Southern Food & Drink: the Week in Review (June 3 - June 9)

Southern BBQ Takes Manhattan: An all-star squad of Southern barbecue kings dragged their rigs all the way up to Madison Square Park in New York City so the city folks could get a proper taste of whole hog. The occasion was the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party 2013, and notable cooks included, to name just a few, Jimmy Hagood (BlackJack BBQ, Charleston, SC), Sam Jones (Skylight Inn, Ayden, NC), Chris Lilly (Big Bob Gibson's, Decatur, AL), Pat Martin (Martin's, Nashville, TN), Ed Mitchell (Raleigh, NC), Drew Robinson (Jim N' Nicks, Birmingham, AL), and Rodney Scott (Scott's, Hemingway, SC).

Fish Tales: Ken Vedrinski of Charleston's Trattoria Lucca has opened a second restaurant, Coda del Pesca, north of town on the Isle of Palms. Serious seafood and pasta with something very rare in Charleston: oceanfront dining.

Gunshow Swooning: Down in Atlanta, initial reviews of Kevin Gillespie's new dim sum-meets-lardcore restaurant Gunshow are starting to roll in. Josh Ozersky penned a "Love Letter to Atlanta" that gives a nice, brief snapshot on what's happening in that city these days, including his praise for Gunshow. Cliff Bostock in Creative Loafing gave it high marks in his first look, too. Pork skin risotto, anyone?

Pic of the Week: Rodney Scott gave some barbecue lessons to Fox News Sunday. Word is they did a pretty good job with the mopping, except that most of the sauce ended up on the pig's right side.

Food Talk: How We Say It In These Parts

Josh Katz, a graduate student at in the Statistics Department at NC State, has put together "Beyond 'Soda, Pop, or Coke'", a dramatic site visualizing geographic difference in dialect that has stirred up a good bit of buzz on the Interwebs in the past few days. After having spent way more time than I intended clicking through all the maps, I've put together this meta-study if you will of what Katz and Bert Vaux's data tells us about the way we say stuff about food around here.

My findings about South Carolina:

• We eat "man-aze" on our sandwiches, and we have no problem putting a little "slaw" on them. 
• Despite the fact that Charleston has  a wonderful downtown joint called "Dave's Carry-Out", almost nobody in uses "carry-out" as a generic term for "take-out"food.
• We have never heard of such a thing as a drive-through liquor store.
• We seem divided on whether we like PEE-can or pee-KAHN pie for dessert, though if we drizzle a sweet topping on we'll call it "carra-mel sir-up".
• We're just as likely to wash that pie down with a soda as we are with a Coke. (Mississippi, it turns out, is the hotbed of calling all carbonated beverages "cokes")

In the "who knew" category:

• A lot of people around Kansas City apparently put "vinegar and oil" on their salads (instead of "oil and vinegar")
• The use of "supper" to refer to the evening meal (and "dinner" to refer to the midday one) is not more prevalent in the South than the rest of the country. If anywhere is the hot-bed of eating supper, it's North and South Dakota. Nobody in California, on the other hand, ever eats supper--probably because the traffic is so bad on "the 5" that time of day that they'd never get there.
• In Tidewater Virginia, they call drive through liquor stores "brew thrus"
• When they want to get the front seat on the way to a restaurant, a lot of folks in Iowa shout "dibs" instead of "shotgun"
• If you call a shopping cart a "buggy", you can rest assured that you are in the South. 

Introducing the Unexpurgated History of the Sazerac Cocktail

I am fast at work on my latest project, which is a history of booze in the South. In the course of the research, I dug deep into the history of the classic New Orleans cocktails, including the Sazerac.

It's a bizarrely complicated tale, and just uncovering the real story was sort of a step-by-step drama in itself, running down leads and discovering many missteps, bad assumptions, and downright wrongness in so many previous accounts of the drink's history.

As I was working on the draft, it kept getting more and more complicated, and I kept having to go back and change details and elaborate as I dug up more information. In the end, the narrative became so long and complicated that I don't think anyone but a few hard-core cocktail buffs would be interested in reading it. I'm trimming it way back and totally recasting it in the book draft, but, in case you are one of those hard-core cocktail buffs, I figured I might go ahead and publish the whole unexpurgated story here on my blog. I've created it as a separate page that you can read here.

Yes, it's long and detailed, but there are a lot of curious twist and turns in it that I found just fascinating. And it made me quite thirsty, too.

What's the Deal with Restaurant Specials, Anyway?

