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Post and Courier critic Hanna Raskin goes all pizza this week with reviews for takeout space Luke’s Craft Pizza and pop-up La Morra Pizzeria. Raskin stops by two La Morra events and recognizes the New York influences in chef Zach Swemle’s pies, but says the samples “suffered from what tasted like an overabundance of excitement.” Then she gets more specific: “La Morra’s dough has a beguiling tang, but it’s hard to get past the crust’s flop and ash.” Raskin concludes that the wood-fired pop-up is fun however, and “[her] inclination is to roll with it.”
From La Morra, Raskin inspects Ashley Avenue stop Luke’s Craft Pizza. She calls the pies as “stock photo pretty” and describes the crust in great detail:
Its crust, punctuated by fully browned bubbles and milder heat scars, has just the right amount of stretch: In a delicious instance of difference-splitting, the edges register aurally as crispy and tactilely as chewy.
All of that is to say Luke’s gets 3.5 stars from Raskin.
Eclectic cafe Sermet's Southernterranean Cuisine-Bar recently opened on James Island to much excitement — chef/owner Sermet Aslan is a well-known name in the Lowcountry community, but, the area also yearns for good, independently owned restaurants. This week, City Paper critic Suzanne Cohen tries it out and comes away with “... the food is just fine and that's actually fine.” She hints that area residents may settle for “[n]ot excellent and not awful” cuisine if that means they don’t have to battle traffic to get downtown or pay for parking.
What makes the menu so “meh”? The sauce in the shrimp and grits reminds Cohen of “Papa John's pizza sauce,” the charred romaine salad is “overworked,” the calamari are tender but lean “too heavily on the citrus element,” the scallops are too salty, and the pork tastes like “smoky grill grates.” Cohen does like the herb-crusted eggplant however, calling it her “favorite of the bunch.”
