I’m happy to report, however, that I’On’s newest restaurant, Jacob’s Kitchen, is much more inviting than I would have ever expected (and no, they didn’t even attempt to turn my girlfriend into a cyborg). The restaurant is a part of the brand spanking new Inn at I’On, which features seven rooms with features like, “fireplaces, hi-def televisions, and jet soaking tubs…wireless Internet access, a full complimentary membership to the I’On Club,…and breakfast for two.” The girlfriend and I were thoroughly impressed; the rooms are certainly much nicer than most places we’ve stayed.

I know you didn’t come here for my thoughts on the rooms, so let’s get down to business. Jacob’s Kitchen is helmed by Executive Chef Jonathan Languell, whose name you may recognize from his days at Sal Parco’s popular Boulevard Diner. Languell describes the cuisine as “New South” which, not surprisingly, is all about modern interpretations of classic Southern dishes and flavors. The comfortable 60-seat dining room reminds me quite a bit of those found at Hominy Grill and Fat Hen with a slightly more modernized faux-country home feel. It also features several very cool paintings by local artist Nancy Valelly.

Starters:

The evening began with a really nice take on one of my favorite Southern side dishes, the hushpuppy. Jacob’s Kitchen’s version ($7) had the perfect, light interior texture, and were boosted in flavor by tiny pieces of shrimp and corn.

The Peach Spiked Crabcakes ($9) were the highlight of both my and my girlfriend’s evening. They were, as all crabcakes should be, filled almost entirely with crab meat. There is nothing more frustrating than excitedly ordering a crabcake, only to bite into it and come away with mostly breading. The subtle peach flavor provided a unique accent to a dish that I imagine will be one of their most popular appetizers, if the crowd’s reaction was any indication.

The BBQ Duck Spring Roll ($6.50), wasn’t bad, but it didn’t particularly impress me. In general, I wish people would just give up on BBQ duck. It may sound great in theory, but the flavor of the bird always seems to get lost in the mix.

Other intriguing starter items featured on the menu but not at the tasting include a drool-inducing Fried Green Tomato Tower with a cajun crawfish corn salad and roasted red pepper coulis ($7) and Southern Fried Quail over cheddar grit cakes, maple pecan brown butter, and caramelized Granny Smith apples ($10).

Entrees:

One of Jacob’s Kitchen’s most appealing features is the very reasonable pricing of their entrees. Ranging from an $11-$19 with most items settling in around $15, you’d be hard pressed to find most of these items for less than $20-25 downtown.

Braised in a double chocolate stout and served on a piece of cornbread and grilled asparagus spear, the Short Ribs ($15) were another high point. I’m a sucker for braised short ribs in general, but for a man who loves dark beer, this was a match made in heaven. The aroma of this dish was enough to make my mouth water.

The sampling included two dishes featuring everyone’s favorite pricey ground chuck replacement, Kobe beef–Jacob’s Kobe Beef Meatloaf ($13.50) and a Kobe Beef Burger ($11). The meatloaf was served as a “shooter” in a little glass with red eye gravy. I’ve never been a meatloaf lover, but I did enjoy Chef Languell’s version. The meat was juicy and full of flavor, pretty much everything you want from your meatloaf. Served in slider form and topped with creamy pimento cheese, the burger was tasty, if not a bit too well-done. I have to say, however, I feel the same way about these dishes that I do about BBQ duck. I think using Kobe in these types of dishes may be a bit of overkill. Sure, it looks fantastic on the menu, but it’s the culinary equivalent of going to the grocery store in a Rolls Royce. Meatloaf and hamburgers can be done perfectly well (and significantly cheaper) with regular fresh ground beef.

The Carolina Gold BBQ Pork Ribs ($15) were wonderfully tender and flavorful. The only downside was that I had such trouble resisting their call that I very nearly burned my mouth biting into one as soon as it was in front of me. When ordered off the menu they will be served “over a warm potato salad and southern corn cole slaw.” Mmmm.

Dishes I’m looking forward to trying in the future include the Roasted Stuffed Pork Tenderloin filled with pear and goat cheese and rolled in honey panko herb crumbs ($15.50) and Lowcountry Paella with mussels, shrimp, scallops, and fish for a crazy $15.50 price tag.

