Sydney Meers’ new FishPig Cafe is a wild, challenging world of Southern comfort

By now, Sydney Meers seems so central to the character of Hampton Roads food that you’d have to invent him if he didn’t already exist.

Through more than three decades and a multitude of restaurants, he has been an idiosyncratic and somewhat mischievous and inescapable presence in local restaurants. A deep-Southern transplant from truck-stop Senatobia, Mississippi, Meers makes mid-Atlantic food as personal as a heart attack — with personality as towering as his heirloom pork pie.

You could consider Meers’ new Syd’s FishPig Cafe, located in Norfolk’s Selden Market, a bit of a victory lap. It is, in part, a greatest hits compilation pulling together decades’ worth of flavors onto its fast-rotating menu. And if he has the ingredients on hand, Meers said he’ll dig through his files to make any of his dishes that you can remember.

But the FishPig also has its own, very singular identity. It is a single-mindedly fleshly place, near-mercilessly devoted to its two namesake ingredients. The meat-filled menu can sometimes read like a James Tate poem about gout — with sidebar yarns about the salty ham spread accompanying Meers’ “infamous cheese tray,” or a decadent pork-o-rama platter with four takes on pig from “smoochie bear” tasso ham to heaping pork belly.

Service is as pleasantly loose as any Southern fish tale, while the décor is like no other in the region. Meers spent more than a year layering the place like a wedding cake, building it into a rainbow explosion of folk art and simple chutzpah. If you stumbled in without knowing it was a restaurant, you’d think it was the apartment of outsider artist Henry Darger.

Like the Roman war front the night before a battle, the FishPig’s every surface is covered with camp: a grinningly obscene painting of Elvis the “dum fluffy dog,” chalkware cowboys, pigs with mouths agape, and a drag-queen Wonder Woman presiding from the ceiling in rough papier-mache.

Pee Wee Herman, whose playhouse the restaurant often resembles, makes an appearance. And everywhere on the walls there is a profusion of Syd: young Syd, old Syd, Syd at a lake. Pictures of Syd that were painted by Syd, and paintings of Syd by former Virginian-Pilot writers.

The menu is just as carnivalesque and prone to near-daily improvisations. Most items — from well-executed takes on rillettes to meat pies to whatever fish came in on the boats — are only “visiting.” Their precise configuration may depend on the freshest ingredients, in micro-seasons of ramp and shad roe and migratory wreckfish. It may also depend on the attention-deficit whims of a chef eager to keep himself entertained.

Even the excellent fresh-baked sourdough, crisped up at a fiery 500 degrees and raised with a 17-year-old yeast starter, may take different ingredients from day to day. One night it may evince the ethereal lightness of soda bread, while on another it may take on the heft of bran or the flavorful oomph of South Dakota wheatberry. The butter may arrive spiced and flavored, or it may come as the essence of whipped air.

Either way, that bread is an ode to Southern hospitality, a consistent highlight of each meal that is often, surprisingly, one of the lightest things on the menu.

Another form of constancy comes from a steady palette of flavors that serves as the baseline for improvisations.

The “world’s only ketchup vinaigrette,” built with spice and balsamic into a singular take on steak sauce, might accompany a New York Strip or a battered shrimp appetizer. Lightly cold-smoked tomatoes pervade the menu, whether as buried umami in a gumbo or a bright side to a filet of tuna. A cabbage-pepper “hamburger relish,” a delicate cousin of Southern chow chow, goes wherever it likes. Meers’ herb-rich étouffée spice mix heats up the Cajun stews, sure. But it also goes on his unorthodox and wonderful pimento cheese made with aged and crystallized Oregon cheddar.

Order the cheese plate with pimento and a cheese from Europe, and you’ll move from strength to strength: house bread, inventive meat spread, reconceived pimento and relish.

Be sure to also get the étouffée or the gumbo when available. They are not quite traditional, but they are delicious — almost brothy in their lightness, aggressively spiced and complexly herbal. Their Cajun trinity of pepper, celery and onion arrive thick-chunked and with their crispness still intact.

And so rather than blend into stew, the dish’s characteristic veggies retain their individual integrity. You strongly taste each element of the trinity and what it offers to the whole: Even with the tongue-stinging blend of chili heat, it’s almost an arty take on gumbo, forcing you to confront each ingredient.

The same holds true for each element in the pork-o-rama, whether salty and spicy ham or a pork pie so loaded with flavors it’s almost floral. A shad roe plate in March likewise highlighted its main ingredient. Rather than come loaded with our region’s customary bacon fat, the shad’s egg sac was allowed to express its saltiness and muddiness with bracing loudness. This was tempered and balanced elsewhere on the plate by a creamily herbal lemon sauce and the sweetness and mildness of a kingklip filet loaded atop the roe.

