3001 Wilshire Blvd
Santa Monica
310-828-9988
Personally, I hate the westside of Los Angeles-which includes areas/cities like West LA, Santa Monica, Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, El Segundo, Westchester, Marina Del Ray, because the people there are such pretentious assholes. They are all douchebags with Ed Hardy clothes. Ok, the women may look nice, but they are filled with silicon and botox. Who the hell wants to be around that?
Anyways, I heard about South- really it's a sports bar, that served up some good soul food. I was a bit hesitant to try soul food in Santa Monica, but figured why not? If worse came to worse, I can laugh at all the douchebag, pretentious, asshole people of the westside!!
I went to South, on a Sunday. So, it was packed with football fans. They had every game on and fans of every team were all over the bar. Honestly, there weren't that many douchebags at South. Maybe, they only show up at night.
While I was looking around for a seat, and I saw a gameday menu. I had looked at their online menu and knew what I wanted; fried chicken. But, I didn't see fried chicken on the gameday menu. So I asked the bouncer, if they served their full menu, he said yes.
A few minutes later, I found a seat, and when the server took my order, I wanted to make sure they served the full menu. She said "It depends on what you want." Huh? I said fried chicken, she said they could do that. Whatever, as long as I got the fried chicken, mac and cheese, and hush puppies, $16, it was fine.
A few minutes later, I got four small pieces of fried chicken, a huge helping of hush puppies and mac and cheese. I tried the white meat first. This was a small portion of the breast meat and it had a strong paprika taste, a pretty good crunchy, and it was pretty moist. Not the greatest fried chicken ever, but solid. The interesting part was none of the other pieces had the strong paprika taste. All other pieces; wing, leg, and thigh, were your regular fried chicken seasoning; salt, pepper, onion and garlic powder. The wing and leg were ok, nothing special. But, the thigh was so moist and juicy. The $16 price tag is a bit high for four small pieces and I don't care that I got two sides, that were good sized portions.
The hush puppies were among the best I've ever had. Seasoned perfectly, cooked perfectly-a light golden brown, and just wonderful.
The mac and cheese was fairly bland and they could have used more cheese, but the macaroni was well cooked.
Service. Ok, I know it was crowded on Sundays during football season, but there was only one server for the entire back section!! Not good staffing by the manager. The server was nice, but the first time around taking orders, she missed me completely. It took her awhile to come back, since she had the entire back section. Then she finally took my order, but she never gave me my drink order. I had to ask the busboy for my ice tea. The tables didn't have any silverware and the busboy/runner, who brought me my food, didn't bring any silverware. Bad training by management. My food did arrive quickly, in fact a very quickly considering the number of people at South.
I'm cutting the server some slack, because she was working hard but she is just overwhelmed!! They need to add, at least, 2 more servers in that back area.
I may come back for the food, because I saw a waffle fried chicken sliders that looked very good.
