Preaching Pleasure in a Plague

You’ll notice, if you compare the date of this post and the post previous, that I am having some trouble staying on task. David Rakoff said:

“Writing is like pulling teeth.

From my dick.” 

And sitting here in London where the sun sets before four in the afternoon and the television screen is full of American body bags, he might not have put a fine enough point on it.

There is the widely felt pandemic brain fog and productivity-suck that everyone I know is suffering from. Then there is something specific to food writing. There is of course the fact that restaurants and bars are mostly closed, or shadows of their former selves, or irresponsibly dangerous to attend. It is relatively easy—or at least sincere—for me to write about the magic of a good restaurant meal, or a debauched night on the town. It is less easy and less admirable to write about the truth. Which, in this case means eating delivery from somewhere called “Bombay Burrito” for at least one meal a day, and last week spending a too large chunk of my dwindling savings on a box of six “fancy Christmas wines” to last me through the month and then drinking all of them that evening (Jill helped) washing down an aforementioned Bombay Burrito and, judging by the litter next to my bed, some delivery McDonalds chicken nuggets.

The bigger problem is that these are such serious times, and even at its loftiest and most serious food writing just isn’t up to the needs of the moment. Many many people are dead. Many more are cold and hungry and out of work. Many are cruel, and racist and murderous. The few who are flourishing are callous and corrupt. The very few who are genuinely hopeful, surely cannot read.

So, it seems tacky of me to choose this moment to tell you that Sauternes is about to have a moment — though I do think Sauternes is about to have a moment and a long time coming too. Mark my words.

Mind, I don’t mean food reporting. Now is absolutely the time to investigate the food industry, how we are failing food workers and how dearly we will miss them and the many restaurants which will surely be swept out in the wake of this thing. How restaurants have always been at the bleeding edge of what is tearing post-capitalist societies apart: the impossible economics, the dependence on and disdain for immigrants, the fact that my kids won’t know what a tuna is, and that mid-pandemic we’ve let that bleeding edge become a gaping wound.

These are timely vital stories. But that’s not the kind of food writer I am. Certainly not here on my blog, where no one is paying me to pretend I’m making the world a better place. 

What I want to do is tell you how upsetting I find figs. Because figs can’t be trusted.

Most figs are such utter garbage — fruit whose texture and flavor I would describe as “like rotten fruit.” But figs upset me not because they are so bad but because the gulf between your everyday fig and a really good fig is so inexcusably vast. When a fig is good — maybe a few times in your life unless you come from a family of Turkish famers — it isn’t just good: it opens a portal into this whole other sensual world, a kind of sticky pleasure dome where you are not eating a fig, but you and the fig are swallowing each other. 

They are so good in fact, that whenever we see figs on the menu it is all our duty to order them, even if what invariably arrives is the kind of food you would feed to a hostage as punishment.

That’s what I want to write about. But…

What I’m trying to get at I think is something we are all going through during this poisonous year-long coma: how to justify our existence. 

Maybe your existence was based around that job you lost, or putting your kids through a college that has become a mismanaged disease vector. Or the friends you cannot see etc.

Well, my existence has always been wrapped up in my identity as something of a hedonist. Like the world’s most lapsed Jehovah’s Witness, I’m that guy knocking at your door or sitting next to you on the airplane and asking unbidden: “Have you let pleasure into your life?”

Not an easy role with such little pleasure to go around, and a very real question of whether we deserve any of it in the first place. Missionaries at least can offer you salvation. I could maybe buy you a drink (read: bully you into taking a jäger bomb) but that, despite what a certain strata of very sad men will tell you, is not the same thing. 

It is Americans — and when I say Americans please know in this context I mean “white Americans” because a) that is the group that this applies to, and b) white Americans is the only group of Americans I would ever deign to speak for — who have always been most desperately in need of my pleasure-proselytizing — it would be wasted, for example, on the French who would benefit instead from some more moderating wisdom like “do not sleep with your students.”

Erotic, electric

This may surprise non-Americans who know my country for its more ostentatious shows of happiness: the parades, and television shows about buying things, the driving big trucks over smaller trucks and all the cheering. But just as how this pandemic has exposed to the world how difficult it is for America to mourn, I'd argue the same is true for our ability to enjoy pleasure. We do not apprieciate what Paul Simon described as “windows into our hearts.” We are afraid of joy.

Even as I write I’m not exactly sure what I’m trying to say, and it does feel a bit unfair to single out the Americans, especially as I’m typing from England a country whose ability to show emotion peaked in the era of the calling-card.

But I’m convinced I’m describing a real phenomenon and I’m not the only one who’s noticed.

Like apparently every other white person with an Instagram account, I have been reading a lot of James Baldwin this year. Baldwin is a very serious person (which is not to say humorless, or grim, or infallible) but he is also an unabashed celebrator of pleasure. 

While I knew about his love of clothes and sex and good company and travel, I’m surprised how little I considered his love of food — though anyone leaving America for France, even during the grim racial climate of the 1960’s, must have cuisine somewhere on their mind.

It was only really last week when I read Valerie Stivers most recent “Eat Your Words” column in the Paris Review, “Cooking with James Baldwin” that I conceived of Baldwin as feaster. 

Reading her column, I learned that one Baldwin’s preferred condiments was Roquefort cheese mashed together with French butter—another on a long list of reasons why we really didn’t deserve him.

And it is also where I found some sort of answer to these questions about pleasure and seriousness and identity and America that I had been grappling with. 

Stivers quoted this passage from The Fire Next Time:

“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and becomes as joyless as they have become.”

Baldwin has written about America’s disconnect with its sensual self (its humanity) before, but it is this phrase, that Americans “begin to distrust their own reactions” that resonates most perfectly with my experiences.

This explains our hypocrisy around sex for one, and drinking too. That we drink to get drunk, succeed in getting drunk, but feel we haven’t finished the endeavor until after the important final step: apologizing.

We are not prudes (the puritans themselves were shiny leather and metal buckled freaks, look it up). And it is certainly not that we don’t think we deserve happiness — Americans’ birthright is that we think we deserve everything. 

And it is not shame I think, but something closer to embarrassment. 

It is just what Baldwin said, that we distrust our own reactions to joy. To sigh too heavily, to laugh too loudly, to cry with happiness (or sadness) is too gay or too black or too female — to whoever it is we are so disdainful of. Whether we disdain them for their unbroken link to their humanity is another question and too lofty for this blog — though the answer is yes.

We don’t feast: moaning with our mouths full, letting our eyes roll back and rubbing our bellies/ nipples. We “eat dinner” and if the dinner is very good we maybe, compliment the grill (the machine and not the human being) and ask where the chef buys their groceries. 

Unless you want to hear an American laugh, do not even bother mentioning that most un-American concept since Christian charity: “making love.” 

Pleasure is soft. And softness, even more than running out of bullets, is what America is most afraid of. That is what we are afraid of in death as well, and why we cannot admit that our country has entered a season of death. It is the tenderness of saying goodbye — because I assure you we have no problem with the killing itself.

But America, we got it wrong. It was never about the fucking, it is about the ecstasy. We love freedom but we never hold it anymore, and we really do think that shooting a gun in the air counts as gratitude. We love loudly, and loving loudly is not quite right.

We put in all the work, spend all the money, and then refuse to allow ourselves to be moved. 

I saw on television once a butcher from Tuscany. He sang to his steak before he put it in the oven, and when he took the first bite he burst into tears.

Americans love their steaks, as much or more than any Tuscan. And we have the best steaks in the world (a fact). But go to an American steakhouse — you’ll be happy you did — and every eye will be dry.

I’m sure a rancher in Kobe isn’t embarrassed if his wife catches him whispering sweet lullabies into his favorite cow’s ear at bedtime.

Our steaks deserve our weeping. At this point, I’m sure they long for it. As do we, us the stiff-lipped freedom-loving steak-eaters.

This is of course, extremely serious. If we cannot have authentic, non-circumspect reactions to our most intense emotions then we only allow ourselves a shadow of a life. Putting a toe in the water doesn’t feel swimming.

Pleasure then, and preaching its virtues is vital. It’s not about the pleasure-seeking, or the act of pleasure, it is about allowing ourselves to feel deeply and openly. 

And that, now that it so cold, and so many people are not going to make it through this, and so many more are alone, is more important than ever. 

To repurpose the words of another artist expatriate, someone whose eloquence and unimpeachable ethical compass is so like Baldwin’s, Mel Gibson (as William Wallace) : the tragedy is not in the dying, but it is in the not allowing yourself to truly live.

This distrust of our own hearts is deep-seeded for every America, and like so much else that is deficient or malignant in our culture it will take time and real hard work to unlearn. It is something I struggle with as well. 

For a long time, I thought that embracing pleasure and rebelling against my American dispassions was as easy as spraying champagne on everybody I met. Now I see, what really takes heart, is turning the bottle on myself.

Oh, and since this blog is supposed to be about me moving to England: I’m not sure what this all means for my adopted home — and America's technical emotional forbear. 

I can’t say I’ve seen too many Brits getting misty eyed over their meat pies. Though I do have a good English friend who will spontaneously recite poetry after a exceptional meal. And the bread I’ve had here is marvelous.

Ye Olde Global Crisis

I’m sorry to contribute to what has already been a year of disappointing news but I’ve decided to blog again. If history is any guide, this should be a short-lived experiment so you can at least take solace in that.

Looking back, this original blog set out to answer — by eating, somehow — the lofty question of whether it is possible to come home again. As I am writing this from a pub in London, I guess that the answer is no. Or rather, not really. Or even better, why bother?

Now don’t worry. This will not become an expatriate blog. Somebody else said it first (James Baldwin? David Sedaris?), but to be an expatriate one must first be a patriot, which I am grateful that my upbringing and education never permitted me. “Expatriate” also expresses a kind of diminished affection: that I had enough and somewhere snapped, and in my privilege, instead of say torching a mail truck, moved to a place where (a la Big Bill Broonzy) “the climate suits my clothes.”

Just as an aside, the climate here does not suit my clothes at all. The climate here is awful.

It might surprise you to learn that my affection for my homeland is undiminished — not America of course whose dissolution cannot come soon enough, but those cities and pockets of California for which I have affinity, especially my true home in Northern California where the mighty redwoods meet the sea, and even the red-tailed hawks sell acid.

All I wanted was to find the same old disfunction with a slightly different inflection: where the crackpots are unarmed, where disappointment is nothing to be ashamed of, and where the country is too wet to burn.

