Southeast's top chef

Hominy Grill's Stehling creates signature dishes

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The owner & head chef of Hominy Grill has won an 'Oscar of the food world' - a James Beard Foundation Award Watch »

Grace Beahm
The Post and Courier

Robert Stehling (center), chef and owner of Hominy Grill, cooks alongside Matt Jenkins (left) and Stuart Cribbs for the breakfast crowd. Stehling recently won a James Beard Foundation Award as the best chef in the Southeast.

Grace Beahm
The Post and Courier

Hominy Grill's grits girl mural is a familiar sight at Rutledge Avenue and Cannon Street.

This is Robert Stehling's least favorite question: Where do you like to eat?

He gets it.

Folks want his suggestions or secrets, the whispers of a sage.

But really, he has little to offer.

He doesn't eat out much. Sorry.

And today, he will not eat much of anything. Only a slice or two of whole wheat toast, a homemade fruit-shake (bananas, peaches, cantaloupe, blueberries, pomegranate juice and yogurt), a handful of almonds, half-slice of bacon for lunch, and bits of a fried chicken sandwich for dinner.

It is an estimable progression in palate for Stehling, chef and owner of Hominy Grill, James Beard award recipient and ex-lover of Hardee's cheeseburgers.

At age 16 or so, he had a craving for fast food. He'd buy a Hardee's burger at noon, stow it in his car, and eat it on his way home from work about 9 or 10 o'clock.

He narrows his eyes to remember. "Something about the way the fla vors married in that tinfoil wrapper while it was sitting in the glove box of that slightly warm car."

The food at Hominy Grill, the food that has carried his signature for 12 years, is much different. It is basic, fresh, first-class Southern fare — biscuits and gravy, pimiento cheese, fried-green tomatoes, vegetable platters, fried chicken, buttermilk and pecan pie — served in hospitable, unpretentious quarters.

As such, the James Beard Foundation last month named Stehling top chef in the Southeast, one of the food industry's highest honors. The awards are often called the Oscars of the culinary world.

Not that Stehling needs validation. The New York Times and Gourmet magazine have praised Hominy Grill, the clippings posted on one of the restaurant's walls. Patrons fill the place for breakfast, brunch, lunch and dinner. Actors Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal dined there in May. Music's Lou Reed more recently helped host a birthday party at the restaurant for his wife, Spoleto performer Laurie Anderson.

So, yes, Stehling has plenty of attention.

"It was a good stroke for the ego," he says of the award. "I felt like Joe Pesci in 'Goodfellas.' I'm a made man now!"

He laughs heartily. He is wearing a bandanna, houndstooth chef pants and an old, orange Southern Culture on the Skids T-shirt. "Hillbilly" is written across the front. Three or four days after he returned from the awards ceremony in New York, his manager got sick. Then his dishwasher got sick.

"I'm back there at 8 o'clock in the dish pit trying to keep things moving," he says. "Pants still go on the same way."

Not exactly. The award means Stehling's voice is more sought, his views more valuable, even when fielding banal questions like where do you eat, what did you used to eat, or what do you enjoy doing. He's a made man, right?

For one, Stehling, who is 45, doesn't watch television. He doesn't own a set (or a cell phone), only a monitor where he, wife Nunally Kersh and 6-year-old daughter Carson can watch the occasional movie at their Wagener Terrace home.

Instead, he reads military histories almost exclusively.

"There's something about poor dogfaces in combat I can relate to," he explains.

The past couple of years, he has read several books on the British Empire. How a tiny island controlled three-quarters of the world's population for 400 years, Stehling cannot fathom.

What he gains are cultural impressions. History helps Stehling understand the connections, particularly food origins, how ingredients and dishes spread and evolved.

"Arabs eating rice casserole cooked with almond milk and dates: That's an Islamic dish," he says. "It ended up in Spain, became paella. Ended up in New Orleans, became jambalaya. Ended up here, became purloo."

It's gotten him kicking around ideas, not Southern ideas, either, but macro ideas, food meaning, the global market and sustainable diets.

"I'm looking at my menu and I'm thinking, what should I be serving," Stehling says. "Not what can I serve, but what should I serve, what makes sense."

If he were to author another cookbook — Stehling already offers a Hominy Grill recipe guide — this would be his focus. And he's thought about it.

It'd be something along the order of "Diet for a Small Planet" or "The Omnivore's Dilemma," taking on convenience and processed foods, and the lost art of cooking.

"Having fish flown in from Antarctica doesn't make any sense to me. People are gobbling that up," Stehling says. "Nasty shrimp imported here from Southeast Asia. It's bad for our economy: the costs of fuel and what it takes to get it here.

"This is the book I want to write: what to eat."

Hard to believe, but Stehling never tires of talking food. You eat three times a day, he points out. It's such a big part of our lives.

Stehling grew up in Kernersville, N.C., and his parents were principled organic gardeners. He worked for the late renowned chef Bill Neal in Chapel Hill, N.C., at Crook's Corner, ground zero for Southern cuisine. After stints in several New York restaurants, Stehling moved to Charleston, setting up shop in a 19th-century barbershop at Rutledge Avenue and Cannon Street.

Stehling, his family and friends painted the burgundy walls white linen. They cleaned the pine floors, kept the old barber poles and brought in oak tables.

The restaurant has a simple logo: a bowl of steaming grits.

"When you come to town, this is exactly what you expect," Stehling says. "It's what you want to be here waiting for you. It's nothing fancy, but you feel like it's the way it used to be, the way you want it to be."

Reach Rob Young at 937-5518 and ryoung@postandcourier.com.