That last plate highlights an essential character of the place: The FishPig can be aggressive in its fleshiness and indulgence, as if David Cronenberg had directed a restaurant. If you order broadly, Syd’s can be demanding, a marathon of salt and spice and fats.

But in the case of that shad roe dish, the plate rewards diners’ fortitude with formal elegance, pulling together surprising contrasts into a satisfying whole.

Because the restaurant pulls from Meers’ long history of recipes, some plates can seem as if they stepped unchanged from a time portal. This was true of a blue-cheese-topped steak, and also of the fried shrimp doused in malt vinegar, and a tuna steak served medium-well by default.

In a restaurant so capable of intensity and surprise, those retro plates can come on a little staid — even with the crisp pop of smoked tomatoes alongside the steak, or the welcome architecture of a corncake draped across the tuna.

But Meers isn’t too worried about dining trends.

“I do what I want to cook, not what’s trendy or what people want,” he said. “I’m old, I don’t care. Everybody can come in and eat.”

The wine list is broad but also personal-feeling, including a very welcome noble-rot Sauternes lovely as an aperitif. The restaurant’s $15 cocktails also hearken to a time before the stirred-cocktail revolution of the early 2000s, with bourbon drinks that infuse fruit and Christmas spice into whiskey, served with crazily candied nut garnishes. That said, each drink I tried was also tons of fun: a throwback drink menu filled with whimsy.

If the FishPig is not a perfect restaurant, and not always an easy one either, it remains as interesting as any in the region. Even its failures are interesting. And when it hits, it hits where you don’t expect.

The Monte Cristo sandwich, of all things, is a near-perfect food. The classic Monte Cristo is a ham-and-cheese sandwich that has been basted in egg and then fried, a bit like a French parody of the American South, or vice versa.

Meers said he first encountered the sandwich at a restaurant of the same name in Batesville, Mississippi. And though it was a favorite of his father’s, he didn’t overwhelmingly love it. And so he remade it from its barest parts, and he continues to do so again and again in different variations.

Our visit involved Oregon cheddar and a granular pork-sausage meatloaf, adding both texture and spice to the proceedings. Rather than sauté it, as is traditional, Meers cooked the sandwich’s eggy brioche to tantalizing crispness in the oven, then doused the whole production with still more fat: a blonde roux herbed up with thyme, deepened and sweetened with his trademark smoked tomato and tomato water.

The result is like a Southern shaggy-dog story delivered in sandwich form, confected from Sydney Meers’ personal culinary history into a thing of surprising delicacy, airiness and crispness.

Somehow, you never feel the weight of its ingredients. Though served on cast-iron and eaten with a fork, Meers’ Monte Cristo is a buttery Southern comfort that feels so light it should float. And because nothing like it existed, he had to invent it.

Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com

If you go

The spot: Syd’s FishPig Cafe, 210 E. Main St., Norfolk (entrance on street or in Selden Market)

The vibe: Wild, woolly, weird, art-filled space with casual service and inventive Southern and Mid-Atlantic plates from one of the more idiosyncratic chefs in Tidewater

Order this: Gumbo or étouffée, the neo-Monte Cristo, pork-o-rama grande or petite, whatever interesting and seasonal fish feels clever, cheese plate. Note that plates are filling: Two diners can likely be sated by splitting an entree and an appetizer or two.

Hours: 4 to 10 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday; 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. brunch, first Sunday of each month.

COVID protocols: Masked servers, spaced tables, tiny and more open-air “patio” in the Selden Market. Distanced bar seating offered.

Food prices: Appetizers, $10 to $17; entrees, $19 to $31 (or higher if you want dry-aged steak). Desserts, $9 to $10.

Drinks: $15 cocktails, very minimal beer menu, very extensive and pleasant wine menu, including a fun little section for noble-rot wines by the glass.

Kid-friendly? Not really

Vegan/veg/gluten: There’s at least one vegan dish and a salad on the menu. But let’s just say this is not a place designed for restricted dining palettes in general.

Disabled-access? Yes

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Reservations? By phone

Parking: Street, or at the parking structure across Main Street

Contact: 757-904-3680, fishpigcafe.com.

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Got burning questions about Hampton Roads food? Articles you’d like to see? Starting in the next few weeks, food writer Matthew Korfhage will hold regular Facebook video chats answering reader questions, and providing deeper context on food stories. Send questions or notes to matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com with the subject line “WHAT’S UP WITH FOOD”.

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Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com.