As I write, I’m watching an icy rainstorm outside from a pub in Aldgate where I am the only customer. The pub is effectively out of beer, covered in advertisements for a fish-finger sandwich on white bread with ketchup, is playing Queen on blaring repeat, and feels more like a soviet veterinary pharmacy than any kind of hospitality business. It is so offensive, in such a different way than I am used to, that I am having a wonderful time. I feel — in my special occasion type of misery — that I am in Disneyland.

I’ve come to London with my girlfriend, Jill, to have a European adventure (normal for a 35-year old), stress-test our relationship, and see precisely how far we could bury our heads in the sand with each other's help. We’re also undertaking a literary project: collaborating on an erotic novel that we’re both hoping will make us millions and cement our international reputation as both literary powerhouses and sex experts.

Other than meals — which get longer and more elaborate and increasingly blur together — and the porn-writing, it’s hard to say what exactly I’ve been doing to fill my days. We volunteer most weekends to get out the vote in the United States, a poor salve against the guilt of leaving, but important.

In the name of research I’ve been reading so-called erotica by some very obnoxious white people: Henry Miller, DH Lawrence, and I’m sure eventually but mercifully not yet, Anais Nin.

I’ve been walking a lot: miles everyday, to get my bearings and explore, but to also offset the effects of the unsustainable amount I’ve been eating and drinking. I walk without any sort of destination: in my head, not walking to anywhere but away from (and as fast as I can) the yawning maw of an early grave.

Also, the leadership here is — please note the typical British understatement — lacking. So every day we are warned that LOCKDOWN IS IMMINENT and that pubs and restaurants might CLOSE TOMORROW*. Very difficult to do the healthy and affordable thing and stay home and cook chicken breasts when every meal feels like your last chance to eat a daily special or drink wine by the glass.

On one afternoon at Noble Rot, a wine bar I really love and that we walk to at least once a week for lunch, I ate an entire partridge (hoping the whole time I’d have to spit some shot onto my plate with an extremely English “plink!” but no luck) and a basket-worth of eels on toast and a sticky pudding.

Here, a professional food writer should probably elaborate (how was it made? What did it taste like?). But this one can’t really remember the details, except that (as a child assures their parents on the eve of their divorce) I loved them both equally and very much.

I do vividly remember the bread and butter which approached an ideal in the category: Breads and Butters with capital “B”s. Warm, crispy in the right places, chewy in all the others, focaccia that, like Cleopatra, dribbles golden olive oil when you squeeze it. If their ovens would accommodate it, I would like Noble Rot to bake my coffin from their focaccia bread. Too much?

A quick aside: they toast things so fucking well in this country. And the bacon. I love American bacon in its variety and smokiness. And the best of American bacon really can’t be beat — yes I see you Bentons. But in terms of everyday ubiquitous bacon, the UK just blows us out of the water. I know it is an entirely different cut and style here (belly vs loin, smoke vs salt etc) but I just can’t get over the meatiness of the bacon here. It’s really a breakfast for dinner for breakfast bacon, and I love it.

Bacon memories part one of a series: for the first two weeks here in quarantine, in a cluttered little house in East Dulwich watching Brits shop for vacation properties on television (in Spain or the South of France, or exotic Orlando Florida) I effectively lived on delivery bacon sandwiches with a side of black pudding. I would spread the black pudding on the buttered bread, and cover the whole thing in brown sauce. Piggy perfection.

As hard as it is to explain, those bacon sandwiches really meant something to me. I’m sure they will become a kind of touchstone, a comforting food memory when I am old and demented. Like how some nursing home patients listen to Debussy and remember their wives, I will drink pig’s blood and remember British daytime television.

I’ve also been awed by British desserts — Great British Bake-off, you cannot tell a lie — and am for the first time in my life developing a sweet tooth. But more on that in later posts as don’t want to blow my whole trifle too early, which is something they say here all the time.

As is the local custom, I drink with every meal, and with every course of the meal, and before meals and in between them. Over a few weeks, I’ve stretched my stomach to accommodate imperial pints and lunch-desserts.

I really have been walking a whole lot.

There is of course a plague on. And I can attest that the populations on both sides of the Atlantic are equally depressed and terrified and unmoored. If my waking life is approaching some depraved ideal, my sleeping self is tormented by nightmares. No idea why, as everything, everywhere is going so swimmingly.

I’ve never dreamed like this before, every night and into the morning beset by screaming tortured animals, children blinded and bleeding from their eye-bandages peeling the flesh from my sides. I wake up multiple times a night gasping or crying or flailing against Jill. My waking hours have taken on a weird kind of edgy twilight cast, as I expect danger everywhere (though never when it is actually bearing down on me in the form of London’s silent and ubiquitous bicyclists).

I snap at my girlfriend, swear at the kitchen appliances and yell at the television. The blood my brain so desperately needs to keep a grip on reality is constantly being diverted to help digest the whole beasts I can’t seem to keep from swallowing.

I’m actually very happy, joyful even, and extremely lucky of course — and never forget it. (The only people I know for sure read this are my parents so let me say that again: I am fine.) While I can’t get myself to do any real work, my brain at least feels fertile. I’m finding a lot of real comfort in my current delusions: mainly that my daily walks ameliorate the damage of all my other lifestyle choices, and that everything, everywhere will eventually be fine.

All of which is to say, it’s nice to be back and thanks for reading. I’m not sure what this will evolve into but expect passionately held opinions on sandwiches and culture in general — how English men wear women’s trousers for example.

Pip pip,

Charley

*As I was revising this they did in fact announce a lockdown, most likely through Christmas. I’m not sure what that means for this blog... maybe a pivot to rage cooking, or perhaps something more drastic. A “fuck it” wholesale move to Sicily? A kind of “Eat Pray Love” thing where the “Pray” is also “Eat” and “Love”, as it should always, comes first?

A Very Unhealthy Season

In the last week I cooked chicken breasts in the oven and ate them with red quinoa and kale. I made an omelet in a non-stick pan without butter. I downloaded a calorie tracking app. I even—I can’t believe I’m even writing this—went for a walk.

How did I get here?

For about a decade my weight has fluctuated pretty wildly, and to be honest I didn’t really mind. When I was at my low weight I would feel sleek and vital. When I was at my heaviest I would wear nothing but my little pink swimming trunks and eat pork chops with my hands in public. I would spill champagne on my thighs or let marinara sauce run into my chest hair. I’m not sure what they were really thinking but in my head people would see me and think: “Wow. That guy really knows how to live!”

Shameless

Since around thanksgiving my weight stopped fluctuating. I couldn’t fit into my suits anymore, and had to buy new jeans. The elastic band in my underwear left a nasty looking ring of broken blood vessels around my waist. Finally, I outgrew my pajamas. Family members started whispering about gout. Not good.

This post will not be about me getting fit.  Anyone who knows me knows I will never really get my appetites under control. This post is about the glorious, decadent five weeks that got me to rock bottom.

Let’s start at Thanksgiving.

This was the first Thanksgiving I didn’t spend at home with family. My girlfriend and I decided to spend it at our apartment cooking, just the two of us.

We made this stuffed turkey breast from Juila Child, wrapped in its own skin and cheese cloth, and basted over hours with melted butter. We stuffed out breast with the caramelized onion and kale stuffing from smittenkitchen.com, and made a second batch for good measure. I love stuffing.

For sides there were buttery roughly mashed yellow fingerling potatoes with blue cheese and garlic, classic cranberry sauce, brussel sprouts with thick-cut chorizo and toasted almond slivers. All served with a big pot of gravy made from the surplus turkey skin, turkey drippings, and shallots, and spiked with white wine.

Feast for two. Note the gravy pot.

Again, there were only two of us.

And we drank.

Everyone in Brooklyn must have an esoteric home bar.

On Thanksgiving morning, we woke up to a bottle of cold champagne, planned the meal for the day and split a bottle of dry cider for good measure. While we cooked it was bourbon over ice—a surprisingly good whiskey from Hilllrock Distillery in New York’s Hudson Valley—and small glasses of Pommeau de Normandie, a kind of hard apple juice fortified with calvados. Over dinner we dug into the wine: reds and sherry for her, and vinho verde and chardonnays for me with maybe an ale towards the meal’s end. In between courses we split shots of a cheap, harsh calvados—an old Normandy feasting trick—to help make room.

And there was dessert: sour smurf gummis—the best haribo ever— and dark Ritter Sport chocolate bars with hazelnuts, pecan pie, vanilla ice cream, and bottles of dark stout.

Afterwards when I was sure I was going to die, I downed a quick Underberg, a German digestif and felt much better.

The next day things really went off the rails.

Obligatory leftovers sandwich shot.

After a few leftovers sandwiches, we took what was left and made a thick slab of shepherd’s pie: with a base of toasted rye bread, a top of mashed potatoes covered in oven-blistered sharp cheddar, and a midsection sloppy with hot gravy.

We proudly talked of how, with the pie thanksgiving could last us a week! And then took the whole thing to bed and ate it over one episode of Narcos.

In retrospect, that semi-somnolent shepherd’s pie was just the appetizer in a feast that was about to last me forty five days.

I spent December in California “working”: researching and writing stories like the best tacos on the west coast, a California dive bar taxonomy, San Diego’s best fish tacos, and a deep dive into the bay area’s flourishing Tiki scene.

For the first two weeks I met friends and made my way up the coast from the Mexican border to the Napa valley north of San Francisco.

In Tijiuana at Taco Nazo I had one of the best bites of my entire life: a tripa taco whose chunks of boiled small intestine turned the color and texture of caramel on a battered iron plancha. 

NYC, why can't you get this?

With a six pack of dark Bohemias from the adjacent convenience store I worked through Nazo’s entire taco menu: spicy birria—goat stew—the tortillas soggy with broth, fatty, chewy carnitas, charred carne asada, spicy chorizo, and al pastor cut thin from a spit-grill like a pork shawarma served with bits of burnt pineapple.

Proper Al Pastor

Over one afternoon in San Diego I ate at five different fish taco places before ending the night at one of San Diego’s best dive bars, Last Call, a bar sandwiched between two pay-by-the-hour motels, where there were hotdogs on the grill out front, and the slogan was “get ugly early”.  Whenever emergency vehicles with their sirens on went by, the bar tender passed out kamikaze shots to the whole bar. There were a lot of sirens; we obeyed the slogan.

Guess where.

There were tacos in LA too, and an obligatory stop at Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles.

