Full Belly Files | Southern Charm and Chow, Part Two: Savannah, Georgia

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This edition of Full Belly Files was originally emailed to subscribers on April 19, 2024. To receive Matt Kettmann’s food & drink newsletter in your inbox each Friday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

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After a week of indulging in the culinary riches served up by renowned kitchens of both Charleston and Savannah — from oysters all ways, fried chickens, crunchy salads, and biscuits and gravies to Southern spins on Italian, German, French, Vietnamese, and Chinese  — could it be that the best bite I had was a sandwich?

Just one bite, mind you, as it was my wife’s order. And it wasn’t an ordinary sandwich, rather the “Green Tomato Sando” from Brochu’s Family Tradition, which stacked fried tomatoes on butter-basted buns laced in Swiss cheese and pickle pepper cream. Not to take away from Brochu’s saucy oysters; shatter-crisp fried chicken; orange-glazed, head-on shrimp skewers; or El Diablo tequila slushie with cassis, ginger, and lime, but their cheapest menu item just may be Savannah’s finest. So yeah, I bought a shirt. (Millers All Day in Charleston got that honor too.)

But before diving deeper into our romance with Savannah — which prevailed in winning my family’s spring-break hearts even after we’d just been wooed by Charleston — let’s not forget the lovely drive between the two cities. We wove through stately oaks dripping with Spanish moss (neither Spanish nor moss, we learned); hit the pristine, jungle-lined beaches of Hunting Island, checked out the seaside towns of Beaufort (sandos at Lowcountry Produce) and Bluffton (fried green tomatoes at Calhoun Street Tavern); and then drove over a massive span bridge to catch our first glimpse of storybook Savannah hundreds of feet below. (This was the same day that a freighter felled the Baltimore bridge, adding a little drama to our many bridge crossings.)

We found our rented home — two stories, two masters, three toilets, full kitchen, dining room and living room, plus cheaper and closer to things than our pad in Charleston — just off of Crawford Square as the sun set, and we quickly changed into nicer clothes (pink coat again for me). We caught our first glimpse of Forsyth Park as we walked up the stairs into Saint Bibiana, the coastal Italian restaurant opened just months ago by Derek Simcik. I got to know Derek a decade ago when he opened Outpost S.B. for the Kimpton brand’s Goodland Hotel just minutes from my house.

Located in a historic mansion that’s been converted into the high-class Hotel Bardo, Saint Bibiana aims to impress, and the food did just that: silky amberjack crudo awash in a fennel sauce, burrata wrapped in mirin-soaked cucumber, cavatelli with nduja and feathery parmesan, and maybe perfect versions of Dover sole piccata and olive-brined roasted chicken. The service was friendly if slightly scattered, but the only actual bummer was that Simcik wasn’t there that night. We’d been in touch leading up to the trip, and he set up our reservation, so I assumed he’d come say hi, and assured my family as much. So I was mildly embarrassed to learn that Simcik had left that morning for a last-minute trip to Nashville.

For breakfast at home, we snagged some Montreal-style wood-fired bagels from a small chain called Spread Bagelry, then joined Rose Moss for one of her excellent and enlightening Explore Savannah walking tours. That we became so fond of this last American colony was due in large part to Rose’s deft and dynamic storytelling. In just a couple hours of wandering, she gave us all we needed to better appreciate why the town was founded (to protect Charleston from the Spanish in St. Augustine), why it was laid out across dozens of squares (the brilliant civic design of reform-minded James Oglethorpe, who banned slavery at first), and how more modern generations have preserved the town so well that’s it’s become the setting for books like Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil and films like Forrest Gump.

For a midday snack, we met Visit Savannah’s Tanvi Chauhan at Zunzi’s, a South African–inspired, mostly outdoor restaurant-bar. Over peri-peri chicken wings, boerewors sausage, and falafel bites, Tanvi told us about her upbringing in Zimbabwe and adult life in Georgia, divulging some of the hipper Savannah neighborhoods like the Starland District for future exploring.

Both Rose and Tanvi urged us to check out the JW Marriott on the Savannah River at the west end of the Waterfront area. It was immediately apparent why. The developer Richard Kessler, whose home we’d ogled during Rose’s tour, turned the lobby into a gallery for massive amounts of geodes, dinosaur bones, and otherwise jaw-dropping collections. Outside, bars and restaurants of varying cuisines lined the walkways along the river. It was a shame we only had time for a drink.

My most anticipated restaurant of the entire trip was The Grey, where Mashama Bailey instantly made national headlines a decade ago upon introducing her “Port City Southern food” inside of a 1938 bus station that still sports an Art Deco design. Our reservation wasn’t until 9:30 p.m., but that gave us time to sip on cocktails and mocktails in the bar before slipping into our booth right next to the glass-walled kitchen. (The late timing also put me on a convenient collision course with the sommelier, who happily shared some rare wines with me while winding down from a private wine dinner he’d hosted downstairs.)

Organized into sections called “Dirt,” “Water,” “Pasture,” and “Pantry,” The Grey’s menu is a seasonal saunter through the kitchen’s current inspirations. We went for oysters (of course), radicchio with anchovy and parmesan, fried pumpkin bites atop honey-serrano yogurt, roasted sweet potato with pomegranate molasses, turnip cakes with caviar on a potlikker base, and pork pate with pickles, Dijon, and charred sourdough. We were a little too stuffed from multiple days of eating to go big on a whole fish with salsa verde or the butter-glazed ribeye, but everything satisfied with understated yet soulful style.

