Monday, January 18, 2010

The Belated Parker's Post

I went to Parker's a long time ago, during the barbecue-tasting tour my brother calls the "ham hajj," but I only blog about it now because things have calmed down.

The new year brought a renewal to my job search, and finally, I got a job.

But you, as the reader, say, paraphrasing Positive K in "I Got A Man," "what's your job got to do with me?" The answer is that, until I stopped sending out mass resume mailings, I had trouble finding time to talk about the second-to-last stop on PorkFest 2009.

Parker's is an establishment of traditional simplicity. The decor is 1960's cheap. There are four main courses: chopped barbecued pork, fried chicken, fried chicken livers, and barbecued chicken. Sides are fries or boiled potatoes, coleslaw or Brunswick stew, and hush puppies and "corn sticks," aka unsweetened hush puppies.

All you can eat is $8.95.

The pork was Carolina traditional, vinegary and tasty, but my favorite food there was the chicken liver. It was fried to hearty, crispy, meaty goodness. If you're not a big fan of organ meats (and since I ended up eating chicken heart in Japan before figuring out what it was - the cardiac septum has a distinctive crunch - I'm cool with much more usual organ foods, like tripe and liver), this won't hide the liver-ness for you; it's not like fried okra. You still taste the liver. But it is awesome.

The Brunswick stew ain't bad, either, and the boiled potatoes are way better than the fries. Don't bother with the fries. The corn sticks and hush puppies are better.

1 comment:

Marc said...

I would prefer to refer to Parker's as the penultimate stop of Porkfest 2009.