A friend visiting from Hong Kong joined me over prohibition-era cocktails at The Varnish—the least obnoxious speakeasy in the world—gin and tonics at the famous Frolic Room (where I decided I love bars with murals), beers and snacks at the Chateau Marmont, and martinis at the Musso & Frank Grill, the oldest restaurant in Hollywood.

The best meal in Los Angeles came as a surprise: a pastrami sandwich on rye from Langer’s Deli. They claim to serve the best pastrami sandwich in the world, and as a deli fanatic living in New York City it’s hard for me to admit that they might be right. Their rye bread, chewy and toothsome with a nice crunchy crust, is certainly the best I’ve ever had.

Lookin fly Paulie

Then it was up the coast, stopping at the greatest hits to give my visiting friend a taste of California road food. We had rushed In n’ Out burgers along the 101, ate piles of fried seafood and sardine sandwiches over looking the pacific ocean in Morro Bay, and closer to San Francisco, ordered up two of my favorite burritos of the moment, a steak super burrito from La Corneta Taqueria in Burlingame with pickled jalapenos and fresh lime juice.

San Francisco is my home and every time I’m back I check in at my favorite dives. San Francisco is, or rather was, woefully misunderstood. It used to be a hard city, a rough and dirty drinking city where the Brown Jug opens at 6am, and corner stores sell plastic cups of vodka under the counter for a dollar.

Things are changing and not for the better, but that’s a story for another post.

The oldest tiki bar in the world.

Anyway, San Francisco used to be home to the best dive bar culture around. Sadly, when I tried to take some friends on a tour of my favorites, one after another had  closed, or been scrubbed up and sanitized and was now full of furry roly poly white people in fleeces taking pictures of each other. Luckily the Geary Club is still there, unchanged and unchangeable.

The tiny, sticky bar is maybe my favorite dive bar in the world; it has absolutely nothing to recommend it but me. I used to do my homework there, and passing drunks would splatter my textbook with jaeger. This time, like every time I visit the Geary Club I was gleefully, gratefully, and disastrously over-served.

I had decided I would try and get healthy in preparation for the holiday-binge but missed the mark by a fair bit when I ate another burrito, this time from Taqueria La Cumbre, home of the original mission burrito, in the bathtub first thing on Christmas eve morning.

That afternoon was the big family dinner, this year a little restrained by our standards: green beans steamed and tossed with lemon juice and sea salt, Brussel sprouts wilted in bacon, and huge salads of bitter greens with perfect Oregonian pears, candied pecans, and little nobs of goat cheese. The main course was a whole tenderloin, smeared with rough mustard, wrapped in pancetta and roasted. Then my family’s traditional Christmas dessert: peppermint ice cream pies with hot fudge.

A proper Christmas breakfast

This year, for the first time we hosted Christmas morning at mom’s house and she gave me a free hand in planning the breakfast. Enter a whole spiral cut honey baked ham with a pot of spicy mustard, lox with whipped cream cheese and capers, fresh baked cinnamon sticky buns, a pyramid of sausages and three tiers of donuts. Another friend, also visiting from Hong Kong but from the U.K. was put in charge of the bacon buttys and brown sauce, while I made eggs scrambled in truffle butter. Fresh orange juice. Egg Nog. Champagne.

Just a few hours later was dinner time. For the last few years we’ve been having Christmas dinner at a friend’s; he’s an ex-chef and plans his holiday dinner for weeks ahead of time.

It shows.

The whole flock

Already full, I found room for green garlic soup, gravlax cured in gin with pickled onions, rare roasted duck, quails stuffed with homemade turkey sausage, a bowl of thick risotto and two slices of dark chocolate, candied ginger macaroon cake drenched in chestnut liqueur.

First thing the next morning I headed off to  join my girlfriend’s family for their Christmas tradition: passing the holidays in the Napa Valley—San Francisco’s wine country. She promised all we would do was eat and drink, a nice change of pace for me.

Days in Napa were spent dripping runny cheeses onto draped piles of charcuterie from the Fatted Calf, or eating sweet duck liver pate straight from the jar, or putting on layers of sweaters to sit outside in the frosty mornings slurping fresh Hog Island oysters.

The Napa trip was a trip of firsts for me: my first visit to a winery, my first dip in a hot spring, my first mud bath, my first oysters bingo—fresh oysters piled with garlic, spinach, and cheese then broiled.

It was also the first time I sat in a California bar that allowed smoking. In fact that was the biggest surprise of the trip, that the uppercrust wine country was also the home of some of the best and diviest bars in the state. It’s like the local bar scene is trapped in amber.

We visited Pancha’s where the bartender/owner Rose has a fearsome reputation. I thought stories of her might be exaggerated, she was unfailingly gracious to us, then she told a group of be-ugged tourists to “fuck off” before they even got in the door.

The legendary Green Door, Napa

We also visited the famous Green Door, where the bartender told me stories of working biker bars up and down the coast: “Those guys had something called honor.”

Both bars readily sold cigarettes, provided ash trays, and encouraged patrons to light up. Many drunk people tried to explain to me how this was so:  legal loopholes, the owners were grandfathered in, they weren’t technically public bars. But, I think it mostly came down to those two bartenders. Some people you just don’t fuck with.

Writing about Napa is bringing back memories: tacos from a truck in the dusty lot down the street from the French laundry, barbeque and rare small-batch bourbons, the best fajitas I have ever had, and of course near-perfect classic cheeseburgers from Gott's Roadside.

I'm not a breakfast person, I'm usually too full from the night before, but in Napa I discovered one of my favorite light holiday breakfasts: pizzelle, those Italian waffle-cookies flavored with anise and lemon zest, dipped in a glass of Dream Catcher, an Irish liqueur made from roasted chestnuts backed up with a cup of black coffee.

My girlfriend and I got back into town with just a few days to spare before New Year’s Eve. I had work to do, which for me meant visiting 14 tiki bars in three days as research for this story in Time Out: that's 14 mai tais with a few scorpion bowls and at one place a full rum tasting thrown in for good measure. I know I must have eaten, but the only solid food I remember in the whole tiki haze is a cheeseburger with bone marrow from KronnerBurger in Oakland. 

Too much?

New Years Eve came as a welcome respite from the thatch, and sugary cocktails. New Years Eve is also our anniversary and we have something of a tradition: sequester ourselves in a house by the beach and cook a too-large, labor intensive meal.

This year it was David Lebovitz’s Chili with chocolate which was a joy to make and turned out OK. I followed my personal New Years Eve tradition by falling asleep on the couch before 11. At least this time—for the first time in years—I managed to wake up for midnight and force a few sips of Prosecco. My spirit was willing but my body had had enough of 2015.

Chopped Liver, Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen

Writing this I keep remembering more meals I’d forgotten. The spot-on Taiwanese food from a strip mall in a suburb south of the city, the reuben, lox, and out of this world chopped liver from Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen in San Francisco,  and the famous Nopalito carnitas, served slick with grease and steaming in a paper sack.

The happiest boy in the world.

And how could I forget the ham? One of the best Christmas gifts I’ve ever received. A whole 400 day old, peanut fed, heritage hog ham hock from Virginia, meant to put even jamón ibérico de bellota to shame. It’s sitting on the counter in my Brooklyn apartment as I write this, all but its sharp little hoof covered in dish towels and wrapped in twine to keep the rats at bay.

On my last night in the city I met an old friend at Hard Water, a New Orleans style whisky bar in the fog out on pier 3. I’d heard they had a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle 23 years, supposedly the best, certainly the most expensive, and certainly the most over-hyped whisky on earth. Bottles of Pappy are getting so rare I’d never actually seen one in person. And, they did have it but only offered it in half ounce tastes as part of a flight that would cost me nearly $250. I passed on the Pappy, and instead drank two other breathtaking bourbons I’d never heard of. When I got up to settle my bill the bartender slid over a glass and smiled at me. “I don’t want you leaving thinking San Francisco isn’t cool anymore.”

San Francisco isn't cool anymore, but the Pappy was excellent. That said, I think I preferred my $40 Rittenhouse 25-Year-Old Straight Rye. No sip of anything is worth $250.

It was a very good month.

Now I have cauliflower and some boneless skinless chicken breasts to tend to. Just don't think I'm giving up too easy.

A Chicago Weekend

I recently had the pleasure of spending a weekend in Chicago and I’m still floating around my apartment missing it. To be honest I only spent one day in Chicago proper; I was in town visiting my cousins one of whom was the victim of a baby shower—congratulations Angela! —and another had just opened a restaurant in the city.

I had a pretty basic list of must do’s for my trip and managed to cross them all off in one day: eat a Chicago style hot dog, eat an Italian beef sandwich, and get a drink and a double cheeseburger at the original Billy Goat Tavern. Like I said, a pretty basic list and, as in everything else I do, I tried to keep the bar pretty low.

You’ll see there is no mention of pizza. Chicagoans should be ashamed for what they’ve done to pizza.

I took the classic Cardinal Line, 28 hours from New York to Chicago.

I arrived in the city just before 10am on the train from New York. Yes, I took the train. I love taking the train. In just under 28 hours I ate the four turkey sandwiches I brought, read an entire book, and slept for 23 hours. I arrived rested, happy, and ready to explore.

First stop was Fatso’s Last Stand. I found Fatso’s by typing in hot dog into google maps after I dropped my bags off at my cousin’s restaurant in the Ukranian Village. I’m not sure if they make the best dogs in the city, probably not. But, I at least got the idea what the Chicago hot dog is all about.

“The hot dog is topped with yellow mustard, chopped white onions, bright green sweet pickle relish, a dill pickle spear, tomato slices or wedges, pickled sport peppers and a dash of celery salt.”

— wikipedia

I have been converted totally; the Chicago way is the only way to serve a hotdog. All the cold veggies add a nice crunch, and that with the snap of the sausage casing really gives you something to sink your teeth into. I was dubious about the celery salt but I totally get it now, especially with the pickles the salt makes the dog supremely savory, like biting into a can of vegetable soup. Fatso’s, I was surprised to learn, is also famous for their shrimp. I ordered, and ate a whole basket. They were fine. Fried shrimp are great.

Five sandwiches, a basket of fried shrimp, and a hot dog in just over one day with almost no water left me feeling somehow both bloated and desiccated. So, I decided to get the blood flowing by walking to my next destination, The Billy Goat Tavern.

It turns out Chicago is big. Living in Hong Kong really screwed up my sense of scale and I haven’t walked more than a handful of blocks since high school and my only shoes were my slightly too tight cowboy boots, so as you can imagine when I limped through the tavern door an hour and twenty minutes later I was desperate for a drink.