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Overall, I think Jacob’s Kitchen (set to open February 17th) is going to do very well. The product is high quality, the prices are very reasonable, and the menu is simultaneously both familiar and fresh. It’s a little bit off the beaten path, but, in my opinion, well worth the trip.

Special thanks to Lawson Roberts for the invitation.

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Further belied by the establishment’s nondescript exterior is the romantic atmosphere which lies inside. The interior is comfortable and low lit. French accents adorn the walls and tables, including one three-foot replica of the Eiffel Tower. Our server (who was authentically French herself) was knowledgeable and polite; she had an answer for any question I had, without more than a moment’s thought.

Coco’s menu features traditional French dishes at prices that seem very reasonable if you’ve spent much time dining downtown. In my opinion, the 10-minute drive out to Mount Pleasant seems well worth the $4-5 you will save on each entree.

Though I was tempted to start my meal with the Moules Avec de la Biere Francaise ($8 - steamed mussels in andouille and Jenlain beer), it was impossible for me to resist the call of Langoustine Risotto de Crevette ($12 - shrimp and lobster risotto).

Coco’s risotto was expertly prepared. With textbook texture and the wonderful flavors of shrimp and lobster permeating through the rice, I can easily say that this was one of the best risottos I have come across.

My partner chose the Ris de Veau ($12 - chili-orange glazed veal sweetbreads), a dish that reminded me quite a bit of the General Tso’s style sweetbreads at McCrady’s. The sweet and subtle heat of the sauce excellently complimented the natural spice of the sweetbreads.

For my entree, I opted for the Bouillabaise ($20). Chock full of mussels, scallops, shrimp, and fish in a light saffron and tomato broth, a few bites will fulfill even the strongest seafood cravings. While I really enjoyed all the seafood, I do wish there would have been a bit more flavor in the broth. This may just be a matter of preference, but I prefer versions of bouillabaise that feature a somewhat stronger tomato flavor (like that at Hank’s Seafood down by the Market).

On my next visit to Coco’s (and I do plan to go back) I don’t think I’ll have any choice but to order the entree my partner chose, the jealousy inducing Navarin d’Agneau ($18 - lamb shank navarin). The unbelievably tender meat is accompanied by green beans, shallots, and mashed potatoes and served in a delicious tomato, herb, and white wine sauce. The dish was truly an event for the senses; not only did it look and taste amazing, but the aroma was more than enough to make every mouth water within a five-foot radius.

The profiteroles (cream puffs filled with sweet cream ice cream and topped with chocolate sauce) were a nice, but perhaps unecessary way to end the evening (I’m a restaurant critic, I’ve got to try a little of everything, right?). Coco’s other dessert options that evening were chocolate mousse, caramel cream, and a chocolate terrine. Though I didn’t sample any of those, I think it’s a safe assumption that you can’t go wrong.

All-in-all, while Coco’s has flown under my radar for quite a while, it has now firmly established itself as one of my go-to recommendations in Mount Pleasant. If you’re looking for a less crowded option for a romantic meal for two, head on over the bridge and seek out this diamond in the rough.

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1. Cinebarre / Traitor - Mt. Pleasant Restaurant and Movie Review
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In case you’re interested in checking out what I had to say, or just in discovering what I sound like (although I tend to think I sound a little weird, but doesn’t everyone think that about themselves?), you should check it out.

You can check it out here:

Cinebarre/Traitor Podcast!

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1. Cinebarre / Traitor - Mt. Pleasant Restaurant and Movie Review

As a movie theater, Cinebarre’s ticket prices are a bit high, at $9 for adults, but are pretty reasonable if you use your college ID for a student discount ($7). Inside, the lobby of the theater has the appearance of a very open, but pretty cool bar, complete with two pool tables. They offer 12 beers on tap, with some decent selections like Stella Artois and Highland Gaelic Ale, as well as a quality list of bottles. The actual theaters themselves are unique. They have removed every other row of seating and replaced it with a counter for food, leaving the theater with only six rows and 60 seats total. Once seated, your server approaches and breaks things down. You place your order during previews while the lights are up and if you have any additional requests during the movie you simply write what you want on one of the provided white cards which the servers make periodic checks for during the film.

