Pies and thighs
McDonaldization is the term that George Ritzer uses, quite effectively, to describe the homogenization of experience in America. His book, The McDonaldization of Society, chronicles the rise of McDonald’s and its adoption of consistency and reliability as a template for corporate success. For argument’s sake, put aside any discussion of quality and enjoyment and let’s focus on the relationship between food and memory. At its inception, or rather at the moment when McDonald’s decided to become a national chain, the corporation staked its success on the ability to recreate a singular experience, regardless of geography. A cheeseburger in Jacksonville, Florida tasted exactly like a cheeseburger in Seattle, Washington. A family on a road trip, could travel across the country and little Billy could have a happy meal for lunch every day without running the risk of a bad, different, or potentially unsettling experience. This strategy, as evidenced by the “billions and billions” served, has been wildly successful and speaks directly to the notion of comfort that eating brings.
Amazing meals are notoriously difficult to recreate. Food can be easily recreated, not to discount the skills of great cooks, but we record and document and use this documentation to precisely recreate dishes again and again. Meals are collaborations with food, company, and season, and mood. Amazing meals require synergy between these forces and as such, occur with relative infrequency compared to the sheer number of times we eat. The genius of McDonalds is that they never aimed to create an amazing experience. It may be the single greatest failure of our society that we so willingly and even exuberantly embraced “good enough” as acceptable. The McDonalds’ cheeseburger: one gray patty of %100 “beef”, two slices of pickle, a yellow square of processed cheese-food, two squirts-one red, one yellow and an 1/4 teaspoon of raw onion. I can taste it now and it tastes exactly the same as it did when I was 25, 18, 14, 9, and 5. To my shame, it even tastes the same as last week, but at 3 in the morning, ones’ options begin to diminish. The point, however, is that the “good enough” experience is not difficult to recreate; the amazing meal is impossible to recreate; and there is a third category that exists between the good enough and the amazing meal: my favorite _____.
My favorite barbecue ribs come from a roadside stand in Gainesville Florida called Terrell’s. A whole slab of ribs-smoky, fatty, sweet and spicy-comes sliced on top of wonder bread in a Styrofoam box that once opened doubles as trough and bone bucket. In the lot behind the stand, you can track Terrell’s BBQ history from his first tiny smoker, to ever larger carts and stands and their years of smoking meat produce an unfailing afternoon of overindulgence every time. Sadly, it’s been over ten years since I’ve cracked one of those Styrofoam treasure chests. Every summer I think of those ribs and every rib I eat is measured against them. They are my Barbecue ideal. My memory of their perfection is probably imperfect, but it is all that I have and I hold onto it, long for it and reminisce about those Sunday afternoon picnic tables, trying to use handi-wipes to get the sauce out of my cuticles.
I have gone back to Terrell’s many times in my imagination. In reality, there is a part of me that hesitates. I love the place I remember, I cherish it and I want it to stay perfect and beautiful. What if, on returning, the ribs are over-smoked, sickly sweet, too fatty, too lean, too charred or simply “good enough.” The tragedy of that fall might just be too much for me to handle, so I stay away from Terrell’s, living two thousand miles away makes it pretty easy.
Herein lies the larger dilemma of having favorites: the memory of a food versus the actuality of it. When I lived in Gainesville, the memory of Terrell’s was continually buttressed by the actuality of those ribs. Actual experience, as it pertains to eating, is sadly fleeting. The memories are what persist and there is a direct corollation between the quality of the experience and the strength of the memory. Imagine an inverted bell on a graph with the vertical axis representing memory pervasiveness and the horizontal axis actual enjoyment. We remember terrible meals as a defense mechanism-never to be repeated. Average meals produce average memories. Amazing meals, amazing foods, and the places where we may procure them stay with us with an indelible intensity that becomes the measures for every subsequent experience of that particular food.
Terrell’s ribs have yet to be supplanted in that grand mental inventory of favorite foods and memorable meals. I will probably never have conch as good as the one my friend Pete pulled out of its shell with a screwdriver then skinned with his teeth while we sat on a tiny key off Andros Island. But tomorrow, or even tonight, I can jump on the L to Bedford Avenue, walk a few blocks and order a chicken box from Pies and Thighs and in a few short minutes I will be eating my favorite fried chicken.