Lucky for me, there may not be any place better to quench your thirst, not Billy Goat Tavern in particular but Chicago overall. If I lived there I might not even get an apartment, just live in bars and I don’t care what you think. In Hong Kong I complained constantly about the state of the bars there and how much I missed no nonsense, concept free, salt-of-the-earth American community bars. Well it turns out bars like those are few and far between in New York too. Not so in Chicago where as far as I can tell there is an inviting, down to earth tavern on pretty much every block of the city.

The Billy Goat Tavern has branded itself “The World Famous Billy Goat Tavern” because the classic Jim Belushi Saturday Night Life skit "Cheezborger! Cheezborger! Cheezborger!” was based on the guy who mans the grill there. And yes, he is still there yelling “Cheezborger! Cheezborger! Cheezborger!” and taking pictures with people in the line. I didn’t really care about that. I was interested in the bar’s history as a journalist hangout. It’s basically directly under the Chicago Tribune Building and everyone who has ever made a name for themselves putting pen to paper in Chicago has gotten drunk there; their bylines paper the wall behind the bar. I enjoyed my beers very much, and lingered looking at all the pictures of newspapermen but it actually was the cheezborger that stole my heart in the end: two wide flat almost-certainly-previously-frozen beef patties, salted, griddled under American cheese, and stacked without ceremony on two toasted butter brushed buns. Next to the grill was a little station with chopped white onion, yellow mustard, and a pot of pickles. Amazing. Really one of my favorite burger experiences ever. How come this is so hard to replicate in other countries?

After the Billy Goat I made the uncharacteristically intelligent choice of cutting myself off. I wanted my full appetite for the dinner at my cousin’s new restaurant. I’m glad I did.

The Cotton Duck is the brainchild of Chef Dominic Zumpano and his partner, my cousin, Cecelia Lanyon. The Cotton Duck is a restaurant art gallery, not restaurant and art gallery mind you. The menu changes four times a year along with the exhibition. The food is designed to compliment the art and diners are encouraged to enjoy both the meal and the art on the walls as part of one holistic experience. Plus, if you get drunk enough/ are rich enough you can leave with a painting. It’s a cool concept and getting a lot of attention in Chicago. There were a few art restaurants in Hong Kong but they weren’t exactly funky: black-suited bodyguards would stand around guarding the art while diners quietly at their wagyu beef, topped with foie gras, topped with caviar, toped with gold leaf. The Cotton Duck is much more laid back and more fun.

Dominic handles the food, while Cecilia (who also runs a gallery in nearby Lake Forest) curates the art. On the night I went the art was a series of paintings of shipwrecks by Illinois artist Renee McGinnis, a ballsy hopefully non-metaphorical move for a restaurant just a few weeks old.

Fire in the Belly of the Stricken Marquessa by Renee McGinnis

Judging by the food I think they should be able to weather any storm. I was in family mode so didn’t really take any notes or pictures but a few dishes are seared in my culinary memory. Like the crispy fried oysters that started off the meal, topped with fruity tomato jam and vinegar spiked whipped cream.

And the scallops. I almost never order scallops and I'm not sure why, these were candy-sweet under piled salmon roe and nuzzling a half-hidden rice crepe filled with duck confit (duck confit is the only thing about winter I can tolerate). Finally, family bias aside I honestly think the dessert--bomboloni, or Italian donuts, filled with hot burnt caramel and served with fresh parsnip ice cream--was the best I've had all year. 

I am of course extremely proud of my cousin for playing a part in such a dynamic restaurant, and I am especially delighted that the Cotton Duck gives me an excuse to visit Chicago more often. This is a city that really gets me. Just not in winter. I will never ever visit in winter. See you in six months Chicago!

Smokes and Ears: Dining in the Delta Pt. 2

A quick post about my last meal in Mississippi. The Big Apple Inn in Jackson was actually one of my most-anticipated stops on the whole trip. It’s appeared on lots of TV shows, including No Reservations which my shrewder readers will have realized this blog follows pretty much entirely. It’s also been on Bizarre Foods.

God I hate Bizarre Foods.

I’ve hated it ever since I watched the perpetually wet Andrew Zimmern struggling to swallow some raw meat on a trip to Ethiopia. He was all exaggerated gagging, grossed out googly-eyed over-acting while the place’s embarrassed proprietor stood by and a group of very hungry Ethiopian children stared, waiting until Zimmerman waddled off, so that they could enjoy his “bizarre” leftovers. I’ve heard that the host has gotten much more sensitive, but I don’t care. I find the whole premise of the show—that some food is objectively weird—offensive. I did hear that back in the day Andrew Zimmern was a crackhead living in New York and stealing purses at Grand Central Station for drug money, so that’s tight.

Anyway. The reason The Big Apple Inn was even on bizarre foods is because it’s known for pig ear sandwiches. The reason it was on No Reservations is because it is a rare example of a kind of cooking that has been the lifeblood of poorer, almost always African American, communities in the south for generations, and because the sandwiches—both the pig ear and a ground sausage sandwich—are supposed to be delicious.

Firstly, I love pig ears. I feel like that’s not even a very racy thing to say anymore. Pigs’ ears, and tails, and snouts are on bar menus all over the place—at least in New York, San Francisco, and London where I’ve seen them over and over again since moving back from Asia. My favorite ears are the ones I had in Hong Kong, done in a chiu chow style, marinated in master stock, boiled, then simmered until they get that slick-sticky-crunchy-bouncy thing that pretty much only great ears have. Ugly, wobbly, and brown those pigs’ ears are right up there in the running with boiled peanuts for the best beer snack of all time.

Which is all just another way for me to say that it wasn’t because they had ears in them that I didn’t like the sandwiches at the Big Apple Inn, it was in spite of the ears. They just didn’t do it for me: the ears were boiled to the point of jelly, the buns fell apart before I could even get them to my mouth, and the mustard really didn’t go nearly far enough to cut the cloying grease and glop of the ears. (In my after the fact google research I see the sandwiches also have hot sauce and slaw on them but either I ordered wrong or I smoked too much pot in high school because I don’t remember that at all.)

A pig ear sandwich.

They also specialize in sausage sandwiches called smokes. They were better than the ears, as smoky as you’d expect and spicy. I had two, nothing too memorable but fine.

It really pains me to say all this because I loved the Big Apple Inn; I want it to still be there in a hundred years and I will still go out of my way to pay a visit whenever I’m in town because it is just such an awesome, totally one of a kind place.

People always describe little hole-in-the-wall spots as neighborhood joints, well the Big Apple Inn is basically the whole neighborhood. The lone store in a long stretch of boarded up windows, abandoned businesses, and shuttered shop fronts. Whatever happened to this part of town was no good, but it was thorough. Still the area is not without its charm. People wave from their car windows as they drive by and the architecture is all languid southern allure. You need only squint to imagine the whole place as a coffee shop engorged hipster enclave—I like to think that the residents thought it was better just to shut it down and move out than become that.

Abandoned as it may have been out on the street, inside the inn the neighborhood is alive and well. I had the great pleasure to visit on the day a huge regional Baptist church conference was meeting in town and the place was full of customers in their very best Sunday best—I highly recommend anyone who can try and plan their visit to Jackson to coincide with a Baptist conference. It was a great mixed up crowd of old-timers returning to the area with kids in tow—in stiff lace, and corduroy bow ties—to show them where grandma used to eat, alongside young men with grease down their shirts—workers from the nearby tow yard I think—on their lunch breaks.

Your hero. Between Meals.

The space itself is simple veering towards makeshift: a counter, a few chairs, a woman spreading yellow mustard on buns, pulling big flapping ears out of a bubbling pressure cooker, and, on the day I was there, a small tv-vcr-combo on the counter playing a documentary (https://vimeo.com/68061989) about the restaurant on repeat.  Other people have described the Inn as ramshackle, or shabby but I found it perfectly used. Warn down profoundly, in that way love can wear you down.

If you’d like to read more about the Big Apple Inn, and you should, check out their entry on http://www.southernfoodways.org. Southern Food Ways is an absolutely invaluable resource on Southern food. I would like them to offer me a job.

In Which a Sandwich Causes me to Completely Lose the Plot

I need to switch things up a little bit.

In terms of this blog I’m in Mississippi, with the amazing food of New Orleans, Cajun country, West Texas, New Mexico, and California’s central valley still ahead of me.

Meanwhile as I'm writing about all of that, I’m having just incredible new food experiences: I spent three hours at Swan’s Oyster Depot shoveling so much in that I think I swallowed a shell, had my mind blown apart by a plantain I ate on the beach in Far Rockaway—served in a tin foil packet covered in farmer’s cheese and guava jelly it was basically a food hallucination—ate too much herring on the roof of New York’s old Russian baths, hosted an informal turkey sandwich competition between the bodegas in my neighborhood, discovered definitively the best gummi candy there is, and  confirmed once again that the #5 at Barney Greengrass is the best sandwich, full stop.

So, I’m going to start breaking things up a little. When I tire of the open road, I’m going to throw in a quick post about my eating-life now. And, I’m going to start today with that sandwich.

Barney Greengrass: The Sturgeon King is justifiably famous. This is no secret off-the-beaten-path-snack. I’d been wanting to eat there for decades before I ever got the chance. In fact, Barney Greengrass (and the Wu-Tang Clan) played a big role in my choosing to attend college in New York over sunnier schools on the west coast.

Like too many great old-school immigrant cuisines, the kind of fare they serve at Barney Greengrass is disappearing. Technically Barney Greengrass is an appetizing store.

Appetizing stores, or appetizing tables, are pretty much the best stores ever. In the interest of keeping kosher, Jewish immigrants were careful to keep their fish and dairy separate from their meats. For the meat, there was the deli—just so my wishes are clear, I would like my ashes scattered in a deli—and for the fish and dairy, there was the appetizing table. That connubio perfetto, a bagel with lox and cream cheese was born in the appetizing store; they are magical places.

The chopped herring. Better than ice cream.

Fish of all kinds, creamed, cured, pickled, smoked, and salted, along with caviar and assorted roes, and baked goods, blintzes, bagels, bialeys, and latkes all come together at the appetizing table.

Sadly, despite food writers talking about the “appetizing trend” for the last few years, true appetizing stores are few and far between, and unless you live in New York or a few other Jewish enclaves in North America, pretty much nonexistent. Ask most casual foodies where to get good appetizing and they’ll probably only be able to name two places: Russ and Daughters on the Lower East Side, and Barney Greengrass on the Upper West. And, Barney Greengrass isn’t really an appetizing store at all.