The menu fits as pretty standard bar food, with a heavy emphasis on fried items. Appetizers include staples like mozzarella sticks and hot wings. Your entree choices come in either pizza or sandwich form and range from $8-10.

For the entertainment side of our evening, we decided to watch Don Cheadle’s latest, the war-on-terrorism themed spy film, Traitor (MetaCritic Score: 60). I’m a big fan of Cheadle’s work and Traitor’s ads cited a review claming it was a 2008 equivalent of last year’s critically acclaimed Bourne Ultimatum, a bold statement that definitely grabbed my attention. While this claim drew me into the theater, it also established some pretty high expectations.

We decided to go with potato skins ($7) and fried pickle spears ($6) for our appetizers and they arrived about 15 minutes into the film. After waiting about 10 minutes for our food to reach a less than tongue melting temperature, we were able to try them out. The fried pickles were a first for me and the flavor was pretty unique. The combination of dill and ranch worked well together, but they were more than a little difficult to eat because the pickle kept escaping from its battered exterior. While they do give you a surface to eat on, it’s quite awkward trying to sit up and use it. We found ourselves holding our plates in our laps, using paper towels as placemats, and struggling to keep ourselves clean while still paying attention to the movie. The messiness of this dish ended up being representative of our dining experience as a whole. As a quick side note, I highly recommend avoiding movies with any subtitles at Cinebarre; we missed a fair share of lines while we navigated through our meal.

As we progressed further into the film, I began to feel like “messy” and “confusing” were going to be the major themes of the evening. Writer/director Jeffrey Nachmanoff’s film has an interesting premise, a deep cover US operative infiltrating an Islamic terrorist organization, but the execution left much to be desired. Rather than tight and intriguing, Traitor’s story came off as simply muddled. It takes about 40 minutes for Cheadle’s character, Samir, to show that he is any different from the terrorists he’s supposed to be spying on. In addition, some of the elements that they played up in the previews, mainly Jeff Daniels role as Cheadle’s boss, were minimized during the actual movie. If the studio really wanted to make this concept work, they should have broken the story into two movies and spent one of them giving us more of the story of how Samir became the character that he is at the start of the film. As it stands now, we are largely left to make our own assumptions and it detracts from Traitor’s overall effectiveness.

About 30 minutes into the film we received our entrees. I went with the “Blue Velvet” burger ($8.50). It came topped with bleu cheese, buffalo hot sauce, and chipotle mayo and was served with thin hand cut fries. It seemed like the buffalo sauce may have been used a bit liberally, as it became the dominate flavor. I enjoyed the burger, but it wasn’t terribly impressive. The fries, on the other hand, were delicious. I love thin shoestring style fries and when they’re fresh cut it’s all the better. My partner was disappointed with the fried green tomato sandwich ($8). She thought the breading on the tomato was too thick and the lemon caper aioli that sounded so appealing on the menu was rather bland. On the positive side, she did really enjoy Cinebarre’s house made potato chips. If I go again, I’m planning to break up the heavy fried stuff with one of their 10″ specialty pizzas. The one that most caught my eye was the “Braveheart” ($10) which comes covered with spinach, a four cheese blend, sun dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, roasted garlic, goat cheese, and olive oil.

Around the same time our entrees arrived, we received our drinks from the bar. I ordered their “famous” caramel porter float, a scoop of vanilla ice cream served in a pint glass with Saranac caramel porter. I was a bit skeptical of the idea of a beer float, but the result was an overwhelming success. The sweet caramel flavor of the beer blended wonderfully with the cool vanilla. This is something that I fully intend to try to recreate at home. My partner chose the sangria ($5) and claimed that it was far and away her favorite part of the evening.

As we finished our entrees, Traitor finally started to pick up. Cheadle is a tremendous actor and even in a poorly organized mess of a movie, his talent manages to shine through. He isn’t given a lot to work with, but he does milk the most that he can out of a largely flat script. The film does also manage to build some suspense as it draws near the conclusion. Samir is faced with some extremely difficult decisions as he walks the line between his need to participate enough to blend in with the terrorists and his moral obligation to not harm innocent people. The tension comes to a head as the real terrorists ask him to plan a major attack on American soil. Despite Traitor’s flaws, I will give Nachmanoff credit for giving Traitor an inventive and totally unexpected ending that, in my opinion, saved the film from a failing grade.

