Art and Soul

I'm starting to be skeptical of soul food, particularly when two girls with soul go to restaurants that serve it. And me and Dotti know soul: from her love of fried chicken, to my love of shrimp and grits and BBQ, and to our collective passion for a variety of undeserving objects, we got soul and some to spare. But copiously butter-drizzled cuisine soul food does not make. Particularly, when this soul food prompts not-seen-since-elementary-school visceral reactions to both butter and vegetables.

Dotti and I headed to Art and Soul on Capitol Hill last weekend, a bar and restaurant claiming southern influences to its food. It started off promising enough with homemade barbecue chips at the bar and butter rolls and some dark (not tasty) sweet bread on the table. This iteration of butter was measured, appropriate, and proportional.


Next, we had shrimp and grits, the first of the weekend and second in a row for this publication. The shrimp glistened with a butter glaze and each hominy of grit was infused with garlic, with a shallow pool of butter hovering above them. If you can have brain freeze from popsicles, can you you have catatonia from butter?


Butter's cousin, cheese, starred in the highlight of the evening, the macaroni and cheese. I consider the pasta noodle almost as important as the sauce and here both shone: tight spirals caught as much of the cheese as possible in its threads, as well as the breadcrumb crunch on top.


Dotti ordered her fried (nearly whole) chicken with greens and mashed potatoes. She cleverly got a real Southern dish. There was gravy, sort of like butter, but no visibly extraneous butter.


I opted for fancy (that was silly): rabbit stuffed with spinach (I believe), garlic/cheese biscuits, and an unappetizing mix of my least favorite combination of vegetables: fava beans (too much like the lima kind), carrots, and pearl onions. The rabbit was chewy and eating the vegetables seemed obligatory rather than pleasurable, so I re-feasted on macaroni and cheese and waited for the dessert menu.


I hate to be dismissive of Oprah's former personal chef, but it's almost a farce to serve soul food--a comfort enjoyed by families on Sundays--in the shadow of the Capitol, in a sleek, modern, deliberately-dramatically-lit restaurant.

Dessert, like a dinner triangle being rung, woke up the rest of the meal. We had a pecan pie the likes of which I've never had, with a dense, praline-like pecan filling on the bottom and a chocolate ganache-like top. We also had a multi-berry cobbler with ice cream. They both had butter but thankfully we couldn't taste it.



















Dessert turned out to be exquisite but as a whole, dinner wasn't exceptional..and afterwards I didn't much hope the South would rise again. That is, unless I knew Clifton would be its capital and butter wouldn't be used with Paula Deen-like abandon.