BG is what I call an outlaw appetizing store. At some point since its opening in 1908 someone there made the inspired—albeit heretical—decision to cater to gentile tastes and serve deli alongside the traditional dairy and parve (neither dairy nor meat) offerings, which means you can get chopped herring with a side of pastrami on rye, and which makes Barney Greengrass my favorite place in New York City and the sturgeon king of my heart.

Every time I sit down at Barney Greengrass I order a plain toasted bialy, a serving of home made chopped herring—so sweet and fresh you could put it on a cupcake—at least five unsweetened iced teas, and the #5.

The number five. Don’t miss it. Hidden deep in the menu under “Triple Deckers”, a bargain at $15.75, the number five is more than a sandwich. It is three sandwiches singing in perfect harmony, a fresco of a sandwich, the number five is a masterpiece.

A lesson for Americans. When it comes to food, sometimes over-the-top is good, sometimes it is bad. Going by yourself to a restaurant and ordering three dozen oysters and a magnum of Muscadet is good, using grilled cheese sandwiches—or donuts, or pieces of fried chicken—as hamburger buns is bad. Serving bone marrow and parsley on toast after dessert (with ice cold shots of schnapps) is good, competitive eating of all stripes is bad. The #5 triple decker from Barney Greengrass is much better than good.

Roast Beef. Chicken Fat. Chicken Liver. Turkey. Cole Slaw. Russian Dressing. All between three thin slices of pungent rye bread. Just take a moment and think about that.

The. Number. Five.

The Roast beef: flaky, iron rich and redolent of the oven, draped over a thick velvety swipe of schmaltz which coats your mouth and fills your nose with the slick, dripping memory of a cramped, steamy Eastern European kitchen, and holds up the beef, saving it like an exhausted swimmer bobbing on a warm and salty sea.

Then, even more. Even richer, even fattier, the liver meets the fat like the river meets the ocean and mingles there, the liver pushing the fat deeper, the liver lifting the fat into the light.  Then, briefly, the gulped breath of the bread, the merciful just-in-time cut of caraway, a welcome but half-hearted palate cleanse, like smoking a cigar in a barnyard.

Then, the turkey, cut thin, roasted dry, and piled high. Savory, and gamey, the turkey is delicious, but I would argue more vital as structure: the teeth cleave through the stacked slices of meat, sheering the flaky bird until, slowing all the while, they meet the cole slaw just right, and ease in to the electric crunch of the cabbage, the cool cream, the light punch of the vinegar.

Then, finally, the Russian dressing, with its fat to coat your mouth, and piquant hum to finally wipe the palate clean. Ready again for another bite.

This is a sandwich that eats itself.

Mississippi Pt. 1: Fine Dining in The Delta

What follows are two entries about Mississippi. Of the whole road trip we spent the most time in Mississippi, driving down through the delta for three days. Mississippi, as a state, has managed to, let’s say, manage expectations.  So maybe as a result I was quite impressed with it in a low key “what a pleasant surprise” kind of way.

The country, and the river itself were often beautiful, and so fecund you could smell it. The people were unfailingly gracious, and the towns, sleepy and welcoming, especially Oxford which was bookish and effortlessly bohemian in a slower more southern mode—I think I could be quite happy there.

I knew absolutely nothing about food in Mississippi before arriving and I was taken aback at the delta's fascinating food culture. More than any place I have ever been, Mississippi’s history plays out on its dinner plates.

The first meal I had in the state was also the best: a quick lunch at City Grocery, Chef John Currence's beloved restaurant in Oxford.

Sadly I took all of my notes on the back of a takeout menu which I somehowmanaged to throw away before I even got out of the restaurant.

Sea Island peas with buttermilk whipped cream.

Looking back over the pictures I took, I think I had the baked Sea Island red peas with green tomato chow chow, and buttermilk whipped cream to start and the shrimp and grits as my main course; the menu describes the shrimp and grits as spicy Original Grits Girls grits, sautéed shrimp, garlic mushrooms, scallions, white wine, lemon juice, and Big Bad bacon. I do remember that I liked both dishes very much, and my mom claims I said the grits was one of the best things I had ever eaten—may I have my James Beard Award now please?

Shrimp and Grits, one of the great dishes.

The meal I was most excited for in Mississippi was at Doe’s Eat Place. This down home steak place has been featured on pretty much every food and travel show there is, and often appears on “best steak” lists.

Hard at work.

I’m not so sure how to write about a place like Doe’s.

The meal was fine, but not great, oddly expensive, and all around gut-busting. There was a steak the size of a small merry go round, a pile of stodgy fried jumbo shrimp, a towering stack of thick cut fries, two delicious little tamales* slippery with oil, and an iceberg lettuce salad so over-dressed you could have lit it on fire.

My tummy is weeping.

That said, the experience was superlative and worth any expense.

Doe’s boasts an extraordinary history: it opened in 1941 in Greenville as a blacks only honky tonk that also served hot meals. Word of the food, and especially the steaks, spread and soon the town’s whites wanted a taste. In what must have been a satisfying reversal of segregation’s mores, whites were served out the backdoor.   

Though now obviously integrated, it is hard to imagine anything else about the place has changed in the last 70 years. The restaurant is literally on the other side of the tracks—an informal security guard keeps an eye on the customer’s cars parked out front. Doe's is actually a low clapboard house; the walls sag and the sun peeks through.

The walls are covered with memorabilia and assorted steaky mementos. A small front room serves as an entryway and is full of standing fridges and a massive, ancient broiler where they cook the steaks. In the main room the tables are gathered around what I suppose these days would be called an open kitchen, a range piled with cast iron pots full of frying oil. The food is made right in among the diners, like some sort of conceptual dinner theatre. I can honestly say there is no place like it—except maybe the eight other franchise locations scattered across the United States that I just discovered on their website.

Oh! And Doe's serves a condiment I had never seen before, Heinz 57, like a ketchupy steak sauce and so good I’m going to order a case.

*A word about the Mississippi-tamale connection. I think a lot of people are surprised that Mississippi considers tamales an integral part of their cuisine. Tamales are everywhere in the Delta, at roadside stalls, fast food restaurants, and on pretty much every menu. There is some debate about how this came to be: either Mexican migrant workers brought them over in the early 1900’s, or they arrived in the century before with returning soldiers from the U.S. Mexican war. Either way they are everywhere, dirt cheap, filling and tasty. You can still find tamales in the cities Mississippians settled in during the great migration. Apparently in Chicago you can get tamales on a bun alongside a hot dog. God bless America.

In Which the Author Cries

Memphis. Sometimes I struggle to write up a meal months after I actually ate it. Even with thorough notes, something visceral is always lost as the memories grow stale.

Not so with Memphis. I taste Memphis when I’m sleeping.

Perhaps Memphis has excellent food that isn’t barbecue. I have no idea. Barbecue is all I ate, for every meal every day. If I lived there barbecue is all I would ever eat until I died fat and happy at 32. In fact, I'm considering it. 

Barbecue in Memphis is really extremely good.

Even without barbecue Memphis is a lovely little town. It is unfailingly fun, friendly, charming and manageable with lots of good history (and lots of history that isn’t good at all). I barely even got a taste but it looked like the nightlife held a lot of promise for acting out.

I really loved Memphis and can’t recommend highly enough that everyone who can should visit. If you do, stay at the Peabody Hotel or at least poke your head in for the daily marching of the ducks: . YouTube it.

Anyway back to the barbecue. 

The two barbecue places in Memphis that made the deepest impressions on me were Central BBQ and Payne's Bar-B-Q.

Payne’s is as local as it gets, known mostly to native Memphisians and barbecue fanatics, Payne’s was the name I would drop around town when I wanted people to think I had my finger on the pulse—though in reality I found Payne’s by googling “best Memphis bbq”.

When I asked the concierge at our hotel which spots I should checkout for good barbecue, she went through the well-rehearsed tourist list: The Rendezvous, B.B. King’s on Beale Street. But, when I mentioned Payne’s she became downright unprofessional, fanning herself with a folded map, leaning on the desk with her eyes rolling back, moaning: “Yes, yes, YES. Payne’s is the spot! Payne’s!”

And Payne’s is the spot. It is dilapidated to a degree I have only seen in Southern restaurants—looking at you Doe’s Eat Place—which I love. If I see your entire restaurant is a few half-broken picnic tables, mismatched patio furniture , and an ancient cast-iron oven, as Payne’s was, what I think is “They are really focusing on their food.”

The traditional way of serving barbecue in Memphis is on a sandwich, with the sauce, slaw, meat, and all between two slices of white bread. This is absolutely correct; in all things the sandwich really is the way to go.

Two things set the sandwiches at Payne’s apart: the neon yellow slaw mixed up with lots of mustard, and the meat which they chop instead of pull so that a bite might include chunks of char, fat, and meat. Locals call the sticky, crispy, burned edges of the pig bark, and it is magical stuff.

Also, Payne’s sandwiches are infamously over-stuffed and messy.

I wish you could smell this picture.

Still, for all this Payne’s was not my favorite barbecue in Memphis*. My favorite barbecue in Memphis, and the best barbecue I have ever had, came from Central BBQ. Central is, brace yourself, a chain. But, it is a local chain and beloved by everyone I spoke to in the city.

My first bite of the pulled pork sandwich with spicy barbecue sauce at Central was when it all really clicked for me; it was the first time I got it. As soon as I closed my mouth around that sandwich it felt like the world fell silent, tears formed in my eyes (not an exaggeration) and I understood how barbecue could be more than just excellent food. It gave me what Freud called “that oceanic feeling”. Central BBQ’s pork sandwich took me out of time itself; I think a part of me is still there chewing.

Pork Sandwich. Deconstructed.

My notes say: “perfectly balanced, fatty, sweet and tangy” but for some things language just isn’t up to the task. If you want to know what that first bite was like, better to go look into your lover’s eyes or watch your child while they sleep. That should take you part of the way there.

Central is also where I dipped my toe into the great wet versus dry debate.

You see, aside from the sandwich the preferred mode of barbecue in Memphis is ribs. Pork of course. You can either order them wet (covered in barbecue sauce), or dry (served as is with a dry spice rub). Now, I just assumed I would be a wet type of guy. I’ve always been of the “fuck subtlety more sauce” school of culinary arts, but in Memphis I learned I am ride or die dry all the way.

