If I were Randy Jackson, I'd call this place ""pitchy"" and say, ""Ya lost me, dawg.""
I don't even want to go into a lot of detail about this because, to me as a life-long Southerner, this place just doesn't add up. It will probably satisfy anyone who has never had real, home-made Southern cooking, daily, for their whole lives, but it's really just somebody's *idea* of Southern food. Their own bio says that the Coaston sisters weren't cooks before they decided to open KingFish and it shows. Everything SORTA tastes like what the dish is supposed to be but there's something off about every single one. I hesitate to trash any restaurant trying to turn out Southern food because I miss it and wish I could get it somewhere other than my own kitchen but there is a HUGE difference between Southern food as made by a person who has made it since they could reach the stove and someone who got some recipes from their family so they could open a funkily-chic restaurant in Seattle. I put in the time to go back and try everything and none of it was more than a vague shadow of what anybody's grandmother would turn out in their kitchen in Tuscaloosa, Jackson, Valdosta, or Chatanooga. If you don't KNOW Southern food - intimately and with your soul involved - this bloodless imitation will probably be a perfectly adequate change of pace for you. I sorta wish I could eat it the same way. Maybe if they removed any references to the South from the place and just called it food. But my expectations for people who claim to make Southern food go a lot higher than Kingfish.
Pros: Studiously laid-back
Cons: FOOD
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