You Had Me At Honey: Pulled Pork On a Grilled Cheese

Chef Adele DiBiase and I have a lot in common.  We both love to cook and being northern gals, we have a love and appreciation of good old fashioned Southern comfort food.  That's where the similarity ends.  While I'm just a home cook, Adele is heading up the kitchen at Summit's latest restaurant, .  Open for just four months, all this Southern hospitality has shaken up our yankee community as Chef Adele turns out nostalgic comfort food rich in Southern roots.  It's the kind of food I'd rather not toil with all day long in my kitchen and thankfully I can get all the comforts of home and so much more in Adele's.

While the menu is about as homey as one of Paula Deen's recipe cards, it also has an element of sophistication with quality ingredients such as Neiman Ranch beef and Bell and Evans chicken.  The weekend brunch menu is so yummy, you may want to exercise and extra 30 minutes so you can be one with the pancakes with caramelized apple and caramel sauce.  Likewise with the dinner menu and classics such as shrimp and grits with Cheddar, Andouille sausage and bacon.  It will make you forget this lousy Northeast winter, at least until you clean your plate.

But I came to Honey Browns for lunch and the sandwich people are buzzing about: pulled pork and caramelized onions on a grilled cheese.  I was dying to try it and praying it would be luscious beyond my home cooks imagination.  It did not disappoint.  For  $9, I got pulled pork and deeply sauteed onions held together by slices of soft white bread and Cheddar cheese,  grilled crispy.  I laughed when I saw the side option of home made fries or salad.  Are you kidding?  There is no place for salad on this plate.  The fries are the ying to the grilled cheese yang, and they clearly had been sliced from real potatoes.

Chef Adele's husband and business partner, Rocco Flores knows all too well what makes this two napkin sandwich so tasty, "We slow cook our pork for six hours then add the perfect BBG sauce to it and use New York Cheddar.  Adele's been working on the sauce for six months.  It's more of a vinegary Carolina style BBQ sauce than a heavy spicy Texas style sauce."

Honey Browns is right in downtown Summit on Union Place, so it's convenient for a business lunch or a quick bite if you only have an hour.  While your at it, why not save room for dessert?  Chef Adele's signature coconut cream cupcake is out of this world and gigantic by cupcake standards.  So get one for the table with lots of forks and you'll be whistling Dixie all day long.