WV Gourmet

Here is something about me that pretty much any of my friends knows: I love Tex-Mex food.  My favorite place around here (aside from my own kitchen) is Chili Willi’s.  I have eaten there easily 300 times in my short lifetime.  Not everything at Chili Willi’s is great, but some of the things on the menu are a little piece of heaven.  I was in there last week and had a somewhat lackluster experience. 

So, I was in Huntington and it was getting late in the day and I had not had lunch, so I went to Chili Willi’s and sat at the bar.  I decided to order a cup of the chili verde, cheese enchiladas, and a habenero-lime lemonade. 

First off, I’m going to talk about the lemonade.  This is an item that they seem to have added last summer.  The first time I got it, it was this perfect blend of sweet, sour, and just enough heat to make it interesting.  This day, they seemed to have toned down the habenero to the point that I barely even noticed it.  It was quite good lemonade, just not the flavor explosion I experienced a few short months ago.

The next item was the chili verde.  This was a little bowl of heaven.  I wish that I had gotten a bowl, rather than a cup.  The chili was meaty with a good pork flavor, a little green chile heat, and a nice tartness from the tomatillos.

Next, we get to where the meal fell apart.  The enchiladas sucked.  I can think of no more eloquent way of putting that – they just plain sucked.  I don’t know why I went with enchiladas; pretty much no one gets them right.  They came out to me bubbling and covered in cheese with a tomato based sauce around them.  I took one bite and realized that they really only tasted of cheese – greasy cheese.  There was easily a half pound of melted cheese in this thing and that’s really all I tasted.  It was actually quite gross. 

Next time, I’ll just go with one of my stand bys: the red onion and bacon quesadilla or the chile relleno.  Both of those items, much like the chili verde and the Texas red chili, are food nirvana.  The enchiladas, not so much.

Sure, they might not have been very good at paying their rent, but I was sorry to see Pullman Square’s Moe’s Southwest Grill close last year.

Fortunately for Huntington burrito lovers, Moe’s is back. Sure, it’s called “Dos Amigos“, but it’s a carbon copy of Moe’s, even seemingly down to the appliances and tableware.

This, as I discovered at lunch today, is emphatically a good thing. I grabbed their premium-priced pork burrito, piled with a tasty cilantro-lime flavored rice, black beans, a spicy home-made salsa, olives, and a sprinkle of fresh, shredded cilantro (yum) for $5.99, and left both well fed and happy.

It came with an acceptably heaping portion of hearty, fresh tortilla chips, and free access to a salsa bar where you’ll find a very passable, well-balanced pico de gallo and an excellent corn salsa, among other things.

Their menu is a lot slimmer than Moe’s, but they will make tacos or salads if you prefer, and offer ground beef, chicken, and steak in addition to the pork. The menu includes beer and margaritas, although neither are actually on sale just yet.

Moe’s Dos Amigos is brought to us, the Herald-Dispatch says, by the owners of the Hall of Fame cafe just across the road. As you’ll read in the link, they’re promising an emphasis on freshly made cuisine, and even though the staff were obviously still learning the ropes today, it’s a promise that rings pretty true. The marinated, slow-roasted pork was delicious, the range of salsas had been made with some skill, and the portion size was just right. I’ll be going back to try the chicken.

The best thing about it? There’s no embarassed-looking fool shouting “WELCOME TO MOE’S” at you when you walk through the door. That’s one Moe’s standby I am not sorry to see the back of.

A tip for out-of-state beer lovers: don’t come here. It sucks.

A bizarre reverse loophole in WV liquor legislation prevents the sale any beer greater than 6% alcohol by volume in West Virginia. Despite several recent efforts by pressure groups and state lawmakers, it looks as if the situation isn’t about to change, and this means that the bulk of the superb, delightful produce of the burgeoning American craft beer industry is just not sold here. The Charleston Gazette’s beer expert Rich Ireland has the full story of the collapse of the most recent attempt to fix this ridiculous situation, together with some pithy commentary with which I heartily agree.

What to do, then? Either head out of state and pick up beer at a store in the surrounding area or, if that’s not an option, get some shipped from one of the many on-line stores. Doing either of these things is probably illegal, although your chances of getting busted seem very small. (Or you can brew your own, but that’s a post for another day.)

This sad situation means many thousands of superb beers are out of the reach of many West Virginians who don’t live within easy reach of an out-of-state outlet, or can’t afford the high shipping rates of the online merchants.

Exhibit one: the American IPA, or India Pale Ale. To my mind, the finest of American beer styles, and one of the most popular creations at any craft brewery. But barring one Sierra Nevada seasonal (the delicious Anniversary, which appears in WV stores every fall and barely squeaks under the 6% line) and Harpoon IPA (which is entirely too shy and retiring for my taste) there’s nothing that qualifies as a real IPA to be found in WV; most mainstream examples fall in the 6.5% to 7.25% area.

And one of my favorite IPAs is from Bells, a brewery up in Michigan that’s among the larger of the many US microbreweries. Named Two Hearted Ale, it sports a handsome label with a picture of a trout; both the name and the imagery are owed to an Ernest Hemingway short story about a fishing trip on Michigan’s Two Hearted River.

