Chef's Womb

Family-style kitchens like Narobia's Grits & Gravy produce the best cooks. Period.

If you come to Savannah, you’re probably expecting to fulfill a long-awaited pilgrimage to soul food Mecca. Locals tend to label the town as “abounding with soul food and southern cuisine.” Well, where the hell is it? All I see is another corporate-owned, blasphemous fusion eatery on every damn street corner. Or, God help me, a place that sells chicken, rice and edamame and calls it a “poke” bowl. This is getting far out of hand.

The search for made-with-soul cuisine has led me to Narobia’s Grits & Gravy, a true down-home breakfast spot that was already packed at 7:30 on a cold Tuesday morning. I was likely the only customer under fifty years old—a good sign—and the only one without an instant readiness to order. I heard “fried smothered, fried smothered, fried smothered” as everyone else ordered confidently. The gods of gravy were surely calling, begging me to get fried smothered. So, despite not knowing what I’d soon be gorging myself with, that’s what I got. Within ten minutes there was a heap of smothered fried shrimp and grits, two eggs, a buttermilk biscuit and a cup of coffee in front of me. Magical.

I’m no food critic. I’m not here to talk about the richness of the gravy (rich enough to turn a Christian toward the gravy gods) or the perfectly fried shrimp. I will, however, say that the pure soulfulness of the meal had my stomach radiating enough heat to walk home in the day's fifty-degree weather with only a tee shirt on. That’s a commendable achievement. Yet even more commendable is the understanding of roles and comradery at Narobia’s. Everyone at Narobia’s does everything. That’s how a kitchen should be. The team of an authentic independent-owned kitchen is a theatre troupe filled with established actors and understudies alike. It’s a troupe of role players ready for any task that may be thrown their way, and the grit to complete whatever it might be.

It wasn’t until I had spent a few years in kitchens that I found there is much more to being a cook than preparing dishes with a certain suavity. There is, as many kitchen linemen seem unfit to realize, a hidden job description behind the beautifully layered curtain of a kitchen (this is especially true of independent and family-owned kitchens, both of which continually produce the best cooks). At some point you’ll find yourself with a shucker-stabbed palm and no server to run your Irish Points, so you’ll be the one introducing oysters to the lovely ladies at table twenty-four. No ma’am, our oysters are not kept in salt water like they are at the shithole down the road. You ate there last week? Yes, there’s a chance you have vibrio. Yes, I can call the hospital. Anyway, these Irish Points are smooth and tender with an ultra-sweet brine and a mineral finish.

A true cook must be a butcher, a delivery man, a speedy grocery shopper, a plumber, a truck-unloader, an expediter, and a therapist. A true cook must have an internal spreadsheet accounting for every container in the walk-in, six mental timers all wound up and ringing in random succession, hands of Kevlar, and a mind capable of dealing with both annoyingly upbeat and tragically disturbed service workers. They must also have the loving grace to cook family meal after a service full of front-of-house fuckups.

Of course, a good cook must have the willpower to go back the next day off of four hours of sleep and an undiluted cold brew and be ready for chef to call in and say, “Kid, there’s four hotboxes filled with mold in the dish pit. There’s red beans and rice in there that have been sitting for half a year. Go ahead and clean ‘em out.” In that sense, a cook must be a biohazard waste remover.

These are the cooks that down-home joints like Narobia’s produce. The independent-owned kitchen is the aspiring chef’s womb. It feeds them the required nutrients of work ethic, assertiveness, and urgency. You’d be surprised how many cooks lack this motherly love. Hateful is the line cook who, with all of their tickets on hold, ignores the overflowing dishpit or the disatrously unorganized spiceshelf just because it's "out of their title". I’ll bet you a bowl of gumbo that they were raised by some multi-location whorehouse of a kitchen like the ones that suffocate the historic district here in Savannah.

Don’t be afraid to give the middle finger to the nationwide restaurant chain or the corporate web of Asian-Mexican-Greek-BS fusion restaurants that don’t even deserve real estate. Visit your local greasy spoon diner. Visit that family-owned catfish trailer. And, if you’re in town, visit Narobia’s Grits & Gravy. If you’re a wannabe line cook, call on the little places to raise you. Independent southern restaurants have kitchens that matter—kitchens with conflict, love, grit and grits.

Narobia’s Grits & Gravy is located on 2019 Habersham St, Savannah, GA. They are open 7-1 on Tuesday-Friday and 7-2 on Saturday.