dining Archives • Page 7 of 7 • Deep Fried Kudzu

We stopped at the Southern Kitchen restaurant in New Market (VA) for lunch on our way to Boston. I tried the peanut soup (it was a little strange having a regional peanut dish like this outside of the Wiregrass in Alabama, where there are roadside stands everywhere selling boiled or roasted peanuts….Dothan even has a peanut festival…). It was a little like melted peanut butter, and it had tiny little pieces of onion inside, too. Av liked it more than I did.

Av had the fried chicken plate, and even the fried chicken was different! It looked and tasted as though the chicken had been battered like tempura rather than how we do it back home – soaked in a bath of buttermilk, then dredged in White Lily flour. This tempura-style chicken was good, though.

Oh – and sad to say, but apparently New Market, VA is past the sweet tea line. When I asked for sweet tea, they only had unsweet. And as for cokes, they only served Pepsi.

Chris’ Hot Dogs on Dexter Avenue in Montgomery

Av and I had lunch at a Montgomery institution: Chris’ Hot Dogs. Everything was good…honestly, not great – but for what they food lacked, the atmosphere more than made up for.

When you walk in, you may think that you’ve walked into a newsstand – but walk on to the back, where there’s a counter with stools, and to the right of that is a walled-off dining area with two- and four-person booths.

From a Huntsville Times article:

Hot dogs were a nickel for more than 10 years after Chris’ opened. Katechis said curbside service was available during the early years, “back when there were fewer cars on the street,” until city officials said traffic was getting delayed. Food prices have not changed much. Neither has the combination of brown paneled walls, art deco ceiling and opaque glass. Katechis is considering an update, though.

“I’ve thought about re-doing this,” he said, motioning to a rear storage area. “People ask why I don’t just gut the place and totally redo it. But I can’t. I just can’t. There’s just something about it. People like it. We added the dining area before World War II, so there hasn’t been much change in here in 60 years.”

The hotdogs are special because of the ‘secret’ sauce they put on them. You can also spice them up with the Alaga hot sauce on each table (Alaga hot sauce is in its own category, because it sweetens regular hot sauce with cane syrup). Hotdogs are $1.70, special dogs are $2.20 (what makes them ‘special’ is that they use two doggies in the bun rather than one). A special hamburger is $2.20, and onion rings are $1.70. For $8, you can walk out with a quart of Chris’ famous chili sauce.

Category: dining

Southern Kitchen, New Market (VA)

Chris’ Hot Dogs, Montgomery