Last week Michael Pollan dictated seven "Rules for Eating Out" to help hapless patrons navigate the uncertainties of restaurant dining. Predictably, there was backlash, and among the more amusing responses was Josh Ozersky's point by point rejoinder on the Esquire Eat Like a Man blog.

I was particularly struck by Pollan's rule #5: "If there are daily specials, order them. Usually means fresh ingredients and a thoughtful preparation."

Ozersky's response was this: "Specials were invented to get rid of old food. That's the primary 'thought' behind their preparation, and it basically consists of a dollar bill with wings on it."

So which is it? I ran back through my own experience working at restaurants and eating in them, and while I remember some examples of specials meant to use up an item before it went bad, I don't remember anyone ever sending outright bad, spoiled food on the old blue plate. And, there are innumerable examples of chefs who run specials because they get in a particularly good fish that day or have something creative they want to flex their muscles on.

And that's when I had this heretical thought: what the hell difference does it matter? Yes, if you eat a special and end up hugging the commode all night long with food poisoning, then it makes a difference, and you would never go back to that restaurant. But, if you have a brain and listen to the waiter's description and think the special sounds good, and it comes out and tastes good and you enjoy it, isn't that all that matters?

Reductive rules like "always order the special" seems to assume that restaurant patrons are clueless when it comes to how to order. Are we really so uncertain about how to navigate the modern food world that we need lists of easy-to-understand, black-and-white rules to guide us?

The answer, I'm afraid, judging by the popularity of "rules" and "eat-this-not-that" and "10 simple tricks" books and lists, is that we probably are. So I have just one rule to add to the mix: "Trust your tastebuds: you know more than you think you do."

Southern Food & Drink: The Week in Review (May 27 - June 2)

A lot of pigs and pork in the news this week.

Saving his Bacon: Near-disaster was narrowly averted when Allan Benton's smokehouse in Madisonville, TN, caught fire. As firefighters worked to put out the blaze, Benton and some friends ran inside and saved the bacon, and the ham, too. No word yet on whether the product will be extra smoky for a while.  

Fleer to Asheville: It's official. John Fleer, who made a name for himself at Tennessee's Blackberry Farm, is opening a new restaurant in downtown Asheville, with a focus on Southern cuisine.

Looking East: Asian bakeries are taking off in Atlanta, and The Local Palate rounded up a few.

Shifts & Changes: In Nashville, Strategic Hospitality announced Josh Habiger would transition out as chef at the Catbird Seat to work on new projects, including a restaurant of his own.

This Little Piggy Went to China: Smithfield Food, America's largest hog processor, announced that it is being bought by China's Shuanghui International for $4.7 billion. Environmentalists are worried about the global expansion of factory farming, members of Congress are worried about jobs moving overseas, and the editors at Forbes composed the headline of the week: "US Regulators To Examine Whether Smithfield Foods Sale Is Kosher."

Pic of the Week: Separated at birth? April Bloomfield and Sean Brock

A Lowcountry Morning

Southern Food & Drink: The Week in Review

Biscuitology: The 4th Annual International Biscuit Festival, which included its own Southern Food Writing Conference, wrapped up on Sunday. Rebecca Orchant provided a good recap for the Huffington Post.

Cool Season: A cold, wet spring has led to one of the best strawberry crops in years. But, those same cool temperatures have limited the supply soft shell crabs, making them hard to come by in places like New Orleans.

More Husk, More Brock: Husk Nashville, the new Tennessee outpost of the Sean Brock's Charleston restaurant, opened its doors  Wednesday, bringing its much-anticipated all-Southern-ingredients cuisine to the Music City. If that wasn't enough, PBS announced that Brock would be featured alongside New York City's April Bloomfield in the second season of "The Mind of a Chef."

Debt & Infighting: The pink building on Royal Street that has housed legendary New Orleans restaurant Brennan's for over fifty years was sold at auction this week, following years of debt and family infighting. The restaurant remains open while the Brennan family tries to negotiate a lease with the building's new owners.

Roast Beef in Texas: Oh, and some guys down in Texas made a lot of fuss about barbecue. Nobody paid them much attention.

Pic of the Week: Afraid of vampires? Hugh Acheson tracked down just what you need at the Athens farmers market. 

I'm Sorry, You're Putting WHAT In Your Pimento Cheese?

A Base for Pimento Cheese?

Around the South, you hear lots of debate over what kind of mayo should be used to make pimento cheese. Some people are loyal to Hellman's, while others insist on homemade mayonnaise. And then there are those who are right and use Duke's.

Apparently there are people in Boston, though, who  don't have much respect for mayo and instead are making pimento cheese out of . . . wait for it . . . plain yogurt.

