Our server looked incredulous when I said I’d never tried grits before. I had never tried hush puppies either — or crayfish, or grouper, or pimento cheese — before a recent trip to South Walton, a coastal community in the Florida Panhandle. Despite having visited family in Florida for the last 20 years, this region felt a world apart from the Florida I thought I knew. South Walton is closer to Atlanta, New Orleans, Birmingham, Memphis, and Nashville than it is to Miami, and everything from the cuisine to the warm, overbrimming Southern hospitality served as a constant reminder that I had ventured where few northerners had been before.
