Since our planned vacation of an Alaskan cruise complete with all-you-eat food fell through, we recently went to Plan B and decided to visit some nearby towns to cross them off our list. First stop: Savannah.
Friends have often told us we'd like the town's style, not to mention food. We imagined a smaller New Orleans; complete with old buildings, walkable neighborhoods, scary tourists, and good food. Three out of four is not bad. Savannah is very walkable, even in July it is much cooler than the hell we are used to from Florida, and we wanted to be able to easily walk off the food. Getting a good mid-week summer rate from the Savannah Bed and Breakfast overlooking Chatham Square downtown, we were ready to explore.
Not being terribly prepared since this was a last minute trip, we went ahead and asked a local for a cheapish fish house recommendation. Twenty minutes later we found ourselves wandering in tourism purgatory (River St) and ate at Tubby's on River Street.
Yes, it has a nice patio overlooking the river and the throngs. Yes, it has fish. But we were very disappointed in the bad service, the worse salad, and the overpriced average fish. I'm not sure what our appetizer would have tasted like as we never got it, my broiled shrimp platter was tolerable but not a good value, my husband had overbreaded grouper fingers, and both of us found the frozen centers of our corn on the cob. Given how long it took us to get the food, at least it could have been uniformly warm. Perhaps if we didn't grow up near the ocean and thus know the value and taste of fresh seafood, we would have been happy chugging some beer and munching on fried shrimp with microwaved corn.
Generally, we are not the kind of people who get attitude at a coffeehouse, we exude aloof hipness at all times so we were a little surprised at getting treated like loud fat Americans at a Parisian cafe. Perhaps we were not wearing enough black or took too long looking at the menu (horrors!) for the surly girl at the Sentient Bean. The weary sighs and rolled-eyes "You haven't been here before have you?" could have been negated by good food. But no, and we were 0-2. The ciabetta sandwiches were pretty crappy. The bread was thick and gummy. The substance that was supposed to be pesto pretty much tasted only of the canned garlic used in its creation. The eggplant was leathery, the olives were so sparingly doled out you'd think we were on rations, and the salad dressing was very tart and there was way too much of it. Even sharing 2 different sandwiches between us we could not feel good about our choice. The house coffee and limeade were good at least, but that wasn't helping my garlicky burps later on. Maybe we caught them on a bad day, certainly the other staff we watched were not as surly as ours, or maybe this a place for coffee and hanging out. Not for food.
All is not lost. A spot of hope appears in the unlikliest of places. We drove out a little ways to get some saltwater action and ended up on Tybee Island which really isn't an island. It was low tide so in order to get our feet wet and out of the burning sand, we had to cross the very full midweek beach. Sick of being thwarted for seafood, we hoped that Fannie's on the Beach would offer some tasty food. Honestly, I think I picked the place because it had the least hideous website of many Tybee places I'd seen.
What visit to Savannah would be complete without a mention of Paula Deen's Lady and Sons restaurant? The website even tells you to start standing in line at 9:30 for lunch at 11, and 3:30 for dinner at 5, but I didn't believe it until I saw it.
10AM on a Wednesday morning. Screw that. No place can have consistently good food and have that high of a turnover. I realize its mostly a buffet, but for $diety's sake, its still just a meat + 3. Its not like Paula Deen is there in the kitchen, and its not like I can't get great meat +3s here in Atlanta or pretty much any town in the freaking South.
*Its not all bad news, Savannah's good pubs are reviewed next!
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