RVA BLT

Recipe: Monster BLT

This Pioneer Woman knows how to live. Of particular interest, the mayo is mixed with adobo pepper juice. She also wisely left the cheese out.

Millie’s

The weather is getting super nice, which means it’s time to spend the better part of your late Sunday morning standing outside Millie’s with a Bloody Mary. These cooks, the way they’re right by the door, are also some of my favorite in the city. They’re a few coarse interactions and a forced Greek dialect away from a late-70s SNL sketch. No ketchup, sriracha.

This BLT was so close to being awesome, but I just can’t give it the seal. The bacon was great, maybe I could have used a bit more. In reality though, you could have this bacon spilling all over the plate and I’d still want a side portion just to be sure. The lettuce and tomato were both really fresh and tasty.

It was the bread, the bread just didn’t hold up (apologies that the photographic evidence isn’t there). It was thin, and kinda crumbly, didn’t really pack the same punch as everything else. Here’s what really gets me, you get some bread and butter and jam to snack on while you order and wait. That bread was great, toasted perfectly, grainy and tasty. Get that bread in here, would’ve turned the whole thing up to another level.

Popkin Tavern

Popkin is part of an umbrella series of nine restaurants all with a sort of vaguely-historic Americana feel. Bowling alleys, firemen, old amusement park decorations, that kind of thing. Every single one of the other eight restaurants are in Chicago. What?

The bacon here was pretty nice, if a bit oily. Loose, leafy lettuce and an underripe tomato left the vegetable portion of this BLT lacking. Popkin also didn’t bring the mayo, and I don’t mean this in the “when we see you at the cheerleading competition, you better bring it” sense. It was literally not brought to the sandwich or the table. Is it possible some people don’t consider mayo a crucial component to a blt? I shudder at the thought. I got sourdough bread, way overtoasted.

Overall, not great. When you can’t outshine frozen-from-a-bag tots (good tots, but bag tots nonetheless), you have yourself a problem.