Where the Biscuits Meet the Gravy

New York Times, April 26, 2000

One of the things that brighten the lives of itinerant scribblers like me is breakfast. As it happens, I’ve spent a lot of time over the years in the American South, a region that has always specialized in big, bountiful breakfasts, at least partly because an energy-giving meal is better consumed in the morning than at midday in its steamy climate. In the South, culinary tradition was largely shaped in rural kitchens with access to a restricted range of ingredients, notably corn and pork, which, in the form of superb ham, bacon, sausage and grits, still grace regional breakfast tables. Starting from there, more prosperous Southerners devised elaborate hunt breakfasts and plantation breakfasts, with mint juleps and silver chafing dishes.

At a little place called Hominy Grill in the not quite yet fashionable Cannonborough neighborhood of Charleston, they serve boffo breakfasts of the traditional kind. These may well be the best breakfasts in the Carolinas, which means some of the best in America. This is a place whose breads are homemade, where instant grits and quick grits and machine-ground grits find no welcome. Fried eggs are gentled to perfection; with the yolks brilliantly glossy and just slightly set and none of those dry disagreeably frazzled edges on the whites.

At the Hominy Grill in other words, breakfast is no gastronomic stepchild. It is cooked as carefully as if it were a banquet.

Funny about breakfasts, you remember the best ones for a long time, always in geographical context. The feasts I’ve eaten recently at the Hominy Grill have taken place in my mind alongside the noodle soup called pho that women in conical straw hats dispense in the streets of Saigon, the ricotta pancakes at Bill’s in Sydney, Australia and the gargantuan feeds, complete with blood sausages that I used to put away in the English Lake District.

When I think of Iowa, I think of the softball sized cinnamon buns served in Amana, the utopian community in eastern Iowa. Now, breakfast at the Hominy Grill is bracketed with Charleston and its gentle ways.

All over the South, breakfast means grits, sometimes plain, sometimes with cheese mixed in and sometimes with grillades – thin square-cut pieces of fried pork or veal. Here in the Low Country it can also mean shrimp and grits with lashings of black pepper through the sweet little river shrimp, once sold door to door in Charleston by hawkers from the barrier islands calling out “Swimpee, swimpee” are mostly a thing of the past.

In early spring, breakfast at the Hominy Grill means the supreme delight of mahogany-dark gamy tasting shad roe, gently sautéed in butter and still a bit pink in the center, served with scrambled eggs.

But Robert Stehling, the grill’s chef is by no means tradition-bound. He modifies some of the old favorites, using country ham and mushrooms instead of crumbled sausage in the gravy ladled over the biscuits and scattering uncooked scallions over all to provide a crisp green contrast.

Why not stick strictly to the old formula? I asked him. “I had to make one nod to people’s arteries,” he replied. “We’re right near the hospital.”

Mr. Stehling invents too, notably at brunch. His fried green tomato BLT, the tomatoes crunchy in bread-crumb jackets, is a big hit on weekends. So is an omelette of spinach, cheddar cheese and chunks of bacon, which though warm, retains the freshness of a spinach salad.

As for his homemade meatloaf sandwich with green tomato ketchup, a condiment he developed while working in New York, I devoured it with an alacrity unbecoming in someone who gets paid to taste carefully.

Mr. Stehling, 36, is a big bashful North Carolinian who owns the restaurant with his wife, Nunally Kersh, the producer of Spoleto Festival USA; Charleston’s yearly bash of music, theater and dance. Mr. Stehling and Ms. Kersh, 34, an elfin, energetic woman, moved to Charleston in November 1996.

She had been working at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York; he had done stints in the kitchens of Arizona 206 (under Brendan Walsh), Sarabeth’s, the Monkey Bar (under John Schenck) and Home. But he learned his most important lessons at the stove long before reaching New York, during six years at the side of Bill Neal, who made Crook’s Corner, his restaurant in Chapel Hill, NC one of the incubators of modern Southern cooking. Mr. Stehling started as a dishwasher and left as executive chef.

In Bill Neal’s Southern Cooking, Mr. Neal who died in 1991, harks back to the antebellum south and argues that “the best legacy of that society is what still makes some of us Southerners: the architecture, the literature, the food, the continuity of man and nature that shapes our perceptions.” I can’t imagine Mr. Stehling saying or writing something like that – he never finished college and remains too much the country boy to use fancy words – but I’m sure he believes it.

Mr. Stehling and Ms. Kersh took over a 19th century barbershop that had been converted into a restaurant before they bought it. Stripping purple paint off the handsome old tongue and groove vertical paneling, the two of them painted it white and left other features intact, including a stamped tin ceiling, heart pine flooring and three paddle fans. Brown butcher paper covers the tables at breakfast. The most incongruous items in the airy room are the pleasantest – oversized reproduction Windsor armchairs that afford a degree of comfort rare in restaurants.

The couple began with just breakfast and lunch, hoping to attract a neighborhood clientele; now they do “three squares a day” every weekday, Ms. Kersh said. But breakfast and brunch remain firm favorites of locals and out of towners, to say nothing of Mr. Stehling, who told me that “breakfast in the South remains very traditional, perfect for what I always wanted to do, good plain food made from scratch.”

All kinds of people show up at the grill. One day I saw a Roll’s Royce parked outside, another day, three Harley Davidsons. On Sundays, Ms. Kersh said, different folks turn up at different hours: at 8, the runners and the tennis players; then around 10 or 10:30, “people who are mildly hung over,” followed around midday, by the churchgoers, including a fair number from the very posh Grace Episcopal, and finally, along about 2:15, “people showing real damage from the night before.”

Like all good chefs, Mr. Stehling is fussy about ingredients. He uses grits ground on a stone wheel at the Old Mill in Guildford County, NC where he grew up. His father still lives near there and every time he comes to visit, he throws a couple hundred pounds into the trunk of his car. But not everything, Mr. Stehling says is as he would like.

Eggs, for example. Mr. Stehling uses supermarket eggs, because he needs 60 dozen every weekend and no one in this area keeps enough free-range chickens to produce that many. Sometimes, he said, store-bought eggs are fine, but sometimes they are too old and have too much water content, which causes the yolks to break when the eggs are flipped in frying.

“Eggs are an art,” he said.

At the Hominy Grill, unlike some refined eating places downtown, lard, not olive oil, is the shortening of choice. Collard greens are stewed not wilted. And biscuits come from Mr. Stehling’s hands, not a tin. He also makes granola from scratch and banana bread and even sausage.

Ah, the sausage. Southern sausage tastes different and Mr. Stehling’s tastes very Southern – although it is not as fatty as he would like, because he can’t find pork with a high enough fat content in these days of super-lean hogs. Southern sausage usually comes in patties, not links, but the shape is not the main point. The seasoning is. Starting with Boston butts, a shoulder cut, Stehling grinds the meat with chili peppers and cracked black peppercorns, for pungency and sage, for the essential, characteristic musky taste.

“Rubbed sage, dried sage,” the chef emphasized. “Don’t ever try it with fresh sage. The rubbed sage gives it its southern drawl.”

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