South Kitchen- Brunch

by Lori Allen, Local Foodie

​150 Pine Lake Drive Suite A, 
Ponte Vedra Beach, FL 32081 
904-686-7144 www.south.kitchen/

​Chef Driven Southern Food Done Right!”  Ted Sumner Chef de Cuisine

​I don’t know about you but I’ve been looking for a fun brunch place that is close by and has great food.  Well I think I found it at South Kitchen! They are not a buffet type of brunch place but they offer so many choices for breakfast and lunch (brunch) that you don’t even miss the buffet.  The cool thing is that they do offer their unlimited Mimosas, Poinsettias (champagne and cranberry juice) and Bloody Mary’s that are often seen at those brunch buffets. But the difference is at South Kitchen you don’t have to choose just one…you can mix and match! Have one of each or more!  Their Bloody Mary is a homemade mix which is full of spices along with a smoky flavor that I thought went nicely with one of their breakfast bowls.  The one I chose was filled with creamy smoked Gouda grits topped off with some really tender pulled pork and once I stirred them all together the two flavors had a creamy cheesy meaty goodness. Add the spicy sausage gravy and top it all off with a sunny side up egg that just oozed out the rich yoke, your taste buds are in for a real treat! Along with the Smoky spicy Bloody Mary now that is some serious brunch food at its best!

Well you know I can’t order just one thing, so to start off the meal I decided to go with a southern tradition of fried oysters. These oysters are buttermilk soaked along with Sambal which I found out is a hot sauce made from a mixture of chili peppers, garlic, shallots, scallions, lime juice, rice vinegar and can be combined with several other ingredients to make this sauce unique. (Sambal is native to the cuisines of Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Brunei and Singapore.)
It gave the oysters a nice what I like to call “back heat” you can taste the heat after you have eaten the food not before. They also came with some made-to-order coleslaw that had Napa cabbage tossed in a homemade Greek yogurt ranch which was tangy and cooled off some of the heat from the Sambal.  Then there was this cocktail sauce for dipping.  The cocktail sauce itself is worth mentioning. This sauce comes from homemade ketchup (yes none of that store bought stuff for them) along with other spices but what is interesting is that the recipe came from an 1803 cookbook from the White Star liner Titanic, so it is no joke. The mixture of sweetness from the homemade ketchup, spicy from the horseradish and tang from the other ingredients makes it all that more special. I could just eat it alone on a cracker and be happy!
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My friends (you know I like to eat in numbers so I can taste everything) totally enjoyed their biscuits and gravy scramble as well as bacon egg and cheese benedicts. Along with Mimosas and Poinsettias of course!  The menu has many choices to choose from savory to sweet.  So if you are looking for fun place to have brunch on BOTH Saturday and Sunday (which is awesome) South Kitchen is your place to be!