When the pork rinds hit the table, they’re still cracking and popping like the world’s biggest, hottest Rice Krispies. When they hit your mouth they’re about that light, too, so crisp they almost melt on your tongue.

Welcome to Southwood Kitchen in Daphne, where these rinds come with the whipped pimento cheese appetizer. Maybe it’s wrong to dwell on them. Even on the appetizer menu, they’re just one great option among many. You might find grilled Spanish octopus, a salad of pork belly with watermelon, Alabama crab chili rellenos or tempura squash blossoms stuffed with goat cheese and served with mango jalapeno compote.

But they do serve as a nice introduction to what makes Southwood Kitchen such a fun place to dine. It’s not just the novelty value of elevating this lowbrow, guilty-pleasure snack into something that’s such a far cry from the tooth-cracking bagged version or the greasy county-fair take. It’s the culinary joy of finding imagination and execution both displayed at such high levels.

And if you haven’t heard of Southwood, it might be because the people who do know about it deliberately decided not to tell you about it. Because they’re having a hard enough time getting in as it is.

“If you don’t have a reservation by Tuesday for Friday, you’re not going to get one,” said chef and owner Jeremiah Matthews, marveling at the loyal clientele he and his staff have built since August 2017.

He’s not bragging. It’s just a fair warning. Southwood Kitchen is not a big place and it’s in demand, so you don’t want to take a walk-up availability for granted – even if it’s not Friday. Fortunately, there’s a workaround: They don’t take reservations at the adjacent Southbar, run by partner Tracy Lynn Ong, which doesn’t allow children and which has a more casual bar vibe but the same menu.

Back to the lunch menu. Don’t want the pork rinds ($8), however elevated the presentation might be? Fine. Try the hot crawfish artichoke dip ($12), which doesn’t skimp on the crawfish, and which comes with some crostini so tasty you’d probably be happy with just them. Or skip the appetizer and go straight for the Snake River Wagyu French Dip, a savory avalanche of textures from crisp baguette to gooey provolone on buttery beef. Or go for that regional staple, shrimp and grits. Matthews’ version, with parmesan gorgonzola grits, is on that select list of dishes that incorporate Conecuh sausage without being overwhelmed by it.

Where did it come from, this willingness to mix highbrow and humble ingredients? Probably from Matthews’ unusually eclectic path to his role as owner and head chef.

He started out as a kid growing up in Magnolia Springs and got his first restaurant job washing dishes in a place called Bogart’s in Gulf Shores. His family moved to Florida for a while and he worked at Buster’s in Destin, starting as a dishwasher and working his way up to oyster shucker and cook. He liked it, but he tried his hand at landscaping and boat rigging before getting on with Ruby Tuesday in Fairhope.

He was a still a kid, but he was picking up on different aspects of the business. The menu at Ruby Tuesday didn’t necessarily seem like the be-all and end-all, but their systems for doing business were impressive. He became a trainer for a while, helping new restaurants get up and running. His dad suggested he give culinary school a shot and he did, at Paul Smith’s College in upstate New York.

They offered a French internship program. “Somehow I made it,” he said. And that’s how this young American came to spend a few months working the lower rungs of the ladder at one of the world’s most famous restaurants, L’Arpège.

“The chef’s name was Alain Passard. He’s still a chef there, he still owns it. Still has three Michelin stars,” said Matthews. “As a matter of fact in 2001 he took meat off the menu, went completely vegetarian, and still maintained three Michelin stars. He’s an animal.” (Note: Passard later returned fish and poultry to the menu on a limited basis.)

Matthews wasn’t “on the front line.” He recalls mornings down in the bakery, juicing lemons and limes by the case. But the overall experience was life-changing. “I loved it,” he said. “It was awesome.”

Back in the Mobile area he worked at a series of restaurants before the economic downturn in 2008 drove him to branch out. He began taking on seasonal work as a chef for hunting parties out west. “I would take 10 guests in the backcountry, load everything up on horses, and I’d cook for them back there. It was just amazing,” he said. “Elk season was really fun because these guys are paying 10 grand for an eight-day hunt. So they expect to eat good.”

