Feature article
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Storie Street Grille offers array of dishes
By Fred Sauceman
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| Storie Street Grille’s Eggplant Napoleon |
“The soul of this town hasn’t changed,” says Bernie Keele as he remembers boyhood days in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, when he watched Max Moody hand-make furniture.
I visited Bernie about two weeks after his furniture-making hero had died. We talked at a back table in Bernie’s restaurant, The Storie Street Grille. Those streetside woodworking lessons, impromptu though they were, took hold in the mind of the young boy. Bernie did all the carpentry work in the restaurant. The booth we were sitting in was built by his own hands.
Accents of wormy and curly maple occur throughout the restaurant, and the V-grooved floors are made of hard maple, giving them the appearance of age.
Bernie knew he’d made the right move in selling his eatery in Hilton Head, South Carolina, and returning to the highlands when members of the Blowing Rock police force stopped in late one night to refresh him with coffee, between hammering sessions, as The Storie Street Grille took shape over a once vacant lot on Main.
Except for a few households and businesses “grandfathered” in, Blowing Rock has no mail delivery. You pick up your mail at the post office. Bernie tries to show up there every morning at 10 o’clock, when he’s sure to see his best friend and the town’s police chief.
“The people here are real,” asserts Bernie. “We trust one another. My banker and I seal our business deals with only a handshake.”
After a life of university teaching and administration, Bernie vows he’ll never leave the North Carolina mountains. His wife Joan, an English major from Furman University, grew up on the campus of UNCG. Bernie credits her for the success of the business, lauding her knowledge of accounting, inventory and purchasing.
Bernie’s the only restaurant owner I’ve ever met who has discovered an enzyme. Two of them, in fact. I asked him how his Ph.D. in biochemistry from North Carolina State University is useful in the restaurant business.
“The whole area of food safety, microbiology, prevention of spoilage, of course, but also in the mixing of sauces and dressings, knowing in what order to mix the oil, water and vinegar, and how they come together.”
Bernie, a native of Huntsville, has crafted a white barbecue sauce in the style of northern Alabama. For lunch, Storie Street spreads the white sauce on a sandwich of hickory-smoked chicken breast, with fried green tomatoes on top.
The Eggplant Napoleon is a stack of lightly fried eggplant rounds, layered with fresh mozzarella, marinated zucchini, beefsteak tomatoes, a roasted red pepper spread made with goat cheese, tomato aioli and stripes of basil oil and reduced balsamic vinegar.
Cheesy stoneground grits is a frequent “starch of the day.” Among the daily specials created by executive chef Chuck Nelson is a horseradish-encrusted salmon, covered with a mixture of reduced soy sauce, the classic butter sauce beurre blanc, fresh lemon juice and heavy cream.
Much of the menu is devoted to Italian dishes, Bernie’s favorite ethnic cuisine. Chicken cacciatore is sprinkled with cubes of pancetta, the Italian version of bacon. The chicken scaloppini, with mushrooms and artichokes over linguini, is patterned after a dish the Keeles enjoyed in Hilton Head. Its tartness is created by a combination of capers and lemon butter sauce.
The Aegean chicken resulted from a Sunday night refrigerator raid in the Keeles’ home kitchen. It gets its Greekness from a scattering of kalamata olives.
The dish that caught my attention the very first time I read the Storie Street menu online was scallops and shrimp with lobster butter. The shellfish are pan-seared in a compound butter with concentrated lobster stock and threads of saffron, which give the dish a hue of yellow gold.
Writer Jan Karon, whose fictional town of Mitford is based on Blowing Rock, is a frequent diner at Storie Street.
The Keeles have settled into the rhythm of Blowing Rock — daily trips to the post office, a walk down Main Street for a ham biscuit and a sweet potato pancake at Sonny’s Grill and sidewalk chats with as many of the storybook town’s 1,500 residents this well-traveled but now contentedly settled couple can manage to meet.
Storie Street Grille
LOCATION: 1167 Main Street, Blowing Rock, North Carolina
CONTACT: 828-295-7075, storiestreetgrille.com
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This Saturday, April 7, I’ll be signing copies of my latest book from noon to 2 p.m. at Wallace News, 205 Broad Street, in Kingsport. It’s a companion volume to the one that came out a year ago. The new one’s entitled “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South, from Bright Hope to Frog Level, Second Serving.”
Kingsport-area places featured include: Davidson’s Country Store and Farm near Rogersville; the Italian Village in the Fort Henry Mall; Milano’s on Stone Drive; Gage’s Towne House and Teddy’s in Nickelsville; Gasthaus Edelweiss in Weber City; Kingsport’s Riverfront Seafood Company; the Kingsport Krispy Kreme store; the Frog Level Service Station near Tazewell, Va.; and Wallace News.
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Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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