WV Gourmet

http://www.amazon.com/SWEET-SUE-WHOLE-CHICKEN-CAN/dp/B0002QEYYK

So, it was Monday after Thanksgiving and after all that gluttony, I wanted something sort of light, cheap, and easy to digest for lunch.  So, I went with one of my favorite go to spots for lunch: Ellen’s Ice Cream.  I know what you’re thinking, “ice cream is not light, not even sort of light” and you’re right.  I didn’t get ice cream.  You may or may not know it, but Ellen’s as some of the best soup and salads in Charleston.  They have several salads available every day and feature a different salad/grain of the day.  The soup is a rotating stable of taste sensations.  They also  serve up a PB&J for those who are so inclined. 

Monday was no let down.  The soup of the day was Arugula and Potato Soup.  It combined all the homey soothing goodness of potato soup, with the spicy flair of arugula.  The grain of the day was Pea and Feta Couscous.  The couscous was no letdown either.  The grains were fluffy, with plenty of peas and feta throughout.  My lunch was successfully tasty and easy on my stomach.  I choose to believe that it was not very fattening (I’ll stab you in the eye if you tell me otherwise).  It, however is not cheap, and I knew that going in.  Soup and a sald will set you back about 8 bucks, which isn’t bad, but doesn’t quite fit the definition of cheap.  If Ellen’s isn’t in your rotisserie of lunch spots, it ought to be.  If it isn’t in your rotisserie of places to go for ice cream, there is just something wrong with you, though that is for another entry.

Okay, so I’ve been to the new Vandalia Grille a couple of times and although the food is pretty tasty, the actual lounge is a bit lacking.  If you don’t remember the Vandalia Lounge, it was a great little bar on Hale or Dickinson (depending on which side you came in) Street in Charleston, WV.  Eventually, the new wore off and people migrated to the bars they had previously gone to and the new “luxury” bar across the street and Vandalia closed down, with a promise that it would return.  Over the summer, a bunch of signs appeared in the windows of Vandalia, indicating its return was near and that it would be a tapas bar.  Finally, after being closed for nearly a year, Vandalia reopened as Vandalia Grille.

My first trip there, I had about a half hour to kill downtown, so I just popped in to get a dinner drink and check out the place.  I quickly realized that this was no tapas bar, rather a tapas restaurant.  The place is full of tables and the great beautiful concrete bar is now pick up station for the servers.  There are exactly four seats at the bar - two on one end and two on the other.  There are no beers on tap, and the beer list is pretty basic, with Guinness and Amstel Light serving as the more exotic selections, which is sad, because Vandalia did always have a pretty decent selection of microbrews and import beers (I will leave it to my friend Rich to explain what a travesty that is).  The wine selection was actually worse.  Basically, it was red, white or sangria.  Back to the layout of the place.  The kitchen is right behind the bar where you can see it.  Now, this is not a beautiful open air kitchen, no it is just an unattractive griddle, fryers and oven out there for all to see.  There is no bar and the whole place does not allow for mixing a mingling, you know, the sort of thing someone would do in a bar.

Okay, I’ve told you what is wrong with it, so now for the good.  I have been there a couple of times with friends, so I have gotten to try several things off the menu.  The sweet potato fries are excellent.  Sweet potato fries are the sort of thing that sounds good, but just about always fails in execution with limp, chewy “fries.”  Well, these are pretty excellent.  They are crispy like any good fry should be and they have a great sweet potato taste.  They come with two very tasty aiolis (flavored mayonnaise) to dip them in; I never caught what they were but one tasted citrusy and the other like a peppercorn kind of thing.  The chicken lettuce wraps were excellent, as were the blackened scallops.  The scallops were prefectly spicy and were nice and meaty.  The pizzas were good, but not quite up to the flavor explosion that is a Lola’s pizza.  The little pork shank is very excellent, though I’ve never seen a pork shank so small, these must come from midget baby pigs.

They have several burgers on the menu which I have not tried yet, but sound great, except for one.  The offending burger, The Islander, is some sort of pork burger, with pickled cucumbers (where I’m from, we just call those pickles), red peppers (so far it sounds good), and, finally, slathered with wasabi aioli.  Why God?  Why?  This isn’t the only chiptasabi offender on the menu, the other, and possibly worse one is the Andouille and Wild Mushroom Pizza.  That sounds really good, until you read the description and see that it is coated with chipotle sauce.  Chipotle and cajun: two great tastes that don’t taste great together. 

In summation, they have managed to do two pretty incredible things at Vandalia Grille: They’ve managed to make something that sounds great in theory, but always fails in execution actually live up to its potential by making delicious, crunchy sweet potato fries, and they’ve managed to ugly up a once beautiful bar.