In between such ventures, in places such as Jackson Hole, Wyo., he’d come back to short-term jobs in coastal Alabama. One of these landed him at Jesse’s in Magnolia Springs, not far from where he’d grown up. He stopped roving as a four-month consulting job turned into six years. Leaving Jesse’s wasn’t an easy choice, he said, but the opportunity to open Southwood Kitchen was a chance to go his own way.

He opened Southwood in August 2017, and found he had a few kinks to work out. He started with small plates. “Come to find out, people in this area were happy enough to buy one small plate and eat that as dinner, which wasn’t working,” he said. “We even had a burger on the nighttime menu. It took six or eight months, we made some adjustments.”

Growth followed, but so did the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We pivoted into takeout. We changed the menu,” he said. “We pivoted the menu to stuff that would travel well, stuff that when you got home it was still going to be hot and look good.”

“The to-go orders were insane. We’d do 300 to-go orders a night,” he said. “It was a struggle. Our sales definitely dipped but it was enough to keep going.”

Matthews remains profoundly grateful for the patrons who stuck with him through the pandemic. And with those days fading further into the past, he’s gotten better and better at giving them what they want. “We have great support from our clientele,” he said. “We have a lot of the same regulars that eat here two or three times a week.”

As his earlier remark indicates, there’s no longer a burger on the dinner menu. You won’t miss it. The short slate presents a balance of “scale & shells” and “feathers & feet.” in a nod to Matthews’ backcountry-chef days, elk is always on the menu. You might find Durham Ranch elk tenderloin ($45) seared with Aleppo pepper and dressed with pickled garlic chimichurri, black garlic lacquer and shiitake spinach risotto, but that’s not written in stone. Depending on your timing you might find elk chops, elk tamales or even elk Wellington.

On a recent visit, my companion chose the diver scallops ($34), pan-seared and served with roasted red pepper coulis, goat cheese green onion orzo, sunflower sprouts and “garlic chili crunch.” The presentation was beautiful, and better yet, the delicate flavor of the scallops themselves came through.

My golden tile ($32) wasn’t nearly as photogenic, given that its presentation involved grits and sauce. But it was the flavor that mattered. The tilefish itself was a fine, firm slab of fish. Bronzed and served with crawfish and smoked tomato potlikker, over pimento cheese grits, over cider-braised collards, strewn with charred corn pico and cotija. If that sounds like a lot, well, it was a lot. Much in the way a symphony is a lot of instruments. I’m still thinking about that little note of sweet-tartness that the cider snuck into the collards.

There are ingredients and other elements here, starting with the pork rinds and pimento cheese, that suggest farm-to-table thinking. Matthews says he doesn’t personally embrace the term. He’ll reach far past local sources to get the elk or the wagyu beef he wants, for example.

At the same time, he can reel off a list of exclusive local providers that he does use, from farms to Fairhope Fish House. “They run a true day boat,” he said. “Their freshness is beyond what I can get from anybody else.”

The real guiding principle here is a little looser, maybe a little more playful.

“The concept, we really didn’t have one in the beginning. It was kind of, make food fun again,” said Matthews. “It’s still a little all over the place.”

He’s always taking in new ideas, he said, and he encourages his kitchen staff to do the same: He wants them to look at menus, cookbooks, magazines. He wants them to feel good about bringing inspiration into the kitchen.

“I’m real big on involving my kitchen crew on menu decisions and menu research and stuff like that,” he said. “I’m one person. One person only has so many ideas. It’s so much better when you have several minds.”

He’s branching out himself. He has partnered with Foosackly’s co-founder Will Fusaiotti to bring a Fairhope landmark, Ben’s Jr. Bar-B-Que, back to life. He also owns the site of the former La Cocina Mexican restaurant and has plans for that.

“I need them to be able to think on their own and come up with their own stuff,” he said of his kitchen staff at Southwood. “I worked for a few chefs years ago who did that for me, and it kind of left a mark.”

Nowadays, it seems, Matthews is leaving a mark of his own.

Southwood Kitchen is at 1203 U.S. 98, Suite D., in Daphne. For menus, reservations and other information, visit southwoodkitchen.com. For tantalizing images of lunch and dinner specials, visit www.facebook.com/southwoodkitchen.

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