We concluded our meal with Cinebarre’s only dessert selection, a wonderful hot fudge cake ($6) topped with chocolate icing, walnuts, whipped cream, and drizzled with caramel. It is incredibly rich and decadent, but not to the point of being overwhelming. It’s not something that you’d want to eat every night, but it’s definitely a great way to treat yourself.

Overall, both Cinebarre’s food and Traitor fall into the category simply described as, “meh.” They both had strengths, but were brought back to mediocrity by their equal weaknesses. I do feel that Cinebarre has a place in this world, though it isn’t what I initially imagined. Next time there is a big blockbuster movie hitting theaters, round up a bunch of guys, order a few beers, munch on some solid, greasy bar food and enjoy this tribute to American excess. Similarly, Traitor, isn’t the type of film that I’d recommend shelling out money to see in a theater. It simply isn’t the Bourne quality thriller that I was expecting and hoping for. That being said, if you’re a big fan of spy movies and love Don Cheadle, it’s probably worth renting once it’s released to DVD.

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That being said, Boulevard certainly did have some strengths. The place really has a nice, welcoming atmosphere. This was great because we had just come from the Charleston Pet Fest where we were standing outside sweating for about two hours, so we needed to eat somewhere where being a little disgusting wouldn’t be frowned upon. The atmosphere carried over to the service as well. Our server was affable and paid plenty of attention to us.

As far as the important stuff (food) is concerned, there was one major success. We started our meal with, as we frequently do, with an appetizer of fried green tomatoes. The tomatoes were thinly sliced and had a really nice crisp exterior. With such thin slices, one might expect that the batter would overwhelm the tomato flavor which it is supposed to accent, but Boulevard handled the ratio perfectly. They were served with a shrimp remoulade sauce that was excellent. The sauce had chunks of shrimp and sweet pickle relish and seemed like a more tangy, upscale version of Big Mac sauce. My only complaint about the dish was that at $6 you would like to expect more than five slices of tomato. Actually, I’d be fine with five slices, but $4 seems like a reasonable price to me. The comparatively high price of our appetizer is surprising because everything else on the menu was a pretty good bargain.

For our entrees, I had one of the daily specials, the tortilla crusted flounder over cheddar grits with pineapple-chipotle slaw and green tomato pico de gallo. Sounds awesome, right? I’ll admit that it’s an interesting idea in theory, but I didn’t think it was executed very well. Everything was served in a shallow bowl with the various parts stacked on top of each other. This caused the flavor of the fish to be totally lost among everything else on the plate, particularly the grits. It also didn’t help that the piece of fish was really thin, so I never felt like I really got a decent chunk of it to taste it on its own. The pineapple-chipotle slaw was okay, but the chipotle flavor drowned out the pineapple, and the green tomato pico de gallo was indistinguishable. I’m not trying to say that the dish was terrible, because it wasn’t, but it really wasn’t any more than mediocre.

My friend got the fried chicken with green tomato chutney, squash and onions, and mashed potatoes. She wasn’t particularly impressed either. I tried the chicken and it was fine, but at a place that specializes in home-style favorites, you would hope this would be something they would nail. One crucial aspect of good fried chicken that was absent was the crispiness you want to have in the outer layer. We also found the chutney to be too sweet and not something that worked very well with the chicken. In fact, we think all the moisture in the chutney was the culprit behind the chicken’s missing crispiness. The potatoes, again, were just decent, and I wasn’t a big fan of the squash, which my friend felt had been overcooked.

The good news is that none of the entrees are too expensive. My flounder was only $9 and the chicken was just $7. I was tempted to try the desserts, which included options like coconut cake and M&M cheesecake that looked fantastic, but we were both a little too full.

When it came down to it, for me Boulevard Diner was a victim of its own hype. It had been talked up so much that I went into it expecting much more than it was capable of delivering. While I don’t believe Boulevard is an establishment that should be featured in all of the Charleston dining guides like it has been, it certainly would be a welcome alternative to the overpriced chain places like Applebee’s and Ruby Tuesday. If you’re looking for an affordable, casual place for an early weeknight dinner, I’d give it a shot, but it’s not on my short list of places to take visitors to Charleston who I’m looking to impress.

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