There is a comfortable simplicity to Pies and Thighs. Mismatched 70’s tables fill the front room below a handwritten menu and a clean Southern charm of nonchalance and confidence fills the space. Though the menu offers an array of southern traditions: pulled pork, brisket, fried catfish and hushpuppies, it is the fried chicken and its variations that make Pies and Thighs a regular stop for so many in the city. I don’t have memories of grandma’s fried chicken on Sunday evenings, no grand traditions or teary reminiscences. I grew up eating fried chicken out of cardboard buckets and red folded boxes. Though I am from the South, I rely heavily on the retold memories of fried chicken dinners that pervade the literary canon of the south, not to mention food magazine anecdotes, and the lush representations of soul food found in every movie filmed below the Mason-Dixon Line. The romance of fried chicken comes alive with the first bite, and lives on far beyond the last foraged flake of salty battered chicken skin. The true test, as every fried food aficionado will attest, is that every bite is delicious. The first bite, through that lightly battered miracle of fried chicken skin always feels right. The interim savagery of ripping through the meat and bone is a minor feast of clean, moist white breast meat and the darker, richer thighs and legs. I always arrive at my third piece with a twinge of sadness knowing that my chicken is almost gone, but safe in the knowledge that I am already happy, very nearly full, and that the skin is still crunchy, the meat warm and giving.
Sit down at pies and thighs, if its early, get the chicken biscuit and the honey and hot sauce that drips out will make you smile. If it’s later, order a chicken box, relax, its chicken, it’s not fancy. You’ll enjoy hearing about your old friend’s new baby and the fact that he’s almost done with Law school and actually still likes it. You can catch up with your friends from home as you work your way through the collards (generously strewn with pulled pork) and the red hot spiked mac and cheese. It’s chicken, it’s delicious.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Friday, January 7, 2011
Introducing...me
I promise my next entry will actually be about a restaurant, but until then...
One of the many useful but financially fruitless benefits of an expensive liberal arts education is the obligation as a writer to contextualize myself in my writing. As such, it seems only appropriate that I should introduce myself, my work and therein offer you, my dear and unseen reader, some window into who I am in this gastronomical wasteland of food writing.
I started cooking when I was 13. My mother, in a brilliant stroke designed to ease the burden of cooking nightly for a family of four, decided that each of us should be responsible for preparing dinner one night a week for the family (Thursdays would still belong to Houlihan’s and the mall). I am still not sure whether she anticipated the dramatic drop in quality of our family dinners, or whether she cared. Until that point, my culinary expertise consisted of over-boiling a diced potato, draining the water, adding diced ham and cheese to the pot, cracking three eggs in and stirring until a solid mass of protein, fats and carbohydrates formed. I would then dump this concoction into a bowl and consume it while watching whatever crappy early afternoon television was available. Thankfully I never shared this particular culinary genius with my family. My actual contribution, however, was not appreciably better.
For the first year, my staple family dinner was “Pizza.” I have inserted quotes because I live in New York now and I know better. Unrolled from the can, my pre-made dough would almost perfectly fit our only sheet pan, jarred tomato sauce, shredded mozzarella, sliced bell pepper and pre-sliced pepperoni. 11-14 minutes later, dinner was served. My father’s staple meal was black beans and rice: 2 cans of black beans warmed in a pot with a bit of salt, rice from the rice cooker, and diced raw white onions. My sister was more inventive though I only remember one of her dinners. She would search out recipes and in the fashion of the day; they were usually quick, strangely inventive solutions for over-worked moms to get their kids to eat vegetables by disguising them with meat and cheese. Her dish: Broccoli, rolled in sliced smoked turkey, placed in a casserole dish a-la enchiladas, then covered in cream of mushroom soup and baked for 30 minutes. We were not a culinary dream team, but my mom relished the nights when she didn’t have to cook. She would happily load the dishwasher when we were finished eating and we would return to our respective televisions.
“So how do you get from there to here?”
I’m glad you hypothetically asked…
In my junior year of High School my father hurt his back. As disconnected as that event seems from the quality of our family dinners, it was a pivotal moment in our dining history. After refusing surgery and seeking out any and every opinion he could find, he finally accepted a long and physically limiting regimen that demanded he stay in bed, or more often on the floor for the next six months. It was then, before the food network was even born, that he began watching cooking shows. Julia Childs, the Frugal Gourmet, and Jacques Pepin had cooking shows and my father watched obsessively. He began to fetishize their copper cookware and Viking ranges. He would dream of crème brulee and chateaubriand. To his credit, he never asked my mother to attempt any of these dishes, but when he was able to walk and work again, he began his own campaign to overtake the kitchen-a battle that my mother happily surrendered. His first challenge was also his first love: Black Bean Soup.
