Who cares which came first?Nectar Farm Kitchen’s fried chicken benedict brings it all together

I do not need a ‘reason’ to eat fried chicken, unless you want to count breathing. If a kitchen is breading and frying tenders and breasts, you know what I am having.

“I don’t think I can trust you if you don’t like fried chicken,” said chef and culinary director Chris Carge, the brains behind the menu at Nectar Farm Kitchen, whose Old Town Bluffton and Hilton Head locations offer identical and delectable daily menus.

He and I need to hang out.

Among four versions of Benedicts always on offer, Nectar’s Fried Chicken Benedict brings the best of a chicken’s bounty together on one piled-high plate.

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Best of cluck

Nectar boasts a larger menu than we normally trust, but everything Carge, executive chef Corey Adams, and their crew crank out is scratch-made and plated in copious portions.

On the ‘BREAKFAST & LUNCH = BRUNCH’ menu, there is too much to choose from but only because I have just the one stomach.

I would never fault anyone’s opting for the more ubiquitous chicken-and-waffles, which looked to be the most popular lunchtime order last Wednesday lunchtime, but I wanted the mélange of a runny yolk and gravy over a biscuit.

Each component of the Fried Chicken Benedict is crafted in-house to chef’s standards, headlined by the bird. Borrowing the technique popularized by that most popular chicken chain, Carge’s recipe calls for a 12-hour brine in pickle juice.

The Springer Mountain (Baldwin, Georgia) chicken is then soaked in buttermilk and dredged in seasoned flour before being fried to order. The crispy exterior more than holds up to being slathered in sawmill gravy, made from the pan-frying process, and cascading free-range yolks from Storey Farms (Johns Island, South Carolina).

The dish’s foundation is one of Nectar’s ‘swim’ biscuits, called so because they “swim in buttermilk and butter,” per Carge. Pans of scratch-baked biscuits, ladled with butter, come out of the ovens every 15 minutes, and prior to plating, one is halved, buttered again, and seared on the flat top to form a crust that stands up.

I paused for a few awkward moments when our server asked for my choice of grits or hash browns before I stammered out an anguished query over the latter’s preparation. Though I am sure that I would have inhaled the Congaree Milling Company (Columbia, South Carolina) stone-ground grits, I cannot tell you how happy I am that I chose the other side.

More smashed brown than hash brown, this take transcends its unfairly mundane moniker. Imagine a McD’s patty and a latke had a potato baby that was flat-top seared and lightly pressed, tender on the inside and crunchy on the outside.

“That’s what we were going for,” said Carge, “only less greasy.”

He said the rendition hails from Sweden, though Nectar’s recipe is “jazzed up a bit with garlic powder, onion powder, and other spices.” Cooked twice, the patty is flash-fried and then kept warm on the flat top before being sizzled a second time to order.

There was not a speck left on my plate.

Tasty day trip

Throughout our marriage, my wife and I have always tried to turn errands into ‘excuses’ to go out to eat, and those that we strategically plan around noon bookend what we gleefully call ‘flunch’: our own little Portmanteau of ‘fun’ and ‘lunch’.

During my winter break, I sweetened a trip up to Savannah Surfaces before they closed for the holidays with a lunch date and stroll around Old Town Bluffton, an outing we do a few times each year.

Admittedly, this is no scoopy reportage, but Bluffton is a delightful day trip for Savannahians. The village itself, though understandably busy with traffic on May River Road as it bends onto Bluffton Road, is cute as a button, especially with the relatively recent addition of Wright Family Park right on the river.

Perhaps FARM can be credited for resetting Bluffton’s restauration bar when it opened back in 2016. Over the last several years, so many places have opened and thrived, and Nectar’s second outpost, which will turn two in January, is among the most popular. It may help that the eatery is enormous, seating 100 inside at booths, high tops, and a full bar, and 150 more on an airy garden patio furnished with its own bar.

The interior bears little, if any, resemblance to what had been a Fat Pattie’s, charmingly redesigned into a cavernous but cozy barn bedecked in antique white bricks, warm woods, honey-toned metals, and denim blue booths.

On our next visit, I am going to take Carge’s suggestion and try what he thinks is the restaurant’s most popular dish across breakfast, brunch, lunch, and dinner: the Spicy Chicken n’ Pickles sandwich. Brined in that eponymous juice, the bird is dredged and fried in house-made chili oil and served on toasted country white bread, slathered with Duke’s mayo and topped with local honey and plenty of pickles.

Suffice to say, if a Nectar opened up in our collective neck of the woods, we would all be there at least once a week.

For now, make the drive and enjoy the food.

Nectar Farm Kitchen Bluffton (207 Bluffton Road, Bluffton, South Carolina) is open Monday through Friday (10 a.m. to 9 p.m.) and Saturday and Sunday (9 a.m. to 9 p.m.)

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Nectar Farm Kitchen’s fried chicken benedict worth the drive to Bluffton