Unless you count the occasional appearance of barbecue at the Pits, the Duke experience is not a Southern experience, culinary or otherwise. We're a campus teeming with Long Islanders and Californians chomping Alpine bagels and groovy burritos, chasing it all down with incalculable gallons of café mocha and cookies 'n' cream fro-yo. There's scarcely a full car's worth of whisky-swilling good ol' boys among the masses of SUV-pimping carpetbaggers. Eating on West is like eating at the mall-you've got the generic Chinese place, the sloppy Tex-Mex and the questionable sub sandwiches, with greasy burgers, pizza and fried "chicken" sandwiches competing for your heart disease dollars. Off-campus, it's more of the same. If you grew up in the South (the real South, not Atlanta or northern Virginia), the mallish selection can bring a tear to your eye.
Fear not, authenticity is just minutes away.
Mama Dip's Kitchen, nestled along a less-traveled section of Rosemary Street in Chapel Hill, hits you like a breath of rarefied Southern air, the air that smells of pine needles and home cooking. The restaurant looks like an old house, with a generous, whitewashed front porch and big, inviting windows. Inside, there's none of the gaudy Cracker Barrel hodgepodge that the untutored might expect from a "Southern" restaurant. The place is spotless from floor to ceiling, well-lit and pleasantly decorated. The atmosphere is sunny even at night, with plenty of light reflecting off the polished Crimson Tide colored tables. Coffee cup planters-with real plants in them-sit in each window. From the dining room, you can watch the kitchen staff work, diligent in the calm, easy way that Southerners are, talking, smiling and joking as they fry and baste and bake and grill. They take their time and do it right, just like their mothers and grandmothers would at home.
Mama Dip-real name Mildred Council-runs her restaurant the way she'd probably run her own kitchen. Though she is 70 years old, she still supervises and cooks, coming in every day at the crack of dawn to start preparing the biscuits, cornbread, cakes and pies that will be served throughout the day. Many of the people who work at the restaurant are relatives-family pictures adorn the walls as you walk inside. Sit down and taste the exceptional cooking, and you'll never want to leave.
How Southern is Mama Dip's? Very. Iced tea only comes one way-sweet, without lemon. Food toppings go way beyond ketchup to include molasses, hot peppers, gravy and onions. The menu selections are reminiscent of past Sunday dinners-chicken and dumplings, smothered pork chops, barbecue, fried chicken and roast beef, all served with fresh-cooked vegetables like okra, black-eyed peas, yams and turnip greens. Dinner is served with a choice of cornbread, yeast rolls or delectable biscuits with the just the right amount of buttermilk. Everything melts in your mouth, steeped in gravy or fatback or boiled to moist perfection. Even with the strong regional flavor, Mama Dip's offers something for everybody. There are salmon cakes and shrimp for seafood lovers, liver and onions and ribs for beef lovers, and even salads for the weight-watchers (ask for Dip's poppy-seed dressing). For the truly proper-or adventurous-chitlins (fried or "just plain") are served up, a rarity even in the soul food world.
Since even I fear chitlins, I ordered smothered pork chops with yams, fried okra and two biscuits. Tasting the smooth, brown meat gravy over chops so tender I could cut them with a fork, I felt like I was savoring the past, quaffing redemption with every sip of just-sweet-enough iced tea. Dip's put me on a back porch in Alabama, on a fishing boat floating downriver on a humid afternoon. This wasn't just a meal-it was Southern heritage on a plate.
Dip's did everything right. Southern cooking is often seen as greasy, mainly because of the frying. Unfortunately, most fail to realize that it's incorrect frying (the McFastfood way) that produces soggy crinkle-wrapped hamburgers and fried chicken. The okra was as greaseless and moist as any I've tasted, breaded just lightly enough to let the flavor of the vegetable come through. The yams weren't quite to die for, but they sure beat the hell out of Yankee yams.
And, like any good Southerner, I saved room for dessert. There are pies galore-coconut, pecan, apple and sweet potato-along with brownie sundaes and bread or banana pudding. The sweet potato pie was sublime, avoiding the tendency to kill the flavor of the vegetable with too much nutmeg.
When I told Tanya, the woman who rang me up, that my dinner was incredible, she didn't look surprised. That's probably because she's Mama Dip's grand-daughter, and according to her, she's worked there a long time. She's been there for hundreds and hundreds of beaming customers, sated and satisfied, all who now know the privilege of eating at Mama's house. Because once you've eaten there, you'll never feel the same about those bagels and burritos again.
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