Tiffani Thiessen fed me fried chicken, cheesy enchiladas, beef jerky...

[TMC]

...and a Michelin tasting menu. We had leftovers

https://www.latimes.com/food/story/2...hor-food-crawl

Frickles are freaking good.”

Tiffani Thiessen is sitting in the Elvis corner at Johnny Rebs’ True South in Long Beach. Above her are framed photos of the singer alongside license plates, coffee mugs and other Elvis memorabilia.

“You have to be a pickle lover,” she says about Johnny Rebs’ frickles, thinly sliced dill pickles dusted in cornmeal and then deep fried. “I love really good pickles.”

With her big eyes, shiny locks of chestnut hair and a smile as warm as this afternoon’s sun, Thiessen, 49, is instantly recognizable as ’90s teen idol Kelly Kapowski from “Saved by the Bell” and as Valerie Malone from “Beverly Hills, 90210.” More recently, she’s built a lifestyle brand with three seasons of her “Dinner at Tiffani’s” cooking show and two cookbooks. Her newest, “Here We Go Again,” focuses on creative leftovers.

But before her TV career, Thiessen grew up in Long Beach and frequented Johnny Rebs’ True South, a decades-old restaurant known for its ribs, fried catfish and peach cobbler. It’s the first stop on a restaurant crawl around Thiessen’s hometown.

It’s really about the nostalgia for me,” Thiessen says about Johnny Rebs’. “I used to take my boyfriend here. It was the one place my parents were OK that we went to.”

She points out the wood-lined booth across the narrow dining room where she used to sit during her teenage dates. Our server interrupts the memory to take our order.

”You don’t come here on a diet,” Thiessen says, surveying the laminated menu. “That’s for sure.”

She orders an appetizer called the Whole South Sampler: a plate of fried chicken with coleslaw, mashed potatoes, gravy and cornbread; fried catfish with macaroni and cheese and collard greens; jalapeño hush puppies; and a plate of sweet potato fries.

“Do you still have the peach cobbler?” she asks.

They do.

Thiessen claps excitedly and orders one for dessert.

A few minutes later, our server returns with a platter as big as a truck tire, filled edge to edge with frickles, fried okra, onion rings and fried green tomatoes in varying shades of golden brown. This is just our appetizer.

I have always had a love for Southern food,” she says, scanning the sampler platter. “I ended up marrying a Southern man. Wait, do you like okra?”

I nod enthusiastically, already reaching for one of the nuggets of fried vegetables.

“OK, we can be friends,” she says.

The okra are cut into bite-sized pieces, which makes them highly snackable. The frickles are crisp, well seasoned and still juicy in the middle. And the onion rings are the kind that are more about the batter than the onion inside.

The rest of our order arrives in a flurry of more brown.

“The cornmeal on the catfish is just so good,” Thiessen says. “It’s that crunchy cornmeal that gets me every time.”

The fish is lightly battered in the same cornmeal that coats the frickles and okra. The restaurant could probably get away with frying just about anything in that batter and it would be excellent.

The fried chicken is juicy. The hush puppies are generously studded with diced jalapeño. We power through a good portion of every dish, almost forgetting about dessert. Almost.

Nearly 10 minutes after we place our order, Thiessen is still looking longingly at the menu, contemplating adding the fried bananas and lok lak (pepper beef on tomatoes and cucumber).

Though she’s always loved to cook, she says she didn’t become a “foodie” until she started traveling.

“When I was doing that lovely Saturday morning show I can’t talk about [this interview took place during the ongoing SAG strike], and traveling overseas, that’s when my whole world opened up,” she says. “I was like whoa, food is so different and tells a story and evokes emotion and all those wonderful things.”

Khut delivers the plate of jerky, presented as large sticks of beef stacked like logs in a campfire. They’re the size of beef ribs, and remind us both of something the Flintstones might enjoy.

We peel pieces of the dried meat like string cheese, pulling away long tiles and dipping them in a sauce made with rice vinegar, shallot and sharp black peppercorns from Cambodia.

The beef is fantastically meaty, dried but not devoid of moisture. It’s salty and garlicky, eating more like a well-seasoned steak.

“I’m a pretty good connoisseur of beef jerky,” Thiessen says. “If I had this beef jerky on our road trips as a kid, I would have never argued with my brothers. I’d be the perfect daughter.”

The tom kha soup, served in a large silver bowl over a small flame, is rich with coconut milk and bright with lemongrass, lime and galangal.

“I could eat this soup every day,” she says as she sips the deep orange broth. “This is one of the best ones I’ve ever had.”

Pancho’s isn’t on our schedule for the day but Thiessen insists we stop by for a plate of enchiladas.

“It’s been 25 years since I’ve been here,” she says, looking up at the restaurant’s tall brown sign. “This is the place I used to come when we did go out to eat because it was a special night that didn’t happen often, but Poncho’s was that place we all wanted to go.”

Her go-to order is the cheese enchiladas with onions. The cylinders of tortillas and cheese come drenched in a red sauce, with melted cheese blanketing the surface.

“With the onions inside, that cheese, that sauce, it tastes exactly the same as I remember,” she says. “I feel like I’m 10 all over again.”

We sit down at the chef’s counter, the only open seats in the bustling restaurant. Heritage, run by sister and brother Lauren Pretty and chef Philip Pretty, serves a seven-course tasting menu. It is the first and only restaurant in Long Beach to be awarded a Michelin star and it’s been on Thiessen’s bucket list for months now.

“My parents and my aunt and uncle are still here in Long Beach, so when you see a success story within your community, it feels pretty cool,” she says. “I love what the restaurant has done for themselves and for the community of Long Beach.”

Our first course is a beautiful presentation of farm-raised beets, tangy house-made yogurt, cucumber, yuzu granita and burnt strawberries.

“Stunning,” Thiessen says. “There is so much complexity without being complex. Does that even make sense? It’s not fussy. It’s very harmonious.”

Her delight increases with each course, moaning with her first bites of grilled diver scallop and again, and maybe even louder, for the black cod. The word “stunning” is uttered repeatedly. The Iberico pork shoulder with polenta elicits more than a few gasps, and by the time the toasted sunchoke ice cream arrives, served over a sunflower seed praline, with bits of caramelized banana and sunflower petals as edible garnish, she’s already making plans to return with her husband.

By this point in the evening, I’ve made transforming our leftovers into a sort of game for Thiessen. She can repurpose the leftover pork on a simple cold salad. The cod she might put on toast for a “little Niçoise on toast kind of thing.