Southern Char Is Charming

Any listener or reader must know by now that we have taken to extensive driving, sometimes aimlessly, to get out of the house. There aren’t a lot of routes that are not well-trodden, so sometimes we veer off the beaten path and discover new things like Picayune Mississippi. Mississippi, I have learned, has a lot of cute little downtowns. Picayune is one of them. Covington, it is not, but it’ll do for something different. On a recent pass-through of Picayune, we spotted a little restaurant in an old downtown building with a promising sign called Southern Char Steakhouse

It took a few weeks to get back to Southern Char but one nice and lonely Saturday evening ML was free and she came with us. The place had a lot more promise from the outside. Inside, it is exactly what it should be, a long-standing steakhouse for the locals, who pack the place.

In my view, the bar is where it is happening. It is smaller and has windows, whereas the back rooms are large, uninteresting, and dark.

The menu is appropriately sized for what it is. A large appetizer menu offers the usual steak apps like stuffed mushrooms and crab cakes but is mostly filled with more casual fare like spin dip, wings, cheese fries, and “Crawfish Kickers.” Because ML was with us I replaced housecut onion rings with fried green tomatoes. And we got spin dip.

The spinach dip, which we should not have gotten but can’t resist, was stridently ordinary, but the fried flour tortilla chips were perfection. I never see these without grease clinging to them, but these were light and crispy and everything this sort of thing should be. These two items did not belong together on the same plate.

The fried green tomatoes were pretty in presentation.  Lined up on a plate and drizzled with remoulade, these were battered medium-thickness and golden brown with a nice remoulade sauce. Ironically, the pinnacle of this dish is further up I 59 in Meridian at Weidmann’s. The Rivershack here has good ones as well.

The steak section was predictable: filets, ribeyes, NY strips, and a pork chop. There is a burger for lunch and dinner.

We got a burger but not the fries. They didn’t specify that they were housecut, so we decided to go with macaroni and cheese. And we got a petite filet with potatoes au gratin. The steak was about the level of a chain steak, so not great or terrible. The Potatoes au Gratin were better than the macaroni and cheese.

The burger was very nice. It was a big patty, not a smash burger, with melted cheddar, thick bacon, and fresh dressings on a regular bun. The macaroni and cheese was just ordinary penne with cream and cheese on top, not especially crusty which we prefer, but it was ordinary in every way.

What was special about Southern Char was our waitress, a young lady in her early twenties who could not have been more welcoming or friendly and helpful with the menu. She elevated the experience beyond what it would have been otherwise. The same was true of the hostess.

We enjoyed our time dropping in to this little steakhouse in a little town in Mississippi. It was charming, but nothing extraordinary otherwise. A great place for locals that is comfortable, and for people like us just looking for adventure.

Nothing wrong with that.