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The Best Eats at the Fair - Dinner Belle and colleague chomp, chew and slurp
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Published: October 7, 2009
Ladies and gentlemen, we found the fried butter. Of course, it's on a stick. Be still my heart -- a distinct possibility.
Fellow reporter Tim Clodfelter and I visited the Dixie Classic Fair on Friday afternoon with a fistful of cash, empty stomachs and a clear if ignoble mission -- scout out some of this year's tastiest eats at the fair. I skipped breakfast. I chomped on some pre-emptive antacid. We were preparing to eat, but also for battle.
After a quick spin around the fairgrounds -- and a rather long delay by Mr. K's Chuckwagon, home of Tim's favorite fair dish, Bits 'N' Fixin's, where he lingered by a man chopping steak with a very long knife -- we weighed our appetizer options.
What would it be? Fried onions? Sweet-potato fries? Roasted corn?
We headed for the stands run by church and civic groups -- comfort-food central -- where chicken and dumplings ($3) from the Vienna Civic Club got us warmed up.
The dumplings were very chickeny, thick with shredded white and dark meat in a rich stew, tender hot dumplings and a warm biscuit on the side. If you are at the fair on a cold night, this is what you should eat.
But if you do, how will you have room for Bits ‘N' Fixin's?
For starters, we had hot, fried dill-pickle chips in a peppery batter with ranch dressing at Griff's Onions ($5 for a small, $7 for a large).
And then, Tim proclaimed that time had come for the main event. The "bits" are sirloin, grilled and chopped and piled in a paper boat with "fixin's" of sweet onions and buttery new potatoes speckled with chives ($7). Tim might be obsessed for a reason. It's hearty and yet, as far as fair food goes, it seems almost normal, like a portable version of a steak dinner that you would cook at home. Lest you think that it is healthy, you can add cheddar cheese. There are also low-carb and vegetarian choices, but not one I would make.
I have eaten in a lot of restaurants, but I have never eaten one with quite the same ambiance as Mr. K's. Behind the "chuck wagon" (a standard fair stand), red-oil clothed-draped tables are festively adorned with small, plastic-wrapped hay bales with dried flowers jammed in the top.
We waddled over to Island Noodles, where a man in sunglasses and a Hawaiian shirt wielding a wok attracted a crowd as he stir-fried up buckwheat noodles, ginger, garlic and about everything you would find in a grocery store's produce section. In went some white sweet potatoes. Two kinds of cabbage. Baby bok choy. Carrots. Orange bell pepper. Sugar snap peas.
Now this was something new. Vegetables. No batter and fryers to be seen. Dinner and a show.
"I flew in from Hawaii yesterday," the chef said, narrating his cooking.
One woman raised her eyebrows at me. "He's probably from Clemmons. He's probably just giving you a good story."
"Fire in the hole!" the chef yelled as a wall of flames roared up the side of the wok. We inched back.
The noodles ($6) need a kick from the sriracha that you can add on. Be liberal with it.
Next, it was on to the area in and around the Joel Coliseum Annex, where we nibbled on excellent conch fritters with a horseradish sauce at K&D Seafood ($7; their menu includes fried frog legs, soft-shell crabs and stuffed scallops that the proprietor likened to the "ice cream of seafood"), an apple-cider slushie at Inga's Apples ($2.50; not icy enough), Cheerwine-flavored fudge at the North Carolina Fudge stand (free sample; too much fudge, not enough Cheerwine) and a fair classic, MacLeod's Farms' maple sugar cotton candy ($3.50 a bag; free samples here, too). Best of all was the snappy homemade root beer at Hillbilly Bob's ($4; other flavors include a cream soda with an undercurrent of almond), which beat out another root-beer vendor, Richardson's, which sells floats and soda out of a cherry-red 1930s Ford truck ($1.50 for a small cup). The nostalgia tugs at my heartstrings, but their soda is creamy and sweet as opposed to spicy.
We were ready for a salty chaser, and I couldn't get the idea of fried cheddar cheese out of my head. The health department hadn't made it to Wisconsin Fried Cheese for inspection on our first lap. Did this stop us? No. Here's where we encountered our first whiff of poor customer service -- we were charged $6 instead of the listed $5 because some other stand was selling fried cheese for that princely sum. Sorry, buddy. Even the deliciousness, gooey bits of your orange cheddar cheese with jalapeno ranch dressing won't make us forget that.
Fried cheese is heaven. Would fried butter be Nirvana? We had to find out.
A small stand on the Midway, between a haunted house and swings, sells a whole roster of fried items -- Oreos, Twinkies, and, yes, fried butter.
"Would you like two or three?" the guy behind the fryer asked. Is one -- with a quarter of a stick of butter wrapped in batter -- not enough? A co-worker of his tisk-tisked a little when I added some chocolate syrup. Uh, excuse me, you're the one selling fried butter ($4).
Will fried butter be this year's runaway food sensation of the Dixie Classic Fair? Well, it's novel. It's tasty. But it's no funnel cake, just this year's fad.
But it's also hard to top. It's a fluffy, airy pocket of fried batter, basically -- the heat of the oil melts most of the butter -- sweet and salty at the same time.
We felt invigorated. We felt sick. Tim grabbed his stomach as we made another lap through Yesterday Village.
We needed a digestif. Strawberry ice cream ($4) from R&R Ice Cream. And then, we rolled home.
lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com
727-7302
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