re: Trip to Oxford and Memphis

We went to a place called Hog & Hominy in East Memphis. They do a lot of small plates, so we got sweetbreads, this kind of hopping john type dish and a pizza.
I had never had sweetbreads, but I've wanted to try them. These were great. They were in a spicy peanut sauce, and served on top of this cilantro cream. It all played well off the earthiness of the sweetbreads. Of course, you could put that spicy peanut sauce on a flip flop and it would have been excellent.



The next dish was called H n' J -- a bowl of collard greens, blackeye peas, ham and a poached egg. Those may have been the best greens I ever had. They weren't cooked to death and they were spiky with vinegar. The blackeye peas were very good, the ham was out of this world.



The pizza was great. It was cooked in a brick oven and had this cured homemade sausages, ham and pepperoni.



We were saying that we hadn't had a meal that good since we went to Peche a few months ago. Them they brought out this peanut butter pie.



That was unreal. There was a thin layer of banana pudding at the bottom of the pie, on top of the homemade crust. The meal was better than what we got at Peche.
And the whole thing was under $100. With drinks. I've dropped that much on mediocre meals on a Tuesday night in Baton Rouge. Folks, if you live in or near Memphis, you have to go to Hog and Hominy.
We ducked into a place called the Brookhaven Bar & Grill that was next door for a nightcap. That place was a dump. The crowd was awful. A creepy old guy who had gotten 86'd and was trying to beg his way back into getting served, a guy who was smoking on the front porch and staring at the Cavs-Hawks games through the window like he was trying to bore into the soul of the TV, annoying redneck girls rapping "Ice Ice Baby" and the guys who were trying to frick them. We left with half our drinks in the glass.

We woke up Monday and headed to Graceland. There was a quick stop at the IHOP, where we met some nice Jehovah's Witness ladies. Then we went to where the King lived. Along the way, I found out the real story about Elvis' death.



After the tour, there was one last meal at the Bar-B-Q Shop. They're known for making sandwiches on Texas toast and their barbecue spaghetti. (Pulled pork on noodles, swimming in the restaurant's famous sauce). The meal was great. The pulled pork was nice and charred and smoky.



All and all, it was a good trip. We'll probably head back to Memphis fairly soon.