What's the food culture in Savannah?

Savannah eats early by Southern-city standards but late by rural-Georgia ones. Breakfast starts around 7:30am. The line at Mrs. Wilkes' Dining Room on Jones Street forms by 10:30 for the 11am seating, boardinghouse-style, with bowls of fried chicken, collard greens, black-eyed peas, sweet potato soufflé, and cornbread passed hand to hand at long communal tables. Cash only, $25 per person. Worth it once. The line eats 90 minutes of your morning, though, and the spread is the same every day. If you have three days in Savannah, give Mrs. Wilkes one of them and spend the others eating south of Forsyth Park, which has anchored the city's residential grid since 1840.

The Starland District, roughly between Bull Street and Habersham south of 37th, is where Savannah's cooks eat on their nights off. Back in the Day Bakery on Bull Street sells flaky biscuits with peppery sausage gravy and a crumb cake that disappears by noon. The Grey occupies the 1938 Greyhound bus terminal on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and plates Lowcountry ingredients with French technique. A bowl of their shrimp stew over Carolina Gold rice runs about $28. River Street, by contrast, is almost entirely tourist-facing. The praline shops are fine for a sample. The seafood places charge $22 for a shrimp-and-grits plate you can get for $14 at Narobia's Grits & Gravy on Drayton Street, where the kitchen cooks in bacon fat and the grits still have tooth.

Savannah's kitchen descends from the Gullah-Geechee people, West African descendants who settled the Georgia and South Carolina Sea Islands long before the Civil War. Their one-pot rice cooking and open-flame techniques built what tourists now call Lowcountry food. Red rice, stewed with tomatoes and smoked sausage in cast iron, still appears at Sweet Potatoes Kitchen on Ellis Square for about $9 as a side. She-crab soup, thickened with blue-crab roe and finished with a pour of dry sherry, costs $10-14 at most sit-down restaurants. Mind you, the roe season peaks April through October, so winter versions tend to taste thinner. Boiled peanuts sell from roadside stands on the drive in from I-95, $5 per bag, warm and salt-soaked until the shells go soft and almost beany. The stands near Oglethorpe Avenue tend to add Cajun seasoning to the brine, a regional twist distinct from the plain-salt versions sold further south toward Jacksonville.

A solid food day starts at Clary's Cafe on Abercorn Street, eggs and stone-ground grits for $12 in a diner that has fed the same neighborhood since the 1950s. By mid-morning, Leopold's Ice Cream on Broughton Street, founded in 1919, scoops Tutti Frutti and Lemon Custard for $5-7. Lunch at Zunzi's on Drayton is a South African-influenced sandwich counter where the Conquistador chicken wrap costs $13 and fills you through the afternoon. The Olde Pink House on Reynolds Square plates crispy scored flounder with apricot shallot sauce for $34 inside a 1771 Georgian mansion where the floors creak after two and a half centuries of settling. For something rougher, Crystal Beer Parlor on West Jones Street has poured drafts and ladled crab stew since 1933. Savannah's kitchens go dark by 10pm on weeknights. Weekends push to 11.