The next morning was our most anticipated outing: a boat ride out to Little Tybee Island with Sundial Charters, whose owner Rene Heidt picked us up from the beach on the bigger, motel-lined Tybee Island. But it was a gray day, cold and wet, so she took us straight to her dockside house to warm up over tea while we looked at her art and chose from fossils of megalodon and ancient horse teeth to take home. 

Rene proved to be quite a hoot, loaded with information about nature, history, and modern affairs, but with that sort of playful energy that excites everyone in earshot. As the weather warmed up enough, we toured the swamps and pulled up to Little Tybee under the gaze of a bald eagle. With cannonball jellyfish dotting the beach and whimbrels and oystercatchers plying the shallows for lunch, we wandered to the far side of the island, where curious maritime debris lingered in a driftwood graveyard.

Due to a minor navigational snafu — I promised not to reveal details, for as Rene said, “What happens on Little Tybee stays on Little Tybee” — we skipped the search for dolphins that’s usually part of the tour. That gave us plenty of time for more oysters, elote, heirloom tomatoes, and fried shrimp at the Wyld Dock Bar, where I could sit for days sipping on palomas as Sea Island life floats by.

And that takes us all the way back to our last dinner at Brochu’s Family Tradition, a “fried chicken and fancy seafood” joint in the heart of Savannah’s cool kid/still slightly edgy Starland District. The only thing I forgot to mention from the menu was the ridiculously scrumptious strawberry pie that we had for dessert. Much like our entire spring break, it was just another example of things getting better all the time.

My son and I added one last ghost tour to the schedule, joining former Disney performer Julianna Monet from Genteel & Bard for a late night meander through Savannah. The old city’s hauntings are so well-documented and frequent that they’re something of an inside joke, a way to test out the new cops when they get called to yet another sighting of the executed Alice Riley looking for her baby.

Many credit the creepiness to the way Savannah merely built on top of their cemeteries as the city expanded. But I never caught a bad vibe there, not even while walking along gravesites at all times of day.

Don’t try to squeeze in a visit to the Wormsloe Historic Site on the way to the airport unless you’ve got more than two hours to spend. In a recent change to the visiting rules, you can no longer drive to the museum, instead having to walk more than 1.5 miles from the visitor center down the iconic oak-shaded lane to reach the actual displays, unless you can snag a ride on the packed shuttle.

We’d stopped for coffee and just-what-we-needed breakfast at Stevedore Bakery on the newly developed outskirts of the Waterfront, leaving just an hour to explore Wormsloe. Thinking we could at least reach the museum, my son and I hustled at a brisk pace for more than 20 minutes and couldn’t even see the end of the road. As we headed back, a golf cart approached, driven by a local confused by the new rules, but with my wife and daughter in tow, having sweet-talked him into a lift. He returned us all to the parking lot, wondering aloud whether he’d no longer be able to drive his cart through the site to access its trails with his dog.

Serendipity followed us home. In Beaufort, South Carolina, I’d bought a bag of Marsh Hen Mill’s Charleston Gold Rice from Lowcountry Produce. When I got opened the previous week’s New York Times Magazine at my kitchen table, there was Eric Kim’s recipe for the lowcountry staple chicken perloo featuring, yes, the relatively rare Charleston Gold.

I didn’t make the perloo, but I did take cues from the recipe to make a traditional-ish red rice for the party we were going to that night. It was an attempt to bring a bit of that Southern charm to Santa Barbara, and our friends forked it up rather quick.

See all of our Savannah photos here and all of our Charleston photos here.

Mark Your Culinary Calendars

Here are some events to attend this weekend and down the road:

• Natural Coast Wine Festival: This natural wine showcase returns for year two on Saturday, April 20, noon-5 p.m., at 616 E. Haley St. Tickets here.
• Meritage’s Spring Grand Tasting: For more classical palates, spend Saturday, April 20, at SOhO, where Meritage wine shop hosts its spring grand tasting. Lineup and tickets here.
• James Beard Benefit @ Rosewood Miramar: Sustainable cuisine supporters are invited to this one-of-a-kind dinner on April 24 at Caruso’s featuring Michelin-awarded chefs Massimo Falsini, Shibani Mone, and, from Justin Winery in Paso Robles, Rachel Haggstrom. Wines will be by Story of Soil, with ingredients provided by Sea Stephanie Fish, Ojai Roots, and Solymar Seafood. Click here for tickets.
• Bacara Hosts Jonata & The Hilt: The next in the Ritz-Carlton Bacara’s winemaker series is The Hilt and Jonata on April 26. Click here for info and tickets. Grassini comes up on May 16.
• The Lark x Paperboy: The Texas brunch stars behind Paperboy were part of The Lark’s opening team in 2013, and they’re coming back for a pop-up brunch party with Chef Jason Paluska on April 27 and 28. They’ll be making breakfast tacos, bacon-egg-cheese sandos, roasted pork and sweet potato hash, salty-sweet pancakes, and strawberry-pink peppercorn pop tarts. Click here for a reservation.
• Taste of Santa Barbara: A series of cooking classes, dinners, and farm tours are happening May 13-19 as well as the first-ever Friday night soiree at Casa de la Guerra and Saturday wine tasting at the Presidio. Tickets are on sale now for this annual weeklong celebration of Julia Child and Santa Barbara’s culinary scene. Click here for this year’s lineup.
• Santa Barbara Vintners Festival: Make sure to plan around the October 19 Vintners Fest at Vega Vineyard & Farm. Buy your tickets now.