That, at least, is what the folks at the Boston Globe are recommending in their "Recipe for Southern pimento cheese."

Sounds like a recipe for an argument to me.

Of course, if you look back at the long history of pimento cheese, perhaps using a little yogurt isn't so much of departure. The original version consisted of just plain cream cheese or Neufchatel cheese with minced pimentos mixed in it--no mayo, no cheddar, no lemon juice or cayenne pepper or other secret ingredients. (You can find the full, somewhat scandalous history of pimento cheese in my collection Going Lardcore: Adventures in New Southern Dining.)

The yogurt, the Globe's recipe writer suggests, is "lighter" and "tangier". Turns out that they're not alone. A Google search reveals any number of "guilt-free pimento cheese" recipes that substitute plain yogurt (often Green yogurt) for good old mayo.

I don't know. Something tells me that if I served my guests pimento cheese made with yogurt, I would have plenty to feel guilty about.

Everything Old Is New Again . . . Or Is It the Other Way Around?

So, over the weekend, Josh Ozersky pounded out a bit of a humdinger for the Wall Street Journal entitled "The New Barbecue", in which he profiled several upstart chefs who are taking on what he calls "the sacred cow of barbecue", a tradition he feels has "become so stagnant and so dogmatic that many pit masters haven't changed their recipes or routines in decades."

He praises Tim Rattray at San Antonio's Granary 'Cue & Brew for unmistakably modern dishes like Moroccan lamb shoulder on preserved lemon couscous. He gives an admiring nod to Tim Byers' coffee-cured brisket at Smoke in Dallas and Andy Husbands' smoked duck confit po boys at Tremont 647 in Boston.

As one might expect, there's was an immediate backlash. Daniel Vaughn, ardent champion of brisket and author of the just-released Prophets of Smoked Meat: A Journey Through Texas Barbecue, traded Twitter barbs with Ozersky, including "You say stagnant and dogmatic, while I say traditional and reverent" and "100 year old techniques have lasted because they don't require improvement."




North Carolina blogger Porky LeSwine (a.k.a BBQJew) weighed in, too, labeling Ozersky's effort "a truly idiotic piece of writing" based upon "a startling lack of understanding of what barbecue is and what makes it great--tradition, family recipes refined over generations, simple techniques that render (literally) exquisite meat."

I suppose my view has a bit longer lens. The controversy brought to my mind a passage in an article that Rufus Jarman wrote for The Saturday Evening Post back in 1954, in which he described the reactions of barbecue purists to the rising tide of barbecue restaurants. These purists still held to the old 19th century tradition of barbecue as a gigantic outdoor event where hundreds if not thousands gathered to dine on whole animals cooked over a pit dug in the ground.

As Jarman reports, the new-fangled restaurant style of barbecue--the very "tradition" that Vaughn and LeSwine  so passionately defend today--struck the old timers in the 1950s as "an insult to the honorable name of barbecue", amounting to "an underdone pork roast served with a sauce so hot and bitter that the victim can't tell what he is eating."

Change has never come easy in the three-century history of American barbecue, but it has come all the same. I'm not quite sure I'm ready for a plate of beef shoulder garnished with coffee-laced quinoa and pickled celery, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a harbinger of even more radical innovations to come.

Ask Not For Whom the Bell Tolls, Chicken and Waffles. It Tolls For You.

Chicken and Waffles from the Rarebit

And, speaking of the fading of pork fat's star, one can only wonder how much longer Charleston's recent crush on chicken-and-waffles will last.

Clearly an invention from far off (there's contention over whether Atlanta or Harlem is the true birthplace), fried chicken and waffles snuck their way into Charleston less than a decade ago, with A.C.'s Bar & Grill being perhaps the first local purveyor.

Suddenly, a year or so ago, they started popping up everywhere. Early Bird Diner, true to its name, got early attention for theirs, even getting the full-on food porn treatment from Guy Fieri on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. The first plate I had in Charleston was from the Rarebit, and I found them pretty good. Fuel, Lowcountry Bistro, Liberty Tap Room, and Poogan's Porch all serve them on their brunch menus. And there's more coming, like the soon-to-launch Kitchen 208, which will feature a chicken and waffle sandwich.

There's nothing wrong with a good plate of chicken and waffles, but I think it's just because fried chicken is good and waffles are good. I've not experienced any sort of magic synergy between the two, despite the combination's apparent ability to send so many diners into rapturous odes.

Will they prove to have legs? Time will tell, but I'm skeptical.