Welcome back to Savannah Flavors, our weekly newsletter bringing you the latest delicious details from Savannah’s culinary scene every Thursday.

Here is what’s on the menu today:

• Slow Fire BBQ from bus to brick-and-mortar! 🛎

• America’s most loved food delivery service 📦

• Best place for breakfast on DeRenne

• How to make applesauce from scratch 🍏

• The new grilled cheese & tomato soup combo from Over Yonder 🍅

THE MAIN DISH

Slow Fire BBQ lands property in Waters Avenue Revitalization area 🥩 🔥

When Terren and Kelly Williams launched their Texas-style barbecue brand back in January of 2023, they bought the bus from Pila Sunderland, one of Starland Yard’s Fab Four owners. Since then, what was Loki Food Bus went all Lone Star and became the mobile home of Slow Fire BBQ.

“He loves our barbecue and is a big barbecue fan in general,” Williams said of Sunderland. “Since he was always coming, I made the comment, ‘Man, we really need a kitchen.’”

“I didn’t mean we needed a restaurant necessarily,” he continued with a Texas-sized grin. “I just wanted a big kitchen set-up.”

Sunderland took the offhand wish to heart.

On December 25, the Williamses announced on social media that they had signed on the dotted line, posting a video montage of Slow Fire BBQ’s first year in business that includes a shot of Terren and Kelly standing out front of their Waters Avenue property, kissing while together holding the key. 

“We’re a team,” Terren Williams said.

Who knew Santa’s bag was big enough for an entire building?

CHEF’S CRAVINGS

Starland Yard - Ava Pandiani & Stacey Phillips

Each week, I ask the folks behind the phenomenal food at our favorite places around Savannah these same simple questions:

When you are not in your restaurant kitchen, where do you go out to eat and what do you order?

Though food is at their literal fingertips every day running the show at Starland Yard, general manager Ava Pandiani and assistant general manager and events coordinator Stacey Phillips offer up plenty of great faves in this week’s Chefs’ Cravings. 

AP: My boyfriend and I both work nights, so we end up going on a lot more day dates than night dates. The place we love the most, that has absolute stellar service and we always have a great time, is Sunny Side Up on DeRenne. It is extremely consistent. Really great staff there. Wei is our server usually, and he’s a wonderful person. They have a perfect malted pancake 🥞, so usually we get what’s called a ‘table cake’. This is a tradition we started a few years back in St. John on vacation. We all wanted one bite of pancake but no one wanted to order pancakes, so we ordered it as an appetizer. Everyone gets their own breakfast, and then we order one table cake for the table. That is my single favorite comfort food, the pancake at Sunny Side Up.

SP: What an awesome response. I’m going to be really short and sweet. I am a night owl. I sleep in all day, and then at night, I’ll have a quick bite somewhere. I’ve been doing a lot of late nights at Brochu’s, just sitting at the bar, having a cocktail, and eating some oysters 🦪, and they don’t make me feel bad for coming in thirty minutes before they close.

AP: Quick and easy and delicious.

SP: And I can walk over there and have a cigarette on the way.

AP: We’ve got a bunch of friends at the bar over there, Joe and Kyle and Dylan. They’ve got a killer staff.

SP: Lots of friends, some whom we’ve worked with previously here at Starland Yard, and everyone’s always super-friendly.

AP: The other place that I love and definitely want to give a mention, for us, a no-brainer is Crispi, Two Tides’ trailer right there 🚌. We close at ten. They’re open till midnight, so by the time we’re walking out of here, a lot of our staff will have one more drink at Smol or grab a bite at Crispi. Similarly, Black Rabbit, which is open a little bit later than us.

SP: I was going to say Black Rabbit.

AP: We and a bunch of our staff all love going over there. Again, a ton of friends work over there. Julia, their manager, is an ex-Starland Yard employee and a really good friend of ours. I always get the eggplant stacker. That’s my favorite, and the salad is the only salad in Savannah that I’ll order.

SP: Yeah, the half salad and spicy pickles is definitely my thing, and you have to get the salad with both dressings.

AP: That’s a hack.

And for a special occasion?

SP: Definitely Common Thread. You’ve got to. You’ve got to go sit at the bar and eat one dish from every single heading.

AP: Each category. It’s like you can make yourself your own tasting menu on any night of the week. I am biased, of course, but that is my favorite place to go sit and eat with my favorite person, naturally (Common Thread’s bar manager James Nowicki).

SP: Are you going to say E-TANG 🥟?

AP: I was going to say E-TANG.

SP: We both looked at each other. Yeah, we’ve got to mention E-TANG. 

AP: I love their dumplings, and the garlic eggplant is one of my favorites, too.

SP: Out of all of it, their General Tso’s is really good. You don’t want to order it because it’s at every other Chinese place, but it’s so good.

AP: The Over Yonder burger is the last thing I’ll say, the Doublestack 🍔. If people come in here, they’re trying to walk in at ten and they can’t get anything here, I’m like, “Go to Over Yonder. Get the Doublestack. That’s what you want.” In terms of bang for your buck, best possible quality, least pretentious atmosphere, most chill, it’s definitely the Over Yonder burger.

-Neil Gabbey

TRIED, TASTED, TRUE

Homemade Applesauce 🍎 

THE STORY BEHIND THE RECIPE

The best-smelling place in the world is Schutt’s Apple Mill 🍁, whose redolence is a blend of warm cider, glazed fried cakes, autumn spices, barn wood, a roaring fire, and nearly three dozen homegrown varieties of the fresh-picked marquee fruit. 

Though it has been twenty years since I was last there, its olfactory memory is Sharpied into my life’s food narrative. 

