I’ve written about Surfside, the one at 4200 Wisconsin in the undefined area between Van Ness and Tenleytown. See here. We go there fairly often, mainly for their fish tacos, and sometimes we or Liza and Michael pick up a fajita box if there’s going to be an unexpected crowd on a busy day. In my previous post I described some of their fish tacos, a fish burrito, and the ceviche, and since that posting they’ve remained dependable. This trip was different. We met the New Much Improved John Tanner, aka Jack, and his fiancee, Patterson Sheehan for Sunday brunch after church one Sunday. That means ..read more

I’d heard a good bit about HammerDown Barbeque, but I was under the impression that they cooked with gas, so never went. Sigh! All those years wasted. I recently had a tip that they actually cook exclusively with wood, and swung by on a trip back from South Carolina. HammerDown was closed, but I saw two big smokers and a grill outside, free of any taint of a gas hookup, and a whole lot of wood. On my next free day, I hopped in my car and drove out to where the blacktop ends. Slight exaggeration. It’s right where US 50 drops down to two lanes, a few miles short of Gilbert’s Corner, site of the ..read more

It was Sunday and just about all of the traditional barbecue places in South Carolina were closed, so I bid a fond farewell to my glorious South Carolina Tour de Barbecue and Hash, and headed north. I drove up to Mebane, North Carolina, to meet barbecue compadres, Dan Levine, John Shelton Reed, and Allan Parsells at Fat Man and His Food Barbecue. I was excited to see them again and to try a new barbecue place, this time to check a likely 100 percent wood cooking place for certification by the Campaign for Real Barbecue. As if that weren’t enough to set my heart racing, the Fat Man had moved fr ..read more

I’m a big fan of the I Love SC BBQ Facebook page. It’s lively and, inevitable trash talk aside, it’s thoughtful and very informative. I check it regularly, and I’d heard a lot of good things about the hash at Ward’s in Sumter. Many people consider it the best hash in the entire state. Good enough for me. Having finished my first four meals of the day by 2:00 pm, after leaving Price’s I detoured to Ward’s. I chose the original location on Alice Street, a plain brick building with plain interior. The attractions are the pleasant staff and, most of all, the food. There were a few people in line ..read more

I rolled out of Carolina BBQ after my third meal of the day, and drove back eastward for an hour to Price’s BBQ at 408 Ervin Price Road outside Gilbert. I actually tried to take the scenic route to give myself more time between meals, but my GPS was obdurate and put me on I-20. Gilbert is a small town up toward Lake Murray, home to 601 souls at last count. Price’s is seven or so miles north of Gilbert in a less crowded area of Lexington County. Price’s sits up on a small hill in a plain brick building. Like most of the South Carolina places on this trip, it’s only open Thursday-Saturday, and ..read more

I’ve praised the extraordinarily well-run Mamma Lucia’s at 5504 Connecticut Avenue before, see here, and have been there often. Still, I’d never tried their pizza, even though Pizza Maven Dan Ebeling of the Morning Starbucks Group recommends it highly. Nancy rarely eats pizza, and if I’m the only one eating pizza, I lean toward small specialty pizzas-for-one, like the ones at Comet, 2 Amys, and Pizzeria Paradiso. They’re more expensive, but have the virtue of being small — right for one person. Mamma Lucia’s are more standard pizza place pies, made for a family of four. I suppose I could save ..read more

Well fed from my Lizard Thicket breakfast and a fine lunch at the original Maurice’s Piggy Park in Cayce, I headed to Carolina Bar-B-Que in New Ellenton, a small town a bit south of Aiken and close to the Georgia line. Carolina has been around for over 50 years, and has changed little since it first opened. It’s been praised far and wide, and won a spot on Southern Living’s The South’s Top 50 Barbecue Joints in 2016. That’s the Robert Smith list, not the readers’ choices. And the SC BBQ Association put Carolina on its 100-Mile list — the barbecue places worth driving 100 miles to try. My kind ..read more

Primed by my breakfast at Lizard’s Thicket, I headed on to the original location of Maurice’s Piggie Park at 1600 Charleston Highway in Cayce, just west of Columbia. Maurice’s is one of the many barbecue places opened by the scions of Joe Bessinger, who in 1939 opened a barbecue place in Holly Hill with his seven sons. It seems like each of the sons went on to start his own barbecue place or chain of places. Maurice started the Piggie Park, which now has multiple locations in and around Columbia. You can’t miss the place. Maurice’s used to be controversial because of Maurice Bessingers’s pen ..read more

The attraction of Lizard’s Thicket for me was onion sausage, one of the hyper-local food specialties that seem to endure and flourish in South Carolina. I sent out some inquiries and found that I could find it at a place called Lizard’s Thicket. I duly searched “Lizard’s Thicket” online and up came a Women’s clothing company. it seemed an unlikely source for onion sausage, so I honed my search and found Lizard’s Thicket, a chain of country restaurants in and around Columbia with one off by itself in Florence. I had planned an ambitious schedule for my second day in South Carolina, and began mo ..read more

A. Litteri has been a purveyor of all things Italian in the Washington area since 1926. It started out as a store in the warehouse district, and for decades has been a top place to go for Italian meats, cheeses, and wines. A. Litteri switched to a retail-only operation, and has gained and held a reputation as one of the best Italian sandwiches in the Washington area. Things have changed over the years around A. Litteri’s spot at 570 Morse Street, NE. Blue collar Union Market has become a huge food hall surrounded by expensive apartments and condos and lots of affluent young people. I’d never ..read more