Every year for the past five, Justus Frank and his wife have spent a week in Charleston eating their way around town. Now all those tasting trips will turn into fodder for Frank’s forthcoming restaurant, Live Oak.
Opening in the former space of Monroe’s in Del Ray, Live Oak—named after the famed trees of Charleston—will be an upscale ode to low country cuisine. The menu reads like a greatest hits list with she-crab soup, crispy chicken livers and pickled shrimp salad for appetizers and shrimp and grits, pan-roasted rock fish with succotash and dry-aged pork chop with collards for entrees ($17-$29). Attention sourcing nerds: Frank eschews Carolina royalty Anson Mills grits for the lesser-known Weisenberger Mills grits, out of Kentucky.
The bar menu ($6-$17), which can be ordered in the dining room and vice versa, will offer deviled eggs with country ham, fried chicken (sweet tea brine, buttermilk soak) with collards and black-eyed peas and cheddar-topped fried green tomato with grits with gremolata. Buttermilk chess pie and a blueberry buckle with burnt honey ice cream are slated for dessert.
These dishes are just ideas for now. The real recipe testing won’t commence until Frank leaves his current job as the executive chef at Copperwood Tavern in Shirlington in early March. After almost a decade working in kitchens (Fiola, Vermilion), this will be Frank’s first restaurant. He’s joining forces with his friends and former coworkers at Eventide, Jeremy Barber as GM and Tim Irwin as bar manager.
With an opening slated for May, Frank, a Burke native, is still finessing the menu, including how to graciously start dinner service. For now, he’s thinking complimentary sweet potato rolls with benne seeds and honey butter. / Live Oak, 1603 Commonwealth Ave., Alexandria