At Central they let you order a rack of ribs half wet and half dry. The wet half was great; barbeque sauce is great. But, if the wet was great, the dry had greatness—even I’m not sure what I’m saying at this point, I’m mostly on Yelp looking for barbecue places that deliver in Brooklyn.

My first few bites of the dry were underwhelming, tasting pretty much only of char and smoke, but then slowly the happiness grew until I realized I totally got the whole dry idea: the deep almost prurient pink smoky funk, the sweet slick fat, the thick strings of meat and the chewy rough candy-like shellac of the spice rub. Just awesome.

Memphis forever. Dry for life.

*Payne’s did have the best beans I have ever had in my entire life. Imagine just perfect sweet baked beans, then throw in about two handfuls of slow cooked pork butt. The beans are worth the trip on their own.

Thank God for Nashville Chicken

Apologies. I’ve been a bit neglectful of this blog recently but I think I have a pretty good excuse.

In the last month I’ve moved to New York, secured an apartment in Brooklyn, gone on a whirlwind tour to London and Paris, and failed outright to secure even part time employ. In that time I’ve eaten lots and lots of amazing meals in San Francisco (Swan’s Oyster Depot, and more than 200 burritos), New York (the #5 at Barney Greengrass—a triple decker sandwich of roast beef, chicken fat, chicken liver, turkey, cole slaw, and Russian dressing), Paris (SO MUCH WINE), and London (an incredible take on traditional English fare at The Marksman).

But for now all of that must wait. I still have the better part of my cross country road trip to blog.

So, let's get back into it. Harken back with me as I remember that cloudy afternoon nearly three months ago when I pulled into Nashville Tennessee.

I love to make definitive, often under-educated, declarations about food. For example the best mustard on earth comes from the Pickled Chef in Pittsburgh, and the best bar in existence for really bad behaviour is San Francisco’s the Geary Club.

For year’s I’ve said the world’s best chicken tenders—I love chicken tenders—were the buffalo chicken tenders served at Perry’s on Union Street in San Francisco. Well, now I’m afraid Perry’s has been bumped to number two. The best chicken tenders on earth can be found at Hattie B’s Hot Chicken in Nashville.

This this this.

Before we get too far down the rabbit hole of Tennessee chicken I must confess to having never even set foot in Prince’s Hot Chicken, the internet’s unanimously favourite Nashville chicken spot, and darling of such food television shows as all of them. This doesn’t bother me at all. And I say again, without hesitation and having only tried one chicken restaurant in the whole city, Hattie B’s chicken is the best.

Now, I love spicy food and I can handle a lot of heat. But I don’t mix up my self-worth with how many chillies I can manage to get down before passing out like a lot of “food people” these days. Sometimes heat is good. Sometimes heat is dumb. At Hattie’s their hot chicken is good. It has a nice slow burn that doesn’t obscure the chicken’s rich smoky spice or the flavour of the bird itself. That said, I don’t think it throws my already tenuous manhood into question when I say I actually preferred the medium hot chicken tenders. The hot chicken is very good; the medium chicken is a chorus of angels.

First, the chicken itself. The chicken at B’s was the closest I’ve had in America to a proper third-world bird. The best chicken, in my opinion, comes from the developing world—yes I have had French chicken blah blah blah. South East Asia, the Caribbean, West Africa, these places do chicken right. We used to watch our chickens get macheted to death in front of us in Togo before being thrown over hot coals by a cook with blood on his hands and feathers sticking to his forehead. That chicken had flavour.

I like the old scraggily birds, the hot weather birds pecking around in the trash heap and the chicken at Hattie B’s was almost, sort of, kind of getting close to that. So. Good.

The tenders themselves come out bright red and like I said are imbued with a nice deep smokiness, and that kind of low down smack you can only get from thoroughly toasted spices. And they are served perfectly: piled on an absorbent bed of sliced white bread, and thick cut bread and butter pickles, served outdoors on the porch with the rain rolling in and Stevie Wonder turned up loud from the overhead speakers, all with a side of bright black eyed peas and greens slick with vinegar.

The best there is.

Jerry Lee Lewis version of Real Wild Child

Grits and Glory: The Magic of the Southern Breakfast

Something amazing happened here.

I’ll have you know that I didn’t only eat sandwiches and barbecue on the road. Some days I also ate breakfast.                  

Southern breakfasts are magical: shrimp and grits, biscuits and gravy, scrambles with country ham and fried green tomatoes, beignets covered in powdered sugar. I could go on and on. Instead, I offer here a paean to the best breakfast I have ever had: the Country Ham Biscuit at Biscuit Head in Asheville.

I had the country ham biscuit, but I think anything I ordered would have been just as good*. You see, Biscuit Head is not a restaurant. It is a dream factory. Seriously, I saw things in Biscuit Head that I have barely even dared to fantasize about, and certainly never hoped to see in real life. Things like a gravy flight. A gravy flight. Like a whisky flight for people who don’t want to live past 50. People who just love too much. People like me.

Proof.

The biggest thing Southern breakfasts have over breakfasts the world over? Southern breakfast chefs are salt monsters. They are animals when it comes to salt, and so am I. I’m the guy salting his French fries at McDonalds. They guy licking his date’s movie theatre popcorn. I can’t eat escargot because the snails foam up and shrivel as soon as they touch my tongue. A few nights ago—no joke—mom and I had a salt tasting; just the two of us at the kitchen table, munching palmfulls of flaky sea salt like trail mix. Southern breakfast chefs really get me.

This is also real.

The country ham biscuit. So much more than the name implies. First, the biscuit was perfect: crumbly but coherent, buttery, fluffy, nice and crunchy on the outside and about the size of a large grapefruit. The biscuit was spit and crudely packed with fried green tomatoes, cheesey eggs, red eye gravy—gravy made from pork drippings—and of course thick slices of country ham. Wait a minute.

Ham rant.

I like Spanish ham. I am not a monster; Iberico ham is delicious. But, it is not so delicious that I somehow forgot that all other hams exist. Seriously the world is full to bursting with lovely hams each uniquely tasty. Why limit yourself to one country. I don't mean to be controversial but I don't belive humans are meant to be manHOGamous. Sorry.

Jokes aside my point stands, remember when prosciutto used to be considered great ham? It still is. In fact, Italy has lots of lovely ham, ditto Switzerland, and even Austria. I love French ham: Bayonne, bread, and goat cheese can make me happy to the point of tears. But that’s not even scratching the ham surface, what about the deep cuts? What about the excellent ham from China? Obviously there are the famous super-salty hams from Jinhua in Zhejiang province which are used mostly in China for cooking and soups but I love to eat straight like beef jerky. Or, even better, the many excellent hams from Yunnan often served thicker than the Jinhua hams, and with a stronger porcine funk. A nice slice on a steamed white bun with a crispy wafer and lots of honey might be China’s greatest contribution to global sandwich culture. And finally what about America? American hams, especially those from Virginia and farther south are really damn good. A good country ham will be very salty but clean and richly meaty. I love it and to be honest am much more excited to see a proper Southern country ham on the menu than the ubiquitous iberico.

Edward Biscuit-hands.

Anyway, the country ham on my biscuit was delicious, and so salty it tasted like it had been pulled from the sea. The cheddar was sharp to the point of outright hostility. The fried green tomatoes were pickle-tart and slick with oil and there must have been a whole hen’s worth of fluffy scrambled eggs. The gravy was unlike any gravy I had ever seen, nearly a stew, thick with chunks of meat. As soon as they brought it out it started begging for a mug of hot black coffee.

I ate half and promptly passed out in the back of the truck. And, tell you the truth, when I think about that other half biscuit, sitting alone in a pool of gravy I am filled with such deep regret and longing.

Country Ham Biscuit I will never forget you.

*Other options included the Brisket Biscuit with with brisket, pickled onion, smoked chevre, poached eggs, and bbq hollandaise. Or the Mimosa Fried Chicken Biscuit with mimosa fried chicken, sweet potato butter, Sriracha slaw, and a poached egg. Or, The Cajun Benedict: an open faced biscuit topped with creole mustard, local andouille, 2 poached eggs, hollandaise, roasted red peppers and scallions. I can’t even keep typing this. I’m looking for flights. 

Asheville: Home of the World's Best Snack?

The time I spent in and around Asheville North Carolina made me feel for the first time that I was really in "The South".

Coming over the misty passes of the Great Smokey Mountains, over the Blue Ridge Mountain Range in the foothills of the Appalachians, the roots-music fanboy in me was already squealing. All around me were the places from the songs and books I grew up with. This was the South of bootleggers and outlaws.

“Up on the Blue Ridge Mountains, there I’ll take my stand.
Up on the Blue Ridge Mountains, there I’ll take my stand.
A rifle on my shoulder, six shooter in my hand;
Oh Lord, I been all around this world.”

— All Around This World, Traditional

The food in North Carolina was mind blowing but in a most unexpected way; this time it wasn’t the pork or the sandwiches that moved me but a simple roadside snack: boiled peanuts.

These salty, sweet, and deeply spiced caramel-colored morsels left me totally dumbfounded. They reminded me most of all of Lao Seoi--the Chiu Chow “master stock” of cloves, star anise, peppercorns, dried orange peel and many other spices used in Eastern Guangdong to braise everything from whole geese to tofu--mixed with peanut butter.

There really is no excuse for why these aren’t available in every city in the world. I can’t imagine a better accompaniment to a double bourbon.

An impromptu picnic of boiled peanuts and local watermelon from the farmers market, with lumps of pulled pork and chopped beef brisket in tangy vinegar, and iced lemonade was my most happy-making meal on the whole road trip. I ate it with mom, my uncle, my cousin and her new husband all gathered around spread newspaper on the front porch, watching the rain fall on the hills ringing the horizon line; we ate with our hands, working through a roll of paper towels.

A proper southern picnic: watermelon, boiled peanuts, pulled pork, and chopped brisket.

Asheville doesn’t have a local style of barbecue like they do in Lexington further to the West but that didn’t stop me from eating it for two of my four meals there.

If I noticed anything unique about Asheville barbecue it was the bizarre flavored barbecue: barbecue joints around town advertised daily specials of strawberry mint bacon or blueberry ribs (?!). I didn’t try them and I don’t regret it one bit.

BBQ joint decor, Asheville NC.

The barbecue I did try, for example from 12 Bones Smoke House in Asheville’s River Arts District, was very good but aside from chopped beef brisket lightly dressed in red and served with paper-thin raw onions, not exceptional.

This chopped brisket was bananas.

