Bacon Cheese Grit Puppies
– Seven Senses –
$7.00 | August 2022
A man walks into a bar…
Well, he thinks it’s a bar, anyway. There’s a long, elbowed drinking section that takes up a chunk of the place, and maybe 15, 20 tables. The joint — it looks like a joint — has sports on, naturally. In certain parts of this country, if you have TVs and a liquor license, you’re a bar. In Tennessee, if you have them, you can be one of the best restaurants in town.
In this case, the town is Cookeville. It lands about 80 miles east of Nashville. It’s a college town that doesn’t really feel like one (Tennessee Tech), with a vibrant downtown that’s a hefty walk from campus and definitely geared toward an older, wealthier demographic. Including the nearly 11,000 college students, Cookeville’s population checks in at 35,000, big enough to offer some upscale dining if Pizza Hut and Domino’s aren’t your thing *. Physicians and professors have to eat somewhere, right?
In Cookeville, that ‘somewhere’ might possibly be Seven Senses, and I’m including the Cosmos and Chocolatinis in that. (A man walks into a bar…) Yes, the drinks menu casts you back to the ’90s. Retro has its place here. But so does experimentation. So before you tuck into that super-brined, super-tasting Sweet Chili Pork Chop ($23, too expensive for me to call out here in detail, but well worth it), order a plate of the Bacon Cheese Grit Puppies.
The what? For our purposes, put the bacon and the cheese aside for a minute, since they are not the point. What we have here is deep-fried grits, rolled into a ball, and crisped up on the outside like Hush Puppies (or arancini). They’re accompanied by dijonnaise and a sweet chili sauce (which somehow work in concert, kinda like how the Stones used the London Bach Choir to open You Can’t Always Get What You Want). I’m unsure why they are plated five at a time, a prime number that’s not easily divisible by 2-4 diners or more than six at the table, all of whom are going to want more. You would think this concept would be more prevalent; the combo can’t be that hard to make, and someone in Trader Joe’s kitchen had to have thought it up by now. But no, not that I’m aware of, anyway. Seven Senses is the first and last time I’ve seen it on a menu. It’s the ultimate bar food … in a restaurant.
* So, Cookeville. Great place to while away an afternoon; there’s a small railway museum, antique shops, and the downtown is walkable. Plus there’s the Bee Rock Overlook a bit down the Interstate. You can start and end your dinner in Cookeville about a block away from Seven Senses, where Hix Farm Brewery and Ralph’s Donut Shop stare at each other across the street, and, one can argue, the centuries.
Hix Farm’s beer, theirs or borrowed, is really good, cheap, cold and served with no fuss. Ralph’s, meantime, was born about 60 years ago. It’s a donut-shop legend, and the donuts are damn good, and super cheap, though compared with, say, Gibson’s in Memphis, maybe a bit lighter than you might expect or even want (lightness in donuts being relative and personal, I mean, it’s a donut).
I bought a few of those donuts before dinner, and took them across the street to the brewery, where they sat quietly waiting their turn. They didn’t make it back to the car after Seven Senses, which meant we just had to hit Ralph’s up one more time before leaving town, you know, so we’d have “something for breakfast.” (Luckily, Ralph’s is open until 11:30 most nights, so you can make this decision late in the game.) That something was not a donut; it was what Ralph’s calls a “Ladyfinger.” Count me in on the joke; this ladyfinger is not dainty: a 5″-deep hunk of terrifically moist chocolate cake, topped with three peaks of vanilla cream, dunked in chocolate, and covered with chocolate drizzle. It’s a Hostess CupCake on performance-enhancing drugs. Don’t let the cops pull you over.