Stretch Cooking: A meat-and-three to slim the wallet

In most meat-and-three establishments, you can expect the bill for two to run about $20. At Art Smith's place in Chicago, the bill for two was $200.

Smith was Oprah's personal chef for some time, then two years ago, he opened his own place, Table 52, on Elm St. just off State. It is not your classic meat-and-three; the setting is comfortable but refined, and the menu is definitely upscale and features entrees like Pistachio-Crusted Chicken Breast and Ancho Chili-Crusted Berkshire Pork Chop.

But there is an unmistakable meat-and-three presence in the place, as if Art Smith, a native Southerner, put it there so people could see it, if they knew what to look for. Reading the menu, I had the feeling that Smith put it there on some kind of a personal dare that went something like, "I bet I can open a Chicago restaurant where I can sell catfish and three sides for $26."

In fact that is where my eye stopped, on the menu, and would go no farther. I read: "Cornmeal Crusted Catfish with Cheese Grits, Bacon-Braised Collard Greens, Hush Puppy and Crispy Okra - $26." Art, my man, you did it. I will gladly go back any time to Table 52 and pay $26 for the catfish and three. The only thing missing was the muddiness of a river-caught catfish, which is impossible to find anymore; catfish are all farm-raised now. Art Smith, of course, would know this, and regret it; his biographical material says he grew up in northern Florida and learned to cook from an African-American woman who was his baby-sitter. If she is alive, she will roll her eyes at her protégé serving up farm-raised catfish, but there are some things in the modern world that you can't do much about.

Karen and I also shared fried green tomatoes ($9), gussied up and served as a starter: ""Fried Green Tomato Napoleon with Goat Cheese, Local Greens, Applewood-Smoked Bacon & Olive & Sun-Dried Tomato Tapenades." It was a cute stack of the fried tomatoes and the other stuff in between, which was tasty and didn't get in the way of the fried tomatoes.

Then, with our entrees (Karen departed the Southern mood with fresh Alaskan halibut, simply grilled), we shared a side of macaroni and cheese, which was $9 and worth it. We had seen another patron being served a large bowl with cheese crusted on the top and spilling over the sides, and we thought it was onion soup. It was macaroni and cheese, filled to overflowing, then finished off in a pizza oven that turned the overflow dribbles brown and crusty. If we had a pizza oven, I would try this at home, one or two nights a week.

I was chipping greedily at the cheese crust when a waiter passed our table with a slice of a towering, heavily frosted, three-layer cake, invoking visions of the Membership Luncheon of the Atlanta Woman's Club. This, we learned, was Hummingbird Cake, which we could neither pass up, nor finish. We took the last of it with us and stumbled out the door into a driving rain and a cab back to our hotel.

The bill would have been lower without glasses of champagne and a bottle of wine, but what the heck. You don't just drink iced tea at Art Smith's kind of meat-and-three.