TGICFS.

Chicken-fried steak and eggs at Cypress Grill. © Ryan Schierling

I'm still lamenting the closure of Arkie's Grill, because dollars to dunkers, that was the best chicken-fried steak and eggs in Austin. I've kind of given up on the breakfast CFS here, since no one really does it. Chicken-fried steak is always on proper Southern lunch and dinner menus, with fries or mashed potatoes and 40 other side dish options.

I want it in the A.M., damnit, with fried eggs, crispy hash browns, Texas toast, some badass cream gravy and a stiff cup of black coffee. That's it. This breakfast is Texas birthright.

Cypress Grill does it absolutely right. A pounded-out, tender cube steak, properly hand-battered and fried, topped with andouille sausage gravy, with a pair of perfectly-cooked eggs and a little wedge of buttered toast to sop up leftover gravy and egg yolk. If they had hash browns instead of home fries, we could have had a brunch love affair, and I would have ordered plate after plate until they kicked me out.

Bonus points for their infused Bloody Mary, which is the second best I've had in the city, just behind Cafe Malta's Bloody Hell.

Now, here's your obligatory TGICFS haiku:

A New Orleans brunch
Adept, tender kitchen hands
Soothe my quondam wounds.

Shrimp, grits, gravy and greens.

Fried grit cakes with boudin gravy, dandelion greens and shrimp. © Ryan Schierling

Every Southern cook worth their heritage cast iron pot-and-pan collection has a shrimp and grits recipe that's the best. Of course, it's a recipe that was bestowed to them in hushed tones by their mama, from their mama's mama, and so on and so forth, down a long line of mamas. My mother doesn't have a shrimp and grits recipe and I'm not a southern cook. I rock the cast iron, but there is no lineage that would tie me to a historically time-honored shrimp and grits recipe.

I'm not looking to give you one more traditional (or non-traditional) reinterpretation of what started as a Low Country breakfast dish. It's been done.

While I have a deep and abiding respect for the classics, I wanted a fussy, sassy, gussied-up little Southern belle that was more a complete plate than just shrimp and grits. Call me a Yankee all you want – but when you taste these fried grit cakes and boudin cream gravy, the little pickled green tomatoes, the robust, biting dandelion greens and that rich New Orleans-style barbecue shrimp – you will slap your mama.

New Orleans, new again.

I-10 East, 90+ mph, just out of Houston. Swing-lens panoramic film camera. The flask is in my argyle sock, sucker. (Click for larger.) © Ryan Schierling

I was a teenager the last time I was in New Orleans, insisting on eating nothing but giant bowls of seafood gumbo as our family vacation took us through Louisiana and across the south. I didn't understand the nuances of Creole or Cajun cuisine, or the origins of the dish, and I didn't care. All I wanted was a spicy bowl of something new and exotic – kissed with Louisiana hot sauce – that I couldn't get back home in Kansas. I affectionately remember Marie Laveau's House of Voodoo, the Maison Dupuy's talking bird in the hotel lobby, and window shopping for a Nikon F3HP camera that I couldn't afford on Canal Street. 

Somehow, It's been 25 years since I set foot in the Crescent City. Julie's never been. 

Now that we're living in Austin, it's an eight-hour drive to New Orleans. There are no longer any excuses. Mardi Gras seems a touch over-indulgent for a proper reintroduction, so I make a few impulsive calls and December 30th we point the car east for a celebration of New Year's Eve.