Category Archives: Georgia

We took our hosts out to brunch The Grey, a fantastic restaurant in a brilliantly restored 1938 Art Deco former greyhound station (the new one is around the block). It’s a very fun space, with oval banquettes, a counter, remnants of the original pale green wall tiles, including original graffiti (a young server pointed out to me.) A three piece band with a terrific female singer performed while we ate delicious, sophisticated takes on southern fare including crab beignets, fried chicken with half dollar size corn meal hotcakes, “pigs head” (pork cheek). The chef Mashama Bailey is a James Beard award winner. I’m glad I booked (five weeks in advance).

The Grey is walking distance to the western part of historic Savannah so we gladly sauntered through some other lovely squares including one fronted by the cool looking Jepson Center for the Arts, in a glassy cube of a contemporary building designed by Moshe Safdie, which is the youngster of the Telfair Museums, the south’s oldest art museum. (Safdie also designed Arkansas’s fabulous Crystal Bridges museum.) The museums include the elegant 1819 mansion housing the Telfair academy — the first American art museum founded by a woman (Mary Telfair, in 1886!) Other highlights we passed: Asher + Rye, an upscale bakery, drinks, clothing and home goods place, the Perry Lane hotel (a high design luxury hotel full of antiques and contemporary artwork including by artists with ties to SCAD, aka the Savannah College of Art and Design), Zunzi’s, a “South African-inspired” (whatever that means) sandwich shop next door to the hotel and the surprisingly gorgeous interior of Basilica Cathedral St. John’s the Baptist, a French Gothic wonder (originally built in 1876, rebuilt after a fire in 1900) with its high pale green marble columns.

We decided that Savannah is livelier and more interesting than Charleston, although we loved Charleston. The presence of SCAD is overt (with buildings scattered all over town) and more subtle (with well-curated and designed shops every which way). Then there’s the sheer loveliness of the squares and boulevards and Forsyth Park.

Finally, I got to see Savannah properly, in all its glory on a perfect day, with lots of sun, shade and breeze. We easily found a free parking spot south of Gaston Street, the northern boundary of glorious Forsyth Park, where wedding couples posing in front of its huge ornate white marble fountain with sculptures of birds and fish.

It was easy to see many of the outdoor sights in a day, with the lovely squares located close by each other, one after another, as we walked south to north toward the river and as we walked east to west. One lovely square after another, shaded by live oaks with Spanish moss and dotted with park benches to linger and the occasional mammoth sculpture in the center, surrounded by all manner of elegant homes. There are also long tree lined boulevards, also breezy and beautiful. It feels more open than the tight cluster of homes and narrow alleyways and cobblestones streets in Charleston’s historic district.

We wandered around shopSCAD, which showcases the output of students and alumni of the Savannah College of Art and design which owns buildings scattered across the city, including a coffee shop called Art’s (get it?) across from shopSCAD. (One merchant told me that SCAD is prohibited from buying any additional property but they seem a good creative force in the city, keeping the city from becoming a fusty relic or overrun by tourist schlock.) The city market and the redeveloped riverfront have cool old buildings but were too touristy for our taste, with bars, restaurants and shops for the party crowd. We preferred the one-of-a-kind shops and restaurants in town near the squares – including Satchel, which has lovely handmade leather purses (I bought a small one), and shopSCAD. We wasted a little time looking for two shops touted in a NYT Travel story from 2015, both out of business.

Lunch was at the bustling Collins Quarter, an Australian enterprise where the specialty is smashed lemony avocado on toast, topped by a poached egg. We joined the long line outside Leopold’s for ice cream, striking up a conversation with a Detroit Tigers fan from Illinois. The scoops were enormous – my favorite was Savannah Socialite, dark and milk chocolate with bourbon-infused pecans (the thin mint ice cream, an homage to locate heroine Juliette Low, the founder of the Girl Scouts, was good too.) Dirck’s favorite was a very coffee coffee with chocolate chips. (We later found an outpost of both Leopold’s and Satchel at the Savannah airport!). On our way out of town, we picked up pulled pork and chicken from Sandfly BBQ, Memphis-style although with mustard bbq sauce that is popular in these parts. We wanted ribs and brisket but they’d run out by the time we called to order food at 5:30.