, and blueberry pancakes.
Later in the day, what we love most about Dip’s meals, aside from the lumpy, crunchy, brightly salty crust of the fried chicken, are the vegetables. The daily list includes long-cooked greens, blackeyed peas, crunchy nuggets of fried okra, mashed potatoes and gravy, porky string beans, okra stew with tomatoes, corn-dotted coleslaw, always a sumptuous vegetable casserole, broccoli, squash, stewed tomatoes, and cool sweet potato salad. For mopping and dipping, there are buttermilk biscuits, corn bread, and yeast rolls.
The Ham Shoppe
132 Broadstone Rd.
828–963–6310
Valle Crucis, NC
BL | $
For a quick sandwich or a piece of cake while passing through the mountains, or to stock up on southern-style grits and groceries, the Ham Shoppe is the place to go. Country hams are sold whole, halved, and by the slice, ready to fry, and the shelves offer a wide array of jellies, preserves, and put-up vegetables.
What we most appreciate about this full-service country store is the fact that you can walk in and grab a hot ham biscuit ready-to-eat. Regarding the ham sandwich, Roadfooder T. Jeffries wrote us a while back to say, “I have never found a better sandwich…stacked high on fresh bread with all the fixin’s.” Or if you are in the mood for something sweet, there are cut-and-wrapped slices of apple, blackberry, and peach pie, as well as sundrop lemon cake and blackberry pound cake.
The most intriguing thing we found to eat was a blueberry biscuit. Yes, it is real biscuit dough with its distinctive baking powder flavor, studded with soft sweet berries and topped with the sort of icing you’d find on a sweet roll. It is weird, no doubt about it, and biscuit purists will likely have a fit over this iconoclastic piece of pastry. But we each managed to eat a whole one and drive away with satisfied smiles.
Jarrett House
Dillsboro, NC
828–586–6251
LD (closed in winter) | $$
Hoo-eee, talk about country cooking! How about a skillet-fried, center-cut slice of country ham with red-eye gravy and biscuits on the side? Or chicken and dumplings with fried apples, and locally grown beans and squash? Catfish and fried chicken are also on the lunch menu; battered and fried mountain trout is available at supper. And for dessert? A nice slice of vinegar pie (“like pecan pie without the pecans”) or warm peach cobbler. Yes, this is the real thing, all right, served in the gracious dining room of a Smoky Mountain inn built in 1884.
Lunch is swell, served by the plate, but full enjoyment of this grand restaurant is found at dinnertime or on Sundays, when meals are served by the platter and bowl, family-style, and