Stove, The Restaurant

Stove, The Restaurant Restaurant Review:

A singular restaurant in the historic, re-evolving Port Norfolk neighborhood, tiny Stove defies categorization. It’s part art gallery, part funhouse, but all homage to the Southern roots and classical culinary training of Senatobia, Mississippi-born Sydney Meers. A protean chef-owner who is at once disciplined and unbridled, he makes diners think, whether they’re looking at his irreverent paintings or feasting on his Gulf shrimp and grits, idiosyncratic with house-made pimento cheese. He grows a lot of his own herbs and vegetables, and creates his own sauces, like Cowboy Syd’s World Famous D’Lish Sauce, a highbrow catsup vinaigrette that somehow improves an already topnotch juicy flat-iron steak. Meers even salt-cures and pepper-coats his own hams, smokes them and ages them for about eight months to star in his “Pork-o-rama BBQ,” a porcine party on a plate with black pig pork belly and house-made sausage, and “ole classic spicy etouffee.” He sources other ingredients from friends around Virginia, like Gail Hobbs-Page, whose Caromont Farm 60-day-aged goat cheese graces his weekly-changing create-your-own artisan cheese plate. For dessert, try the peach-rhubarb cobbler in season or the perennial “Salty Dawg,” a bittersweet ganache tart that will leave you howling for more. The wine list is one of the smartest you’ll find.