Southern Hospitality is a Memphis-style barbeque restaurant/bar co-owned by the 26-year-old pop star Justin Timberlake. This isn't his first crack at the food biz. Inside LA's Hyatt West Hollywood there was Chi Restaurant and Lounge, a dim-sum joint venture between Timberlake and brothers/bar owners Art and Allan Davis. "There's an indoor and outdoor patio with waterfalls, with seating areas around the waterfalls," Allan explained to MTV almost four years ago. In 2005, Timberlake was reported to have vomited at the bar. Quoth Yelp: "Justin Timberlake's Club Ain't Justified!" Chi closed by year's end. Late December 2005, TImberlake announced he was backing Destino, a semi-fancy Italian restaurant in midtown New York with Eytan Sugarman, a self-made man apparently life-coached gratis by baseball's Tommy Lasorda. In a 2002 partnership with hip-hop's Timbaland, Sugarman had opened Suede, a Chelsea club that closed in 2006. Timberlake's Destino is still around––that said, click on "OWNERS" and all you'll see is "COMING SOON." Encouraged by the lack of failure, Sugarman and Timberlake teamed up with JT's childhood bud Trace Ayala for Southern Hospitality, which opened July 2007, which borrows its vibe from Timberlake's hometown Memphis and steals its dessert recipes from Timberlake's own grandmother. Recommendations from Justin: "fried green tomatoes and the pulled pork."

Not to slack: You don't need me to tell you that the food here was pretty awful, do you? You don't need me to tell you that the babyback ribs were bone-dry, that the sauce didn't smother the meat so much as sit on top of it, some real microwave-quality stuff––right? Maybe you could imagine a sucker like me dropping nine bucks on Maker’s neat––but do you really need me to break down the rum-to-iced tea ratio in their group specialty cocktail known as Creek Water? The fried green tomatoes and the fried pickles tasted identical, flat––nothing fresh or sweet or tart on the inside to balance out the salty deep-frier. Beans, which came with almost every dish, swam flavorless in their own preservative liquid. Mac-and-cheese, a dish I didn't realize could not taste delicious, was remarkably uneventful––not poorly made, but the cheeses themselves were bland, unsturdy. There is no point in discussing the waitress's face, is there, or in mentioning, even ironically, that Justin himself was M.I.A..

Or is there? Timberlake's absence, or the extent of his absence, stuck out most. You won't see his name on the menu or punned on for the cocktail list (e.g. "Sex on the 'Lake"), won't hear his songs on the speakers (you will hear "Mary Jane's Last Dance"), won't find his mug up on the wall among photos of other Memphis heroes (Elvis has a whole dot-matrixed wall to himself, protected behind glass). The restaurant's storefront, on the east side of Second Avenue between 76th and 77th Streets, might be the darkest on the block: Budweiser, Sierra Nevada, Coors Light neons provide some color, but the place's sign, written in one of those small-caps fonts you'd recognize in an MS Word drop-down if you saw it, it might as well be called "Restaurant Font," had zero exterior illumination. Hanging much more prominently above that sign though were two huge eye-catching banners. One read "CENTER FOR MOVEMENT"; the other "PILATES." I actually didn't see the restaurant until I had crossed the street, then had to cross back.

Granted, Timberlake could count on the secret-hungry press to get the word out about his restaurant, located way up in that capitalist crownstone the Upper East Side, without being too loud about it––without (say) making the storefront look like his face or the entranceway like you're walking into his mouth. But aside from the internet confirming Justin has a stake in the place and proved it by coming out for the opening, you would have no reason to assume anything. You would have no reason to go into this restaurant and expect anything but a probably mediocre meal.