Eating on the Wild Side
Fish, steak and chicken are common favorites of many taste buds, but there are some foodies whose palates go wild for dishes such as emu, venison, elk and kangaroo. You can find them all in Greenville at Saskatoon. It’s where the wild things are.
Trail guide and owner Edmund Woo
grills these wild meats to perfection.
Woo, a Greenville native, is accustomed to the restaurant business. According to Woo, his parents opened the first Chinese restaurant between Atlanta and Charlotte in the mid 1950s. For more than a decade, it was Greenville’s only Chinese restaurant.
Woo took a different culinary approach when he opened Saskatoon in 1995. The casual fine dining restaurant, with a rustic Northwoods lodge atmosphere, is unique to Greenville. Greenville is home for Woo, and he thought it a perfect place to do business.
“Greenville is big enough that you can find almost anything, but it’s small enough that it still has that small town feel,” Woo said.
Evidence of the wild is obvious in Saskatoon.
Antlers are a part of the light fixtures, and a giant moose
trophy head hangs above the fireplace in the dining room.
In addition to wild game, steak, fish, pork, chicken and shrimp are also served.
“We’ll have a group of diners come in, and they’ll want to try something that’s unique and different, so what they’ll do is get some different appetizers of different wild game,” Woo explains, “They’ll get some buffalo, a taste of elk or a taste of venison, and for their entrée sometimes they’ll end up having steak or a piece of salmon. But the next day, they’ll have the opportunity to tell their friends that they’ve tried three or four wild items.”
Saskatoon won the Greenville News’s 2009 Best of the Upstate award for its delicious steaks.
Blue Ridge Brewing Company in Greenville has a much less intensive menu of wild game. Best known for its unique craft of signature beers, Blue Ridge offers a wild game sampler which can include three of the following: venison, antelope, quail, rabbit, buffalo, wild boar or duck breast. South Dakota buffalo flank steak is also on the menu during dinner.
So, are you game for a wild dish?
Try eating on the wild side.