Charlotte - The Food Section

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Calling all The Food Section Charlotte subscribers: We need your help in tasting things for free at a brewery! We have a bunch of small-batch pantry items (preserves, condiments, spice blends, that kind of thing) from small vendors throughout the South, and we want to test them to see if they’re worthy of sale on The Food Section’s TFS Mercantile store.

But there’s no way we can test all of them ourselves. So mark the cal: 5:30-7 p.m. Thursday, May 28, at NoDa Brewing Company. The event is free but subscriber-only. However, you can order NoDa’s award-winning beer and grab pizza and salads from NoDa Brewing’s new The Exchange Pizza Depot, and stay after for some N.C.-themed trivia! It’ll be a blast. RSVP below ...

Join us for the party!

Top Chef is covering the Carolinas this season, so we're returning the favor. Read Kathleen Purvis' show recaps every week in the TFS:CLT newsletter.

Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Greg Collier brings it with a round of side dishes from his own repertoire. Collard greens, fried okra, potato salad, Charleston-style red rice, hoppin’ John, hoe cakes, and smothered cabbage.

Yes, that’s the Leah’s cabbage he made famous at Leah and Louise, which I loved so much, I’ve ordered as a main dish with a spoon for that sauce. I must think like a “Top Chef” producer, because the challenge was to pick a side dish and turn it into a main dish.

Local stardom: Deep Roots Farm and owners Cherie and Wisdom Jzar, Greg and Subrina Collier (caught that Cook Out shoutout, ‘Breena) and Collier’s current restaurant, Fine & Fettle. And was that a quick shot of Larken Egleston, local man about town?

Packed her knives and went: Brittany Cochrane, executive chef of Stagioni. Cochrane has struggled since the first episode. Good news for her: She was eligible for Last Chance Kitchen, when chefs can cook their way back into the competition. Bad news: She didn’t make it. Sorry, Brittany.
Episode 5
Episode 6
I can say this honestly, and proudly: I have slept with pigs.

Hogs, actually. Whole ones. Spend 30 years or so covering food in the Carolinas, and you will spend an awful lot of time with barbecue. Our cheftestants got their turn in the burn barrel this week, with multiple challenges arising from whole hog barbecue, North Carolina-style.

First, though, I have a quibble: Throughout this episode, everyone from co-host Kristen Kish to the various barbecue celebrities (et tu, Sam Jones?) kept referring to North Carolina’s two styles as “Eastern vs. Western.” Where’s my buzzer? I suspect the show’s producers may have asked them to do this because the rest of the world needs a simple narrative, like good vs. evil: If there’s an Eastern, there must be a Western.

That’s wrong, though: The best way to describe the two styles are Eastern and either Lexington-style or Piedmont-style. Eastern-style is whole hog, chopped together and dressed very simply with a vinegar-based sauce. Lexington- or Piedmont-style is chopped pork shoulder, dressed simply with a vinegary sauce with a little bit of tomato. “Western” makes it sound like it originated in the N.C. mountains, and while there’s certainly barbecue there in modern times, there isn’t a history of it.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, let’s roll the highlights:

Charlotte-ish sightings: Sweet Lew’s Barbecue in the Belmont neighborhood, along with owner Lewis Donald; the Monk family of Lexington Barbecue in Lexington; Super G Mart, the Asian supermarket; and Splendor Pond Flower Farm in Mooresville, where the chefs set up their pig cookers and burn barrels for the true overnight-by-pits experience.

Pitmaster sightings: Props for the amount of barbecue royalty on hand. Besides Sam Jones of Skylight Inn and Sam Jones Barbecue in Raleigh, Greenville, and Ayden in Eastern N.C., and Charlotte’s Donald, I also spotted Atlanta barbecue chef Bryan Furman, who was raised in Charlotte and keeps dangling hope of opening a restaurant here; Matthew Barry of Midwood Smokehouse; Erica Roby, Ohio pitmaster and competitor known as @bluesmokeblaire, and numerous mentions of South Carolina star Rodney Scott.

Taking pigs to new places: In addition to traditional barbecue, a few chef creations included Chinese-style pork floss, pig ear terrine, and fried pork skin (chicharron) with pimento cheese.

Packed his knives and left: In a shocker, one of the expected stars, Sieger Bayer of Chicago, got too cheffy with his team’s pig and went “wee, wee, wee, all the way home.” Pity.
Episode 7
It seems so long ago that the “Top Chef” crew invaded Charlotte. Why, it was so long ago, Cracker Barrel had a different logo.

Remember that brief brouhaha last year, when Cracker Barrel toyed with streamlining its look, starting with taking the old man and the barrel off the logo? The company scored major product placement — a Quick Fire Challenge to create new versions of something from the menu — while that lame logo was still in play. Top Chef stayed true to the rest of the Cracker Barrel aesthetic: fake porch, rocking chairs, even a giant version of the peg board game. The chefs actually came up with things that should be served at the Barrel. Elote corn cakes with blackberries? I’d brake for that.

The big challenge this week was a dessert party for 60, with the chefs getting 3 hours to remake classic Southern desserts. They spent the time doing unholy things to perfectly lovely desserts. Liquid nitrogen in ambrosia? Caramel layer cake turned into pandan rice pudding with dulce du leche foam? Chefs, chefs, chef.

Best line: Co-host Kristen Kish declared that “Life in the South is all about slowing down.” Apparently, she didn’t drive Independence Boulevard while she was here.

But wait, there’s more: This year’s roster included a husband and wife, Justin Tootla and Jennifer Jackson, who had a restaurant in Detroit. Jackson got injured right before the taping began and has played hurt all season. In a twist bigger than turning Moravian sugar cake into undercooked bread pudding, Tootla got eliminated for that too-cold ambrosia, just as Jackson was sent to the ER. At the last minute, the show got the word that Jackson was too hurt to continue. She’ll get the chance to come back in a future season, and they offered to let Tootla stay and play in her place. The upshot: He refused, opting to leave the show to look after his spouse. Good man. I almost forgive him for screwing up ambrosia.
Episode 8
Episode 9
We knew it was coming: They left for some little town called (consults notes) “Greenville.” Not the North Carolina one, the one in South Carolina. Or as we call it: “Charlotte’s favorite retirement center.”

OK, OK — it’s a nice town, with a great restaurant scene. This episode was all party, party, party at the restaurant Soby, featuring passed appetizers made with Duke’s Mayonnaise and then a seated dinner party. Guest judge Shuai Wang of North Charleston, a previous TC finalist, has a Duke’s mayo tattoo because “mayonnaise runs through my veins.” And Kristen Kish finally said something I can get behind: “In the South, mayonnaise is the sixth mother sauce.” (Meanwhile, Jonathan Dearden made a heinous joke about Southern accents and is dead to me.)

Best food ideas: A deviled-egg version of crab gribiche and a BLT deviled egg, made by different chefs. Tucking those ideas in my back pocket.

Packed their knife and went: Oscar Diaz of Raleigh, our last Carolinas cheftestant. Oscar is the one who seemed like he was actually having fun, and he took a piece of my heart with him.