This spin on Southern food needs more charm
by Stefanie Gans
Duck fat and butter. If there’s a time to eat a fowl christened with two types of fat: a month dedicated to misery and oversized sweaters. After a leisurely four-hour sous vide soak, the duck is seared to order. Drizzled with a white truffle and bacon cream sauce and fanned across the plate, the duck is probably the best item on the menu at Magnolia’s on King. (The spicy-sweet, crunchy-tender pecans served as a snack in the lounge upstairs are terrific, too.) Unfortunately, the accompanying potatoes, a whipped gratin, end up pureed to a gluey consistency. The mushroom bread pudding, a recipe based on one from chef Brian Rowe’s great-grandmother, surprised me with its Georgia roots; its solid structure and limited flavors more resembled a Jewish-style kugel. There wasn’t a Michelle Obama-approved vegetable portion on the plate.
In fact, many of the entrees lack proper produce. A lightly blackened redfish, cooked just right, sits atop two portions’ worth of smoked cheddar grits. Three-inch-long pieces of raw scallion stripe the grain, a decision Rowe calls a “presentation kind of thing.” It’s the only green on the plate.
More vegetables—haricots verts, carrots, peas—appear in the chicken potpie, but rightly, the chicken stars. From Saturday to Monday the chicken soaks in brine. On Tuesday, the bird is smoked until it falls apart, says Rowe. The meat is pulled and chopped and mixed with a duck fat roux. The topper: a lofty Southern-style biscuit. The fragrant chicken, whose abundant smokiness permeates the dish, makes this classic pop from ordinariness. When servers bring it back to the kitchen, they say guests complain: “It tastes like it’s burnt.” Rowe wears the complaint as a compliment. As he should.
Rowe grew up in kitchens. At 11 he bused tables and washed dishes at his family’s waterfront Annapolis seafood restaurant. Instead of relying on his firsthand experience, he graduated from culinary school and cooked in kitchens from California to France, though never in the South.
Adorned with paddle ceiling fans and pineapples (a traditional welcome symbol), Magnolia’s on King doesn’t want to be known as a Southern restaurant or a contemporary American restaurant. During a planning meeting a former manager came up with “Southern immersion.” It stuck. Rowe describes the concept in terms of hospitality, “This is not supposed to be this modern restaurant; [it’s] basically like you’re in someone’s house.” He calls the colors—deep reds, dark mustards, golds— “grandma-y.” On recent visits, the service doesn’t feel familial: It’s stiff and uninterested with servers unable to answer questions and a host slow with a smile and slower to sit guests.
Brunch, a convivial meal if there is one, was dreary. Though stopped for the winter—brunch is set to restart once it’s warm, as early as late next month—that’s probably a good idea, especially if it gives time for the chef to instill discipline in his team.
Where is the skin in the brunch’s duck confit hash? “We eat it,” Rowe says. “I got tired of yelling at people” to stop eating it, he says, so instead they incorporate what is probably the best part of duck confit into the staff’s family meal.
Rowe also claims it made the dish too salty. In fact, it desperately needed the crunch, the flavor, the pizzazz the skin brings to the sad mélange of sweet potatoes and red peppers sitting next to two eggs, up. In another dish, the fried chicken is actually chicken tenders (please label it as such on the menu), and the flapjacks arrived as discs of uncooked batter. When returned cooked, they were light, balancing sweet with a bit of savory, and very lovely.
Too much here is careless. The hot pimento cheddar dip came out cold in a semi-warm cast-iron dish, and while we very much liked the biscuits, their soft, tear-apart texture isn’t right for scooping up the dip, and the dip is too heavy to slather on the delicate biscuit.
An $11 Caesar salad tastes like it was poured out of a premixed bag, and the fried anchovies were cold and bready, not warm and crispy. The cornbread croutons, while an interesting idea, added too much sweetness.
Another bread pudding on the menu, this one served as dessert, left us wanting to find our sugar craving elsewhere. It was a play on bananas foster, but the bananas were oddly hard.
Opened last July, Magnolia’s on King still shows its youth. Like spring’s long-awaited arrival, here’s hoping a turn of season will let Magnolia’s bloom.
Notes:
Magnolia’s on King
703 King St., Alexandria
Dinner Mon.-Sat.
Entrees $22-$36
( February 2016 )