At Moe’s Original I was happy to see they served white barbecue sauce, a specialty from Alabama made from mayonnaise, vinegar, salt, and pepper that can be hard to find outside of the state. Like at every barbecue joint I tried in the South, the greens were a revelation but it was the Alabama style pulled pork bathed in white sauce and served with thick cut pickles that made the biggest impression. The flavors reminded me strongly of one of the most over-the-top Cantonese dishes I used to order at cooked food centers in Hong Kong, Ribs in Salad Sauce: basically thick chunky pork spare ribs submerged completely in a big bowl of pink Thousand Island dressing.

Trust me, it is just as good as it sounds.

Alabama style BBQ from Moe's Original in Asheville North Carolina, note the white sauce.

American Barbecue: South Carolina

Barbecue keeps me a patriot. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I just saw online that in Britain they call putting something under the broiler barbecuing—don’t get me started—and people from lots of cultures, some Americans included, refer to backyard grilling as barbecuing.

That is not what I’m talking about; you can’t barbecue a hot dog, not really. When I say barbecue I refer to the culinary tradition, born in the American south in which meat is cooked slowly—often very slowly—with smoke or indirect heat.

Little Pigs Barbecue: just the sides.

The origin of barbecue is obscure and contested, interweaving the culinary traditions of Native Americans, African slaves, Caribbean islanders, Mexicans, the colonial powers, and Southern whites. You don’t get much more American than that. And there is so much that's true of barbecue that is also true of America itself: barbecue is at once part of our shared national identity and at the same time fiercely local, regional, even protectionist; like America, barbecue is oftenperceived as rural and unsophisticated but is in practice deeply nuanced and complex, taking an enormous amount of expertise, talent, and often multi-generational dedication to do right; and like America barbecue's unique poetry comes from deep pain and suffering, for most of its history barbecue represented a rare celebration in a life defined by hardship—nothing in this country involving African Americans and Native Americans is going to have a very happy history.

So all "true barbecue" must be meat cooked "low and slow", at low heat and for a long time, but after that all bets are off.

 When it comes to barbecue there are many, many regional differences: from the well-known Kansas City and Memphis styles, to the more obscure. Every hear of Alabama white sauce? Or Kentucky barbecue mutton?

My personal barbecue pilgrimage started in South Carolina. 

There is no true "Carolina style" barbecue, the situation is much too complex for that. The Carolinas are divided into a whole slew of micro-regions, each with their own local barbecue tradition; the one thing they all have in common is pork. 

In the Piedmont area of North Carolina the slow smoked pork is served with a tangy, ketchup-based red sauce. In Eastern North Carolina whole hog barbecue is the way to go: the pig is slow cooked whole before being picked apart and served simply with a splash of vinegar.

South Carolina embraces both styles of sauce, and brings one of their own to the table: a sweet, yellow, mustard based sauce that was introduced by the many German immigrants who settled in the state over the last 200 years. Because of their relative sauce-open-mindedness South Carolina is the perfect place to get an introduction to the region's diverse barbecuing traditions and perhaps the best introduction of all is at Little Pigs Barbecue in Columbus, the South Carolina state capital.

Little Pigs Barbecue: pulled pork with vinegar, pulled pork with mustard, and a chunk of sausage.

It was Sunday afternoon when we pulled off the freeway and found the Little Pigs sign; the dusty parking lot was filling up fast. Inside it seemed like the whole neighborhood had decided to stop in after church. Little Pigs was full to bursting with families in their Sunday best, little kids in clip on ties weaving in and out of the buffet line, old folks in their wheelchairs waiting for their grandchildren or great grandchildren to bring them styrofoam plates piled with steaming chopped pork.

The restaurant consists of one large two-sided buffet, and a small island in the middle of the room for plastic forks, napkins, and desserts. Not only did the buffet boast all of the traditional Southern fixins: baked beans, mac n’ cheese, fried okra, hush puppies, and fried chicken, there were also some deep South folk-gems I had never seen before like tomato pie and a pile of dark chocolate-brown fried livers the size of babies’ fists. 

Fried everything.

Then there was, in glorious profusion, the barbecue. 

Little Pigs had it all, and so did I. 

Everything was good but the pulled pork in vinegar was the star of the afternoon. The lightness off the vinegar let the pig sing out loud, deeply porky, its fatty sweetness cut just enough by the sauce. The flavor was remarkably similar to the best Filipino fried pork and vinegar dishes like lichen koala and crispy pata. 

That's mustard sauce bbq on the back left, and vinegar to the right.

The livers were also a surprise. They were excellent, not too fried and not too livery but rich, with only the faintest bite of iron. I did enjoy the pork in mustard sauce, the region’s signature style, but the sweet mustard for the most part over-powered the flavor of the pork, though it would be excellent on a sandwich no doubt—it’s worth noting that I was in the minority here, everyone else at my table preferred the mustard sauced pork.

Pre black out

We also had to try dessert which at Little Pigs consisted of a series of vats next to a tray of sliced dill pickles. Inside the vats was a delicious yellow mush (banana pie) and also a tasty brown mush (Chocolate delight). They were both good in that way instant pudding mixed with peanut butter is good (read very).

Look at that liver!!

The South it seems is not big on recycling, so after many trips to the trash can to throw away the sticky heap of styrofoam plates, bowls, and plastic cutlery, and waddling towards the door, I wondered idly—not hungrily mind you—that the only kind of Carolina barbecue not present was whole-hog style. "Probably a good thing," I mused, burping and picking my teeth, "I'd have to try it, and one more bite of pork might push me over the edge."

Well wouldn't you know, coming around the back side of the dessert island, my mother pointed out a whole massive haunch of pig, crisp and shiny under heat lamps next to a greasy pair metal tongs.

Quivering, I peeled off a shard of skin, picked apart a small pile of fatty pale meat, and retook my seat.

Somehow my stomach made room, and lord was I glad it did. The tiny stack of skin and meat was smoky and tasted intensely of swine in the funkiest, farmiest most fantastic way. It was delicious, and the deep, gurgling nap I slipped into as soon as I got back in the truck was too.

Sandwich Frenzy: The Overdoing

The next two weeks were a bit of a frenzy.

In DC it wasn't uncommon to go to two delicatessens for lunch, or to invent new meals: a quick sandwich between brunch and lunch, pre-appetizers, after dinner tacos. 

The few notes I took were ecstatic to the point of incoherence. Most of the pictures were rushed and blurred, taken with smeared mayonnaise sfumato or through a kind of sepia-toned barbecue sauce filter, or just remembered too late. I have a lot of very nice pictures of crumbs on plates.

Still, if the goal was to find Washington DC's best sandwiches, I think I succeeded. 

Mind you, I didn't only eat sandwiches. I had perfectly nice tacos all over the place, excellent modern Indian food at Rasika (where the Palak Chaat of Crispy baby spinach, sweet yogurt, tamarind, and date chutney might be the single best dish I have had all year) and most of all I had the full sampler platter at Zenebech Injera one of the best Ethiopian restaurants outside of Africa and my one must-visit-pilgrimage-spot every time I'm in DC.

I don't only eat sandwiches. This is an AMAZING platter from Zenebech Injera, a beloved injera bakery and one of the best Ethiopian restaurants in the United States. 

Zenebech is an Ethiopian Restaurant's Ethiopian Restaurant; almost all of the best Ethiopian restaurants in DC get their injera from the bakers at Zenebech (note to the brand newy: injera is an unrisen sour dough flat bread that is a staple of Ethiopian cuisine, and often the literal plate that the cuisine is served on). 

The restaurant itself is basically a hole in the wall, with linoleum floors, some casual outdoor seating, and a big fridge of cold Ethiopian beers. But, there is nothing stripped-down about the food. It is the best of its kind, spiced to the point of madness, fresh, bright and fiery. Get the meat combo and make sure to specify you want your kifto (ground beef) raw--pregnant women should order double. The doro wat (chicken stew with egg), and greens are especially excellent.

Ethiopian food in all its sloppy glory.

OK, back to the sandwiches.

Even though every sandwich I had in DC was better than any I had ever had in Hong Kong, three sandwiches were on a different level entirely, the kind of sandwiches you eat silently with tears in your eyes.

The first is another example of an Italian sandwich, just across the street from A. Litteri at Red Apron in Union Market.

"The Italian" put me in a bit of a quandary. The "4 Red Apron Meats, Aged Provolone, Herb Vinaigrette, Pickled Peppers, Iceberg, Onion" sounded close enough to a classic Italian sub on paper but as soon as they brought it out I could see that something was amiss: it was visibly over-seasoned, the lettuce was still in leafs and not shredded, and worst of all the ingredients were served jammed into a soft, top-loading bun. Everything, in a word, was wrong.

Then how do I explain that the sandwich was sublime: punchy, chewy, lip-smacking, a perfect balance of salt, and acid, fresh liveliness from the greens, and deep funk from the thicker cut cured meats. I don't know. I just know it was very, very good.

Here then is a commonality between poets and sandwich craftsmen: you must first master the form in order to break it, and sometimes only in breaking the form can something of transcendent beauty be born. Or something like that. The student submarine sandwich becomes the teacher submarine sandwich etc. etc.

Anyway.

The next sensational sandwich I had in DC came from one of the most unexpected places.

In fact we were trying to take a break from eating sandwiches when we got in line at Rose's Luxury nearly two hours before they opened for dinner.

Rose's Luxury has been described (by google I think) as an eclectic New American tapas restaurant. It is famous, and it is trendy. I believe it was named America's best restaurant by GQ Magazine last year and it surpassed all of my expectations.

A shitty picture of an excellent sandwich, Rose's Luxury

A different blogger might take this opportunity to walk through their full, delicious, multi-course meal (pork sausage, habanero, peanuts, and lychee salad holla at me!), but I'm going to focus instead on something magical that happened after the dinner was, for all intents and purposes, over.

We had just decided we were too full for dessert, ordered a sherry, and asked for the check when we saw the chefs in the back of the open kitchen assembling a sandwich and serving it to a duo of self-satisfied foodie-hipsters. 

An off-menu secret dinner sandwich. I almost peed my pants.

We ordered one immediately and what came out was a sandwichized version of their popular smoked brisket entree. Perfect pink brisket shiny with fat, piled under a glistening thatch of tart and crispy slaw, all served with a generous slather of horseradish on a brioche bun so buttery it threatened to melt. This was a meal sandwich to be sure. A fatty, filling, stew of a sandwich, the kind that has you lying in bed hours later perspiring suet into your eyes. I loved it.

