Restaurant review: Hattie's
DIG IN: If gluttony is a sin, then forgive me, Lord. I have been to Hattie's, and I have sinned.
This quintessential New Southern bistro nestled in the Bishop Arts District strikes just the right balance with food, hospitality and comfort. Hattie's specializes in the sort of engaging dishes a good Southern host or hostess trots out with the best china and silver, food that in the South we might call "company food" or "Sunday food."
NEW SOUTHERN CHARM: Where tearooms often overplay the hospitality hand, Hattie's gets it just right with co-owner Tony Alvarez acting as host. The room itself is sunny and sophisticated, urban and charming. A tin ceiling and tile floors suggest a building of a certain age, while the banquettes and suspended lights embrace modern elegance. Water is served from traditional silver pitchers, yet something resembling trance music pulses in the background.
As for the menu, chef Kelly Hightower blends Southern comfort with tony inventiveness to beguiling effect. The menu changes seasonally, but there are favorites that never go out of rotation. On this visit, we passed over popular standards such as the macaroni and cheese made with three artisanal cheeses in favor of two distinct entrees involving another Southern favorite: grits.
NO GRITS, NO GLORY: These dishes were like haute comfort food, as satisfying in their way as steak and potatoes. Subtle, smooth goat-cheese grits were the foundation for low-country shrimp, puddled in a thin, Tabasco-bacon pan gravy that was smoky, salty and just spicy enough. Creamy grits with garlic cradled a mound of lean, savory pulled pork set off with just a touch of sweet-onion marmalade.
If you've ever puzzled over the concept of fried green tomatoes, Hattie's appetizer version makes the appeal clear. Just crisped with cornmeal batter, the green tomatoes were tart and firm, finding the right counterpoint with herbed buttermilk dressing.
Not surprisingly, tomatoes figure prominently on the menu this time of year. Another appetizer favorite made more good use of thick, smoky bacon, wrapping fried, melt-away oysters.
For dessert, the ladylike napoleon layered tender pastry with orange cream set off by light, lemony sorbet. But molten cake was really just a dark, primordial chocolate ooze beneath a crown of whipped cream, a combination certain to make chocoholics go weak in the knees. In our hearts, we also lusted after the blueberry fried pie.
WINE, WHINE: Now, one waits for the wine list to catch up to the menu. It's not hard to pair this cuisine with a selection from those offered, but descriptions would be useful and staff knowledge, even better. On our visit, a dry rosé, for example, was characterized by a server as being like "white zinfandel." Not. And you'd have to be a wine insider to know that fresh, crisp Nora albariño from Spain was an excellent value and food match.
It's the only disconnect for this hospitality overachiever. Otherwise, the only real problem is curbing your impulse to keep savoring just one more mouthful ... until every morsel is gone from your plate.