If you’re used to the swill that passes for beer in most WV store coolers, it’ll raise your eyebrows. It’s full-bodied even for an IPA, and is towards the higher end of the ABV scale. But slosh it into a nice wide-mouthed glass — don’t, for the love of god(s), drink it from the bottle — and the hop aroma will practically fill the room. The floral, citrusy bouquet is unmistakable, and decidedly appetizing. Take a sip, and you’ll find it’s not as mouth-puckeringly bitter as some IPAs can be, despite the considerable hop flavor. Balance is the key here, and although I love the more off-the-wall IPAs many micros have developed, Two-Hearted is decidedly an easy beer to drink.

For a microbeer, it’s comparatively widely distributed in around the eastern US. My regular source is Ashland Beverage Center in Kentucky, but it should be available in good PA and VA stores too. If you know of a good supplier in other areas, let us know in the comments.

I am a fan of Bluegrass Kitchen.  They have some of the best food in town, and they try their damndest to use locally grown, organic, and/or ethically treated (which really doesn’t matter to me, but it makes the hippies happy) meats.  Service, on the other hand is another story.  The service there is a crapshoot (more on this later).  I was there on New Years Day because they were having a special brunch menu from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., so I went down there with my friends, Alan and Alan.  Yes, I have two friends named Alan, with whom I regularly hang out.  This is much better than when I was in law school and the four people I hung out with all the time were Jason, Jason, Jason, and Chris (that’s right, three Jason’s and two Chris’s).  To make this less confusing, we will call them by there first names (for some reason their parents gave them first names, but call them by their middle names), Preston and Roger. 

Around 10:30ish, while I’m flipping back and forth between The Twilight Zone marathon on Sci-Fi and the Looney Toons marathon on the cartoon network, Roger sends me an e-mail, informing me that he left his phone somewhere the previous night so he could not call, but inquiring what time we are going to Bluegrass, I say 11:30ish.  Around 11:00, I hear from Preston and inform him that I will be hopping in the shower, then leave for the East End around 11:30.

I get to the Bluegrass around 11:45, just as Roger is walking across the street to the place.  He and I are promptly seated and order some mimosas because it seemed like a good and healthy way to start the day.  The mimosas were good.  Nothing to write home about, but a decent combination of sparkling wine and orange juice.  We finish them and no sign of Preston.  I order a bloody Mary, while Roger orders coffee (he obviously didn’t fully realize that brunch is an excuse for drinking in the morning/early afternoon).  We stare at the menu some more and then I send Preston a “where the hell are you text message” to which he responds that he will be there in fifteen minutes.  Roger and I can wait no more, so, in a stroke of pure genius, we decide that we should get an order of the andouille sausage gravy and biscuits AS AN APPETIZER for the table.  The gravy and biscuit (it was just one really big “biscuit” that looked like they made a giant biscuit in a sheet cake pan, then cut it into nice big squares) arrived just as Preston got there.  The gravy and biscuits were phenomenal.  This ain’t your grandma’s gravy and biscuits.  This was made with spicy andouille sausage.

We all three ordered the fried chicken and waffles as our entrée, and I ordered another bloody Mary, at which time, Roger also caved in and decided that he needed a little more nutrition from the tomato juice and ordered a bloody Mary. 

The fried chicken was crispy and well seasoned (both big plusses to this fried chicken connoisueur) and was served on top of a nice and crisp, yet fluffy Belgian waffle.  I doused it all with maple syrup and went to town.  Fried chicken and waffles is a great combination and they did an excellent job on this fine day.  Now, this wasn’t just one piece of chicken; you gut a full half chicken on this bad boy.  It was an organic chicken, so it was smallish, but still a lot of food. 

I contemplate getting dessert, but opted not to.  They sounded great, especially the jalapeno chocolate mousse. 

Places like Bluegrass and Lola’s (which will be the subject of another entry) are trendy hipster places, staffed largely by trendy hipsters (or at least people who think they are trendy hipsters).  These people also, for the most part, are the type who couldn’t hold down a job any where else, including other jobs as servers.  There are a few exceptions, notably Eduardo and Adam (neither of whom were working this fine day).  Now, Adam’s name isn’t really Adam, but I have no idea what her name is, Roger knows her and one time introduced her to Preston and me and it must have been Ann or Alice or Millicent, or something else that kind of sounded like Adam, because that is what Preston thought he said and I’ve called her that ever since.  Our server on this day was not one of the really bad ones, but was no Adam or Eduardo either.  At first, he seemed like he might do alright, he quickly took our drink orders as soon as Roger and I got there.  When Preston showed up, he sat for like ten minutes before the dude ever came over to take ask if he wanted anything to drink or bring him silverware or otherwise acknowledge that another patron was at one of his tables.  At the end of the meal, he screwed up the check, but did so in our favor, leaving off at least one (maybe more) bloody Marys.  For the record, we pointed it out and he said “don’t worry about it.”

In summary, the food was sensational, gravy and biscuits can (and should) be an appetizer, and the service was sort of okay.