Chefs fuse old and new, reconstruct Southern cooking

Nation's Restaurant News, Oct 5, 1998

Held more by the spirit than the letter of their culinary heritage, top chefs in the American South today are continuing to redesign the traditional cuisine that most of them connect with treasured memories of childhood in warm family kitchens.

While the term Southern regional still connotes "sincere cooking that begets emotional warmth." Chefs like Gary Mennie of Canoe in Atlanta and Frank Stitt of Highlands Bar & Grill in Birmingham, Ala., and their peers from Memphis, Tenn., top Charleston, S.C., remain committed to enlivening their menus with untried color texture, flavor and energy.

"We've been doing succotash here since day one," says the Pennsylvania-born Mennie, who cooked in New York and Los Angeles, and then in Guenter Seeger's former kitchen at the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead, before opening Canoe in August 1995. "But we're not afraid to put our own spin on Southern." Mennie adds, believing his tour of the East and West coasts equipped him for the regional reinterpretation he undertook with Canoe's chef-partner, Gerry Klaskala.

For example, Mennie's kitchen up Gorgonzola ravioli with its popular grilled Georgia quail, collard green puree and country bacon. "It's a combo that works great with a lot of game dishes - quail, rabbit or squab, for example," he explains.

NRN Fine Dining Hall of Fame winner Frank Stitt, meanwhile, combines a pan-roasted pork chop and tenderloin with cracklin spoon bread, red cabbage and tomato chutney aioli at Highlands.

"Our job is to implant a finesse to the cuisine that wasn't there 40 years ago," Stitt explains. "It's an attitude that allows you to turn a tradition like fried black-berry pie into a dessert crostata."

"It's not just being cutsie, though," Stitt adds. "It's being choosy, insisting on the best authentic ingredients - like tomatoes that have enough juice and acidity - and hybrid food varieties, such as pink-eyed peas."

On a recent dinner menu, Stitt showcased a grilled tuna with pink-eyed-pea hoppin' John, a dish traditionally including black-eyed peas and salt pork. He also combined a dry, aged sirloin strip with Vidalia onion shoots and arugula salad with foie gras-peppercorn butter.

Likewise, western North Carolina native Thomas Young, a gold medal holder from top culinary competitions around the region, isn't afraid to rearrange the essence of Southern regional at his popular fine-dining venue, Expressions, in Hendersonville, N.C.

"Creative regional to me means doing things like chicken-fried quail with wilted greens or pecan-crusted mountain trout with pumpkin butter," says Young, who also talks about substituting white and cherry-skinned eggplants for the typical purple variety.

"It's about re-creating the traditions that are embedded in me - a lot of the very things my mother did - with a flair," he says. His mother's grit cakes, he recalls, were cut from sheeted leftovers, then dipped in flour and an egg wash before pan-frying.

Young recalls in fact, before his mother passed away, the telephone "consultations" he'd had with her on the way to reproduce those grit cakes as well as the vinegar potato salad he enjoyed as a boy.

"I could never get my potato salad exactly right until I called her and learned I had to pour the vinegar on the potatoes while they were still hot - immediately after cooking," Young admits.

Louis Osteen, a Southern chef who 15 years ago began carving his reputation in South Carolina's "low country," Charleston and nearby Pawley's Island, is also fond of creating a modern culinary showcase for the recipes of his childhood.

"I was lucky my mother made good food," says Osteen, a native of Anderson, S.C., who recently opened Louis's Restaurant in the same neighborhood where he ran Louis's Charleston Grill for nearly 10 years. "With a new fall menu coming up, I'm thinking about homey foods again, like a really nice rabbit pot pie."

Emphasizing local ingredients and techniques, Osteen has an uncanny knack for blending the unusual. Thus, his menu can boast "Asian style" deep-fried local whole snapper as well as pan-fired whole North Carolina flounder. Other examples are shrimp with marinated mushrooms, North Carolina mussels steamed in Belgian beer and avocado blinis topped with local crab.

Another Charleston favorite introduced by Osteen is oven-roasted sweetbreads with country ham and caramelized Vidalia onions.

"It's a little more refined this way," Osteen explains, recalling he was the first chef in the region to serve South Carolina Clemson blue cheese at the Pawley's Island Inn in 1980.

Likewise, it was more than a decade ago that French-born chef Jose Gutierrez began serving hush puppies with shrimp Provencal at Chez Philippe in The Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tenn.

At the time he also was introducing ravioli with quail a la king, Grits with peaches and honey - and a tantalizing sweet potato ice cream.

"The list goes on and on," recalls Gutierrez, who continues to creatively assemble traditional Southern ingredients. "Some chefs are calling the new Southern cuisine a kind of fusion, but I think of it simply as combining the cooking techniques I learned in France with the wonderful foods of the South."