If you’ve been looking for a midday food coma, fear not: King James Public House can to satisfy your gluttony. The Charlotte Street restaurant is now serving lunch seven days a week.
The lunch menu features Chef Steven Goff’s duck French dip, fried chicken and crumpets with black pepper gravy as well as an assortment of po’ boys including smoked chicken and kimchi combination and a french fry variety covered in cheese and smothered in gravy. The eatery’s standard snacks, such as coddled eggs, Scotch eggs, duck wings, Carolina red hot dogs and menudo rojo, are all available as well are jars of rillettes and pâté.
“I had a lunch menu already written from when we opened, but there was just no way we could do it at the time with all that we had to prep for each night,” says Goff. “But as we got better and better, I think now we can pull it off.”
Part of that is thanks to the newest addition to the kitchen, sous chef Nohe Villatoro. Villatoro was sous chef at Zambra for years as he bounced back and forth from Asheville to his home country of El Salvador. This summer, he has been cooking pop-up lunches at King James, slinging South and Central American cuisine to hungry diners. Goff hopes to continue those pop-ups with Villatoro on Sunday nights now instead in their previous Wednesday lunchtime slot.
“Part of having him leave Zambra to come over here is that we’ll still let him have some creative control,” says Goff, who admits that he can be a bit strict when it comes to his menu. “The restaurant has one vision,” he says. “A lot of what I don’t like about some restaurants is that it sometimes turns into just three dudes standing around cooking whatever they feel like. But a good kitchen needs consistency. If something doesn’t fit the restaurant, it doesn’t fit the restaurant. But it’s pretty easy to make something fit here.”
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