Beginning in college, I learned that telling people I was ‘from New York’ required a postscript lest I was automatically assumed to be from Manhattan, so I said, “Cows and apples New York.” The latter appellation is down to this family enterprise that has been around for more than a hundred years.

Not even five miles from the house where I grew up in Penfield, Schutt’s is just over the Webster town line and was an annual you-pick outing with my family every fall. For every dozen apples I placed in a basket, I would eat one. From October to March, we shopped at Schutt’s at least once a month, often swinging by after a Sunday service over in Fairport for a fried cake and a cup of cider straight from the tap. 

To this day, I know that it is the ambrosial joy of this place that shaped my appreciation of all things apple, as well as my snobbish disdain for those lesser species relegated to gift baskets. For the few weeks they are in season, I am a Macoun man. Otherwise, hand me an Empire. I want an apple that is crisper than crisp with flesh snow-white and juicy 🍏.

While I am sure that the odd jar of store-bought Mott’s languished in our fridge at some point during my childhood, to me, applesauce was what my mom made from scratch which forever abolished the very idea of eating the mealy beige store-bought mush.

Real applesauce is not snack-pack piffle, and scratch-making it is a cinch.

You need fresh apples, some brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, a pinch of salt, and about forty minutes, the majority of which is simply simmer time. A cup or more of the result makes for a sweet breakfast treat, midday nosh, or darn healthy dessert.

The web is awash with suggestions for which apples make the best sauce, but you can hardly go wrong as long as you do not choose Red Delicious (a.k.a. The World’s Worst Apple): Crispin, Fuji, Gala, and Honeycrisp for sweetness; Granny Smith, McIntosh, and Pink Lady for tartness.

The only real effort in the entire recipe is peeling and coring the apples, but even this is quick work, especially if you have a press apple slicer like the Oxo Good Grips eight-wedge classic or the Chef'n Apple Slicer and Corer, which produces sixteen slimmer segments. If using the former, remember to make it sit flat by knifing the knobby bottoms. 

Six apples pre-surgery will weigh around three pounds, which will pare down perfectly to a 2.5 or 3-quart saucepan. To reduce the cooking time, cut the cored pieces in half and make sure to trim off any pesky peel remnants.

Many handed-down directives call for too much sugar and unnecessary liquid. The natural sweetness in those aforementioned varieties only needs a little punch, and the juice released during a covered low-and-slow simmer is easily enough to make a scoopable sauce that is not a loose soup.

If you want that, just go to the store and buy a jar, or be the hero of your house and make this, an applesauce that actually tastes like apples.

The next time you are remotely near Rochester, make a special stop at Schutt’s Apple Mill, even if it is just for a sniff.

-Neil Gabbey

THE RECIPE

HARD GOODS 

• 6 apples (roughly 3 pounds before preparation, 2.5 pounds once peeled and cored)

• 2 T. light brown (or turbinado) sugar 

• ½ to 1 t. cinnamon

• Pinch of kosher salt 🧂

• Few gratings of fresh nutmeg (optional)

WET GOODS

• 1 T. honey (optional) 🐝 

DO THIS

1. Peel, core, and segment the apples

2. Cut the segments in half again, into approximately 1.5” chunks

3. Place the apple chunks into a 2.5 or 3-quart saucepan 🍎

4. Add the light brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt to the apples

5. Set the saucepan over medium-low heat and cover

6. Once some steam is visible, reduce the heat to low

7. Simmer for 30 minutes

8. Every so often, use the backside of a fork to press the chunks until they ‘collapse’ 🍴

9. If need be, recover and continue to simmer until all of the chunks can be ‘collapsed’

10. Remove from the heat and stir with the fork or a spatula

11. Let cool and refrigerate 🥣 

BEEN THERE. ATE THAT.

Over Yonder 🤠🌵🌺

My wife and I are always surprised when we mention certain places and specific dishes to friends and colleagues and find ourselves on the receiving end of the countenance equivalent of a question mark.

Because the giant bull has been on the Over Yonder roof coming up on three years, y’all should have downed at least a dozen Doublestacks by now.

Fair warning to anyone who makes that unknowing facial expression when I rave about this burger’s eminence: at this point, I might just have to walk away. 

We had not been to the Thomas Square gastro-honky-tonk in a minute, so our usuals were well on our minds before we sidled in and shouted “Hi!” to co-owner and greatest dude around Chris Moody.

The weather still chilly, he almost talked us into a relatively new Grilled Cheese & Tomato Soup combo ($9), served on Texas toast with both American and pepper jack, but we needed to share a Doublestack ($13) and a Chicken Sandwich ($14), both with a heaping helping of thick house-cut fries.

Once Chris served us our food, the challenge became alternating between bites and notes, punctuated by frequent paper-towel mop-ups. Both sandwiches are ambitious pick-ups at the start, so my wife’ eats the chicken in pulled-off pieces, dipping each into cowboy sauce 🍗 

We cheerily traded chomps and wondered aloud why it had been so long.

Even though the two four-ounce patties are smashed and charred on the outside, the burger manages to remain moist, thanks in some part to the melty slices of American and brush-coat of burger sauce.

The grilled potato bun never stands a chance. One roll of paper towel just about does it for what my wife aptly calls a “beautifully messy” meal.

The same goes for the chicken sandwich, even with the spicy jalapeño slaw served on the side . The fried tenders glisten in Over Yonder’s own sweet chili mayo concoction, and the onion ring tanglers delicious sweetness lingers on the rest of the sandwich’s components.

Though thicker than they first were, the house-cut fries remain some of the best in the city, UT burnt orange due to the double fry and the salty chili powder dusting, reminiscent of Sly’s.

A few stray pickle pieces were all that remained in our paper trays underneath a mountain of balled-up paper towels.

That is how you do flunch in Savannah.

-Neil Gabbey