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Something to Crow About Recognition from Food & Wine magazine gives Jackson’s Two Sisters’ Kitchen reason to preen.
B y S t e v e n We l l s H i c k s
Be honest. If someone told you that a Jackson restaurant had been praised in a major food magazine,would your first thought be, “By George, they must be talking about Two Sisters’?”
Mine, neither. Unlikely as it may sound, that’s precisely what happened this past November when Food & Wine included the cornerstone of the Jackson restaurant’s “Only Home Cookin’” buffet in the magazine’s list of the ten places serving up the “Best Fried Chicken in the U.S.” As soon as my raised eyebrows returned to their normal alignment, my inner voice told me it was time to see for myself. You must understand, fried chicken has been culinary catnip to me since my days as a schoolboy. For years, fried chicken has even had an unofficial “gold standard” in Willie Mae’s Scotch House, a 10 table hole-in-the-wall in a dicey part of New Orleans, where that personal evaluation is shared not only by many of my confederates in the Southern Foodways Alliance, but also by the Food Network, The Travel Channel and the judges of the ultraprestigious James Beard Awards who designated the place as one of “America’s Classics” in 2005. With its nod from Food & Wine, Jackson’s Two Sisters’ Kitchen found itself running in pretty fast company. On a raw December Wednesday, I made a point of being at Two Sisters’ when the doors opened at 11:00 a.m. The place is lunch only, Sunday through Friday, and I wanted to be sure to score a drumstick while it was at its hottest and freshest. Jackson’s hometown team was suddenly making its rookie appearance in the NFL of fried chicken, after all, and facing a nation of seasoned veterans at that. The main building at Two Sisters’ Kitchen hasn’t changed much over its 23 years of operation. The unprepossessing two-story frame house was converted into apartments in its previous incarnation before being outfitted as a restaurant and could stand to go a few rounds with a paintbrush. Another writer once told me that a home could never be considered truly Southern if it didn’t have a painting of a magnolia over the mantel (preferably rendered by the lady of the house), and I took it as a providential sign to discover one in the front parlor. The mismatched furniture and vinyl tablecloths scattered throughout the rooms are evocative of the era when small Southern cities were dotted with boarding houses, and yellowing scrapbooks were filled with pressed corsages and some of the region’s most distinctive literature was being simultaneously penned by Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Harper Lee and Eudora Welty, who was born three doors up the street from Two Sisters’. Beyond the fried chicken, the smallish buffet offers up what you’d expect: rice and gravy, chicken and dumplings, blackeyed peas, greens and the like. The cooking techniques seemed a little more modern (I didn’t see a piece of fatback anywhere), most likely a concession to our both leaner and meaner times. Well, I tried the chicken, both dark meat and white, and while it was good enough, the fact that it comes off a steam table instead of being cooked to order keeps it from equaling the gold standard upon which my confederates and I concur. Time simply isn’t an ally to fried chicken, which takes mere minutes on the steam table to start losing the signature crispness that makes it so unarguably Southern. If there is a bottom line on Two Sisters’, it may be that while the food can be very good, perhaps the intrinsic nostalgia of the place is even better. Whichever you have a hankering for, give it a try and judge for yourself.
Two Sisters’ Kitchen, 707 North Congress
Street, Jackson, 39201, 601.353.1180 PORTICO
Jackson Magazine | 2819 N. State Street Jackson MS 39216 |
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