Last fall, as the restaurant closings began to ring in, the developers behind Elm Street’s LTV Towers announced the opening of Grayson Social, a modern Southern restaurant attached to the Hilton Garden Inn downtown, where in hotel-restaurant terms, the Joule holds court.
Undaunted, Grayson Social seemed determined to woo. With its expensive build-out, private supper-club option, and twee details—miniature skillets; a sachet of beef jerky clothespinned to a bourbon cocktail’s tumbler—it appeared that modern Southern had reached its apogee. A PR/marketing team puffed up the opening with splashy announcements and press photos that looked like the stylish pages of Garden & Gun magazine. It hit the local “hottest” lists immediately, like a 14-carat gold biscuit.
But as far as I’m concerned, the Emperor wears no clothes. The interior’s lavender-grey, overstuffed divan banquettes, gold-framed mirrors, and bird silhouettes fail to disguise the fact that you’re dining off a hotel concourse. One evening, half the diners tapped and scrolled on laptops while wearing earbuds. The dispiriting atmosphere: modern Southern boudoir meets Waiting for Godot.
After charming cornmeal fried oysters, their shaggy coats a vehicle for an enticing black garlic tartar sauce that I used to dip the garnish of frisee once the oysters vanished, the food was decidedly uneven.
The country fried yard bird’s crust, overseasoned with salt showered on like dandruff, oozed grease when squeezed between two fingers. The pieces, tucked into a cast-iron vessel, come with one biscuit, but that’s all you need. Like the biscuits your Southern aunt might make, knobs of butter have been roughly cut in, forming steamy, airy pockets when they rise, flaky and rich. The cast-iron dish is roomy enough to dip in with knife and fork, angling awkwardly—roomy enough, in fact, to also house two mini Dutch-oven casseroles with sides: mac and cheese showered in bacon and chives and generously creamed corn. They form a quartet vying for your arterial health.
The menu’s vegetarian entrée, a dish so rich that we only made a dent sharing it three ways, is griddled haloumi cheese served atop decadently rendered Homestead Heritage grits. A medley of roasted root vegetables, which they call a succotash, are folded in—carrots, parsnips, golden beets. Although oil from the three thick slices of griddled cheese forms a pool atop the grits, I do concede they’re good.
Coffee- and sea salt-crusted prime rib came with an avocado horseradish puree that elevated it, though the meat was a bloody mess.
In view of the knobs of butter, the fact that between the three of us, we had hardly made headway in those haloumi-topped grits, we weren’t about to order dessert. Not the white-chocolate croissant bread pudding, though it came with housemade lavender ice cream (I was tempted to just order a scoop). It also comes with ancho chile caramel. Trendy pairings like these (the berry cobbler comes with beet-cayenne ice cream) make it feel like they’re trying too hard. And if the cocktails are any example, they’re doing so to dubious effect.
The cocktail list—all 33 priced at $15—seems to have a love affair with sexy-sounding ingredients like cypress essence, myrrh, and smoked salt. The sangria does a play on rosé with rose syrup. The Bloody Mary is a paragraph that starts with bacon vodka and ends with pickled quail eggs and the house beef jerky. The Dark Chocolate Citrus Protein—rum, honey, chocolate protein, orange bitters, orange essence, smoked salt—sounds like an energy shake.
What we ultimately ordered, because it sounded vaguely like dessert, couldn’t have been more puzzling. The Snicker Doodle cocktail was neither cocktail nor milkshake but something bafflingly in between—and impossible to drink/eat. It arrived as a tower of shaved ice in a frosty tin cup, milky at the bottom and topped with chopped Snickers bar, toasted coconut, and the inevitable smoked salt. It was unclear what we were supposed to do with this. Any attempt to scoop up a bite met with the barrier of bits of Snickers-on-ice, the caramel hardening to form stalactites on our teeth. Could they not have shaken and strained? Or served as a sundae? Perplexing and poorly planned, we thought as we slurped up the milky, sweet coconut dregs under the avalanche of ice.
The service, too, confounded, coffee-shop casual and snail-paced though the room was scarcely populated.
They’ve since rolled out breakfast, lunch, and brunch menus, all happily anchored by the biscuits, the most solidly winning item that evening. Perhaps the place, once slated to be Lisa Garza-Selcer’s Shelby Hall, will thrive with its built-in hotel clientele. Perhaps the private supper club will be a draw. For me, and especially at those prices ($19 for the fried chicken; $36 for the mangled prime rib), the glow is missing from this Southern rose.