Watching my father work on something is not unlike watching a bullfight. Like the bull, he has an incredibly singular focus and a drive to win, or rather defeat. For months he battled that soup, under-soaking, over-soaking, burning the bottom of pots, buying dampeners to control the simmer, calculating ratios of pureed beans to whole beans, measuring cilantro, drying cilantro, freezing cilantro purees for the next batch. When he finally emerged with his quintessential “Black Bean Soup” he had literally been working on it for 6 months. It is delicious, silky, earthy, and aromatic with an herbaceous bite and a sweet balsamic driven finish. His black beans and rice from the year before became a running joke in our family. Sadly the black bean soup has become one as well, only because we can never get him to make it since the recipe takes three solid days. In my memory, it is amazing.
Fresh off his victory he began to conquer all of his culinary dreams: Coq au Vin, pate sucre, creme anglaise, crème brulee, pancakes, waffles, scrambled eggs, roasted pork and lamb of legs (sorry-- I just liked the rhythm of the list). As my father reworked recipes, I became his official guinea pig. He would chart each minor change and with my sister away at college, I was tasked with giving constant feedback. Every Sunday’s pancakes had to be noticeable better or he would berate himself for an ill-advised shift in the recipe. Cardboard tubes of pizza dough were banished from the kitchen and a pizza stone took up residence in the oven. Food became the central topic of conversation.
When I left for college, my parents moved to a house with a better kitchen and a place for my father to hang his copper pots. Every Christmas he would unveil a new series of successfully conquered dishes and we would talk food for hours. Food was always safer than politics so my sister and I were happy to indulge him. Along the way, I became his holiday sous chef and with the skills he taught me, I began seducing girls at school with my ability to make a green peppercorn sauce.
When I graduated and started waiting tables (please refer to usefulness of said liberal arts degree), we had even more to discuss. I began to bring home tips, tools and ingredients from the restaurants where I worked and we would trade sous chef responsibilities. My father cooked from his intricately tested and proven recipes, I would cook like I had seen the chef’s at work cook, intuitively moving through the kitchen, tasting, changing, tasting, plating. We would cook together and review our meals for missteps and successes. As I moved through a second bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree and 5 restaurants over 15 years, our relationship revolved around food. From time to time we might stray into his politics or into my sculpture, but those topics were always too difficult and fraught with our mutually perceived failings and disappointments. In the kitchen, we are the same blood, so we stay in the kitchen.
Despite having ventured through several degrees and academic pursuits, food is the subject that drives me. For years I spent more time in restaurants than in the studio, initially as a means by which to support my studio practice, but more recently, I have come to embrace the industry and the work as an environment in which I thrive, and a language in which I’m fluent. But beyond having a faculty for the subject, I have come to realize that I love it. I can talk about food for longer than most people would like to listen. I will taste anything and everything, often twice. Foods that I don’t like initially, I spend more time with, parsing their components to ensure that it is my taste and not their new-ness that I am objecting against. In the past 10 years I have tracked food network stars, rising chefs, food trends and the once burgeoning, now global obsession with food. In that time it has been my work, my hobby, and my connection to my family. It is only here and now that I am also able to recognize with confidence and pleasure that it is also my future.
One of the many useful but financially fruitless benefits of an expensive liberal arts education is the obligation as a writer to contextualize myself in my writing. As such, it seems only appropriate that I should introduce myself, my work and therein offer you, my dear and unseen reader, some window into who I am in this gastronomical wasteland of food writing.
I started cooking when I was 13. My mother, in a brilliant stroke designed to ease the burden of cooking nightly for a family of four, decided that each of us should be responsible for preparing dinner one night a week for the family (Thursdays would still belong to Houlihan’s and the mall). I am still not sure whether she anticipated the dramatic drop in quality of our family dinners, or whether she cared. Until that point, my culinary expertise consisted of over-boiling a diced potato, draining the water, adding diced ham and cheese to the pot, cracking three eggs in and stirring until a solid mass of protein, fats and carbohydrates formed. I would then dump this concoction into a bowl and consume it while watching whatever crappy early afternoon television was available. Thankfully I never shared this particular culinary genius with my family. My actual contribution, however, was not appreciably better.
