A scathing final decision on Georgia Brown's

Monkey again had the craving for southern food, so we decided to give Georgia Brown’s one more go. I should preface by saying that the FIRST time we visited, it was not for restaurant week, and that additionally, I am at this point writing so far past the fact that I won’t have good details like drink names, etc.

First off, Georgia Brown’s restaurant week menu sucks. You get a choice of only two entrees and NO choice on the dessert. Isn’t southern cooking ALL about the desert? Of the two entrees, I may choose from BBQ brisket and pork or trout on grits. I do NOT do meat off the bone, and I had my reservations about brisket being any good bbq-ed (a fast process, compared to the days-long roasting that a good brisket requires.) I am also not a fan of grits, but I do like trout, so I decided to go ahead and try the trout and grits. Monkey, of course, got the bbq, which came with a side of slaw and collards.

For appetizers, we both decided to try the scallops wrapped in bacon, because we both like scallops. The dessert was a blondie brownie with icecream. I also decided to try out one of the signature drinks, which comes with a ginormous wedge of watermelon, and Monkey got the Black Eyed Susan, despite the fact that I reminded him he’d gotten it before and was unimpressed.

Drinks: Monkey, as last time, was unimpressed. I was even less than impressed – my lemonade-ish concoction was actually so sweet that I felt like I was drinking watermelon schnapps. Because I wanted to pay $9.95 to drink like I was in high school again.

Before we get to apps, I have to tell you how we were treated like second-class patrons for ordering off the restaurant week menu. When you order something at a restaurant and are told it is out, you are FIRST given the option of a substitution and NEXT offered the option of ordering something else from the menu. Now, as we all know, GB’s has a couple of fish dishes, and doesn’t really have anything on the menu that strikes my fancy, so when I was told about 10 minutes after ordering that the trout was out (by announcing “Who ordered off the restaurant week menu?”, as opposed to the more genteel, “Which of you ordered the trout?”) , I assumed that the kitchen manager would then offer me the option of subbing a cheaper catfish, which I’m sure they had loads of, or even a chicken breast, or at last resort, a more expensive fish. I waited for him to offer. He asked if I would care to look at the menu again. I was slightly appalled, because my whole reason for bothering to try GB’s again was that we could try it at a little bit of a discount. I had ordered the trout since I wanted the trout, and apparently, GB’s was absolutely refusing to take a couple-cent loss (or even make a slight profit, if subbing a cheaper fish) to make a happy customer. Since I knew I wouldn’t find anything else on the menu, I went ahead and went with the bbq. This would later prove a big mistake.

Apps: About the only thing they got right was that the bacon was thickslab. But when has GB’s been all about the authenticity? Honestly, I would have preferred that the scallops be wrapped in proscuitto, even though it’s not “southern”, just because it makes a better pig-wrapped scallop. (How treyf.) The real woe though, was that GB’s seems to think that it’s unwise to EVER taste scallops. Salty pork can be ok with scallops, but when the scallops are
A. covered in salty seasoning and
B. covered in a spicy remoulade-type sauce
do you think I'm REALLY, *REALLY* EVER going to know I’m eating seafood? Of course not. A couple of glasses of water to mitigate the saltiness later with no inclination we’d just had scallops, our entrees arrived.

The brisket, as I’d suspected was far too tough. But I ate it, because I was not in the mood to gnaw the pork off the bone. The slaw was… I dunno what it was. It wasn’t slaw. There was no slaw sauce, just some cabbage shreds. Even Monkey wouldn’t eat it. And the collards were sad. They didn’t even taste like collards (I suspect a lesser green was just being passed off as collards, but in that case, couldn’t they have just passed off some catfish as my trout?) In fact, Monkey’s mom makes better collards, and I almost wanted to call her to tell her so. As far as bbq goes, it was meh. We had better at the bbq battle this summer, and that may or may not be saying much.

Dessert: I have had the EXACT SAME DESSERT from Firehook. It’s called a 7-layer bar, only GB’s heats it up a little bit before serving. It was unspectacular.

When Monkey and I first went to GB’s, I felt we spent a lot and were a little disappointed. This night though, I KNOW we spent WAY TOO MUCH (even WITH the restaurant week menu) for NOTHING WORTH NOTING. In fact, this meal had us both agreeing to never go back.

We wash our hands of Georgia Brown’s.

On a final note, I believe that an essential problem with southern food (or, as we like to call it when we gentrify it, “low country” food) is that the ingredients are essential to the taste. There is no substitution, and that means that you can’t make it into a fine dining experience. The real ingredients are often pretty unappetizing to the sort of crowd that would frequent a fine dining place, so chefs make concessions by “upgrading” the ingredients, at the sacrifice of taste, and for those that don’t know better, they think they’re eating “authentic” cuisine. Because nobody wants to hear that their dinner was boiled with pig jowls.