Homegrown History

Like the livers and gizzards, the frog's legs are also breaded and fried. In fact, lots of stuff at Pat's is breaded and fried, including the cheesecake for dessert (served warm in a cinnamon-dusted shell and a surefire lead cause of diabetes in Dogtown). While many of these preparations are unorthodox (even Morgan says he prefers his chicken livers sautéed with a little sherry), they work. Rarely is an all-brown dinner this flavorful and enjoyable. The onion rings, for example, should be anointed the eighth wonder of the world, so humongous are they. The polar opposite of the typical fast-food ring -- no transparent wisp of barely there onion pleading uncle under the weight of all that oppressive breading -- these are clearly handmade, with such equal heft shared between the breading and the onion that the whole thing comes off like a liltingly sweet fried-onion sandwich. The whole-catfish entrée forsakes only the poor bastard's head before breading and frying the entire, intact body, which renders its appearance almost cartoonish. Inside, though, it's a fun, flaky, unctuous mess of catfish.

Morgan claims that "we get our feelings hurt when our fried chicken is never named number-one in town." Pat's half-chicken is breaded and cooked to order using canola oil (which in and of itself isn't properly touted for its low amount of saturated fat and its high contents of good-for-you monounsaturated fats and omega-3 fatty acids). Like the onion rings, the fried chicken plays nice with its breading, resulting in a terrifically cooked bird housed in a tasty coating without a drop of extra grease.

Pat's can also be proud of its house-named burger, ripe with a certain savoriness and so good I wanted another one as soon as I finished it, and its homemade meat loaf, a formidable brick of darkly browned meat given a little panache by the herbs mixed into the beef. Those herbs are grown on-site by Morgan and the owner's wife; the meat loaf recipe comes from her aunt. Various family and kitchen-staff members also contribute their own recipes for the rotating choice of soups, which include beef stew, broccoli cheese, "cheesy chicken," split pea (using both yellow and green peas), French onion, a well-stocked but thin-brothed and somewhat bland chicken minestrone and a cream-based chicken-pot-pie soup that's so thick it's like condensed soup without the water added in.

Homestyle cooking aside, Pat's is still a bar; as such, a couple of items do fall pitifully short. The all-iceberg dinner salad comes with a single, less-than-vibrant tomato slice and microscopic bits of carrot and cabbage, all of it shredded up and served on an undersize dinner plate, resulting in a lot of stabbing at greens that inevitably fall overboard onto the table. And the bad thing about just-like-Mom's cooking is that you must sometimes endure Mom's hopelessly bland and overboiled green beans.

But maternal instincts shine through in the service, which could not be warmer or friendlier, and in the portions (they really feed you here!). And just like Mom's, you want them to feed you again and again.