I may have some of the details wrong here, I was deep in the throes of sandwich induced ecstasy (what my parents have learned to call "tripping sammies"). 

Brisket: The Close Up

Now, to what I think was the best sandwich of my two weeks in Washington, the Spiced Baby Goat sandwich from G by Mike Isabella (yes, the guy from Top Chef). 

I have no notes about this sandwich and not a single picture. I do not feel bad about this; nobody is paying me to blog.

My memories of the sandwich are... well memories are tricky things.

I do remember I'd never had anything like it. It was like Isabella managed to cram all of the depth and complexity of Moroccan cuisine into a bun; if the Rose's Luxury sandwich was a stew, the spiced baby goat was a tajine. 

I'm looking at the menu description for the sandwich online now: harissa, lemon potatoes, and oregano and that hardly does what really was a watershed sandwich for me justice. Firstly it doesn't really explain the goat itself, which I remember as slow cooked in what must have been a heavily-spice broth until it was deeply flavored and falling apart, then it must have been put on the griddle, or under the broiler for a bit because in my mind it was still nicely browned and chewy. The potatoes were almost as moving as the goat, they were little bright yellow fingerling and marble potatoes but cooked until soft and creamy, and when you would take a bite they would basically take on the roll of a thick sauce, redolent of preserved lemon, the smokey heat of the harissa, and the savory slightly astringent oregano. 

It was (I think) one of the best sandwich I (might) have ever had.

Just a quick note: It has been brought to my attention that so far this blog is a bit sandwich-centric so if you're not a sandwich fan (read foreigner) or are gluten intolerant or something (read asshole) don't fear, from here we'll be going down the rabbit hole of American regional barbecue. Next stop the Carolinas!

Sandwich Capital

I love sandwiches. Washington DC loves sandwiches. I love Washington DC.

Some things just seem fated. I arrived in the capital in the throes of a fevered sandwich obsession just when sandwiches seemed to be dominating the passions of every food loving Washingtonian. Google Washington and in would auto fill "'s best sandwiches", local magazines were extolling the pleasures of a good sandwich in big, garish cover stories and a city-wide tournament was taking place between the area's best sandwich cooks.

My girlfriend, who shares my obsession and has her finger  on the "sandwich pulse", had already made me a list of the must tries—A. Litteri, Rose's Luxury, G, Sundevich, Red Apron, etc etc*—so with only two weeks to spare we wasted no time in getting down to it.

The first stop was A. Litteri, an overstuffed Italian market slotted in between the warehouses on Morse Street in the Union Market area.

First proper yams I've seen outside of West Africa.

What a first stop it was. My presumed deceased patriotic impulses were stirring before we even got into the store. As soon as we got out of the car it even sounded delicious thanks to the mix of Cantonese, Spanish, Ewe and Amharic spilling out of the warehouses with boxes of Chinese vegetables, Ghanian yams, and dried chillies.

Entering under a painting of an Italian sub, A. Litteri was dark, and tight, and crammed to bursting with jars of pickles, sauces, and preserves in portions ranging from tiny single-serving jars to restaurant supply barrels the size of a tallish child. There were overstuffed refrigerators of fresh and frozen pastas, cubbies rammed with bread rolls, mountains of olives, and walls of dried pasta. Against the far wall was the deli counter with cured meats, bowls of peppers floating in oil, and assorted antipasti behind glass.

I may have been out of the country for a while but I'm not new. I ordered right: 9-inch Italian sub with all the fixins (at A. Litteri this means capicola, Genoa salami, mortadela, prosciuttini, provolone, lettuce, tomato, onion, hot pepper, and Italian dressing ) on a hard roll** with a trio of peppers on the side—medium hot finger peppers stuffed with mozzarella and prosciutto, goat cheese stuffed sweet peppers, and miniature mild bell peppers stuffed with the same mozzarella  and prosciutto.

If I had a church the altar would look like this.

To say the sandwich hit the spot is to miss the mark widely. This was more a "blind man sees" type of situation.

I’ve learned over the years introducing out-of-towners to their first "classic Italian" that a surprising number feel their first sub experience is a bit of a letdown. I think this is because the typical modern jaded sandwich palate, used to mounds of pickles, strong mustards, peppery micro greens, sweet artisanal spreads, and sharp stinky cheeses, may feel the Italian sub, with its ice burg lettuce, raw onion and thick shingle of cured meat, is a bit one-note. 

Head Shot

I realize that taste, perhaps especially when it comes to food, is subjective and intensely personal. Still, I have no reservations in saying these people are wrong. 

The Italian sub is not a modern sandwich: it is somehow pastoral, hardscrabble, a shepherd's lunch of a sandwich, an urban memory of a country luncheon. A good Italian sub is an artifact of a great geographic and spiritual shift, of a rural people staking out a place for themselves, against all odds in a cold and indifferent urban world. It’s real Cain and Abel stuff and it is perfect. 

Sorry I'll stop. Good subs have a way of making me lose all perspective. Suffice it to say A. Litteri makes  a very good sandwich. And those peppers, God damn.

Me, mid dreams coming true.

*I would be remiss if I didn't mention the obvious omission of Stachowski's Market in Georgetown. I ate there before on my last trip home and wanted to keep this list all new-to-me sandwiches. Still, they make an excellent and justifiably famous Italian sandwich. Be warned, they are really, bizarrely big. One could easily feed a very hungry orphanage. The sandwich we ordered would not fit in the glove box of our car. This is no joke.

**A word on rolls. When ordering a proper Italian sandwich you order it on a hard roll. I know that soft rolls are often better but, in the world of deli most of all, without tradition all is lost. If you can’t handle the hard roll just leave your sandwich in the paper for a while and let it soak up all of that oil, vinegar, and processed pork perspiration (PPP). In fact do this anyway.

Coming Home

When I started telling people I was moving back to the United States almost everybody asked me why. Usually I would tell them that I missed my loved ones or that the job opportunities were better back home; if I was feeling especially candid I might admit that it was the sandwiches.

It’s a common trope for writers to conceive of their life as divided between parenthesis: the parenthesis that, say, open on a graduation and close with a first real job, or the set that open on a child’s birth and close on a first day of school. Instead of parenthesis I see my life portioned between slices of bread. I see a whole series of sandwiches of varying quality: a childhood between TOGOs hot pastrami and my mom’s tuna salad sandwiches with curry powder and green apple, coming of age from the  Padre’s Pride (bacon, chicken, avocado,  melted provolone cheese, and pesto sauce) from Mr. Pickles Deli near my house to the gooey chicken cutlet, oil, vinegar, and mozzarella on a Kaiser roll from Cazzie’s Corner Deli in Yonkers just off my college campus.  Then, for the last half decade, I’ve been adrift. Living in Africa and Hong Kong, I haven't been able to find a decent sandwich to save my life.

And, it’s not just sandwiches. Sandwiches here are more of a symbol: I miss barbecue, Mexican food, big California avocados, salads with goat cheese and peaches, Ethiopian spreads the size of wagon wheels, all of those regional specialties, and immigrant imports that make American food and food culture so constantly rewarding.

They say you can never go home again and while I’m not sure I will ever be able to find gainful employment in America, establish a satisfying social circle, or slip back into my earlier home life, I know reflexively that the food—and for that matter the music, literature, art, movies, and TV shows—is mine. American culture is my birthright, its food culture most of all. We’ve just become a little bit estranged.

For all my talk of "America", I've barely actually seen (or eaten) much of it at all. All my life on my mental map a big blank space stretched between San Francisco and New York City. I would brag to friends in Hong Kong about how good the ribs were in America, keeping guiltily to myself that the most “authentic” ribs I’d ever tasted were from Oakland California more than 2,000 miles from Memphis. 

Over the years I filled that blank space with stereotypes and misconceptions. Like most Bay Area culture-snobs I pictured the middle  of country as an endless expanse of mega churches and KKK rallies, where fat men in camouflage took occasional breaks from slow cooking pork butt to handle snakes or shoot shotguns in the air—I know this makes me an asshole. I also know that “the rest of the country” is where those things I love most about America— jazz, bourbon, biscuits, Ham, rock n’ roll, barbecue, and sausage gravy to name but a few—are from. Pretty much none of the things that excited me most about coming home (exceptions: deli, mission style burritos, the Wu-tang clan) were born in New York City or the Bay Area.

Wanting to "come home right", and after many phone conversations with my mother (who I also missed very much, nearly as much as my girlfriend and sandwiches), we together settled on the perfect re-entry. 

My favorite sticker ever. Spotted in a DC deli. T-shirt please.

Mom was already a few weeks into her annual retreat at Hilton Head Health, a health and weight loss resort on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina and we decided that I would fly into the States through New York (sturgeon with scrambled eggs and double decker pastrami and turkey sandwiches from Barney Greengrass), then spend a couple long-time-coming weeks with my supremely patient girlfriend in Washington DC—while eating my way through the city's exploding sandwich scene—before taking a train to Hilton Head where I would join mom in eating a restricted calorie diet without alcohol,  and exercising all day every day for two weeks, hopefully undoing some of the the considerable damage done in four years of being a food and booze writer.

One of the world's great sandwiches: turkey and pastrami double decker with slaw from Barney Greengrass NYC

Then after the famine, would come the feast.

Since I was a little kid mom had talked about taking a musical pilgrimage slash road trip through the South and West, visiting the birthplaces of her favorite musicians and catching as much live music as possible. I've always wanted to do the same but with an emphasis on food—especially the many different regional styles of barbecue. This, we decided, was the perfect opportunity. 

A perfect US road trip starter kit.

We made plans to meet my uncle at a newly married/pregnant cousin’s house in Asheville, North Carolina. He would then take us—chauffeur is such an ugly word— in his truck (mom doesn't drive on the highway and I don't have a license: the perfect foundation for a road trip) down to Nashville (hot chicken), then Memphis (BBQ!), on down through the deep heart of the Mississippi Delta along the blues trail to New Orleans, cut west through Cajun country—my god that Cajun country No Reservations Episode—up to Austin in Central Texas, across the great Western flats to Santa Fe, through the Mojave desert and over the foothills of the Sierras, and finally home to San Francisco. We would fill the car with books and CDs from the places we were visiting, along with lists of venues, restaurant recommendations and sheafs of menus, eating and listening our way across the country.

Hopefully when the truck finally stopped in the driveway of my childhood home in San Francisco I would feel truly home again. At the very least I wouldn’t be so hungry anymore.