For the first year, my staple family dinner was “Pizza.” I have inserted quotes because I live in New York now and I know better. Unrolled from the can, my pre-made dough would almost perfectly fit our only sheet pan, jarred tomato sauce, shredded mozzarella, sliced bell pepper and pre-sliced pepperoni. 11-14 minutes later, dinner was served. My father’s staple meal was black beans and rice: 2 cans of black beans warmed in a pot with a bit of salt, rice from the rice cooker, and diced raw white onions. My sister was more inventive though I only remember one of her dinners. She would search out recipes and in the fashion of the day; they were usually quick, strangely inventive solutions for over-worked moms to get their kids to eat vegetables by disguising them with meat and cheese. Her dish: Broccoli, rolled in sliced smoked turkey, placed in a casserole dish a-la enchiladas, then covered in cream of mushroom soup and baked for 30 minutes. We were not a culinary dream team, but my mom relished the nights when she didn’t have to cook. She would happily load the dishwasher when we were finished eating and we would return to our respective televisions.
“So how do you get from there to here?”
I’m glad you hypothetically asked…
In my junior year of High School my father hurt his back. As disconnected as that event seems from the quality of our family dinners, it was a pivotal moment in our dining history. After refusing surgery and seeking out any and every opinion he could find, he finally accepted a long and physically limiting regimen that demanded he stay in bed, or more often on the floor for the next six months. It was then, before the food network was even born, that he began watching cooking shows. Julia Childs, the Frugal Gourmet, and Jacques Pepin had cooking shows and my father watched obsessively. He began to fetishize their copper cookware and Viking ranges. He would dream of crème brulee and chateaubriand. To his credit, he never asked my mother to attempt any of these dishes, but when he was able to walk and work again, he began his own campaign to overtake the kitchen-a battle that my mother happily surrendered. His first challenge was also his first love: Black Bean Soup.
Watching my father work on something is not unlike watching a bullfight. Like the bull, he has an incredibly singular focus and a drive to win, or rather defeat. For months he battled that soup, under-soaking, over-soaking, burning the bottom of pots, buying dampeners to control the simmer, calculating ratios of pureed beans to whole beans, measuring cilantro, drying cilantro, freezing cilantro purees for the next batch. When he finally emerged with his quintessential “Black Bean Soup” he had literally been working on it for 6 months. It is delicious, silky, earthy, and aromatic with an herbaceous bite and a sweet balsamic driven finish. His black beans and rice from the year before became a running joke in our family. Sadly the black bean soup has become one as well, only because we can never get him to make it since the recipe takes three solid days. In my memory, it is amazing.
Fresh off his victory he began to conquer all of his culinary dreams: Coq au Vin, pate sucre, creme anglaise, crème brulee, pancakes, waffles, scrambled eggs, roasted pork and lamb of legs (sorry-- I just liked the rhythm of the list). As my father reworked recipes, I became his official guinea pig. He would chart each minor change and with my sister away at college, I was tasked with giving constant feedback. Every Sunday’s pancakes had to be noticeable better or he would berate himself for an ill-advised shift in the recipe. Cardboard tubes of pizza dough were banished from the kitchen and a pizza stone took up residence in the oven. Food became the central topic of conversation.
When I left for college, my parents moved to a house with a better kitchen and a place for my father to hang his copper pots. Every Christmas he would unveil a new series of successfully conquered dishes and we would talk food for hours. Food was always safer than politics so my sister and I were happy to indulge him. Along the way, I became his holiday sous chef and with the skills he taught me, I began seducing girls at school with my ability to make a green peppercorn sauce.
When I graduated and started waiting tables (please refer to usefulness of said liberal arts degree), we had even more to discuss. I began to bring home tips, tools and ingredients from the restaurants where I worked and we would trade sous chef responsibilities. My father cooked from his intricately tested and proven recipes, I would cook like I had seen the chef’s at work cook, intuitively moving through the kitchen, tasting, changing, tasting, plating. We would cook together and review our meals for missteps and successes. As I moved through a second bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree and 5 restaurants over 15 years, our relationship revolved around food. From time to time we might stray into his politics or into my sculpture, but those topics were always too difficult and fraught with our mutually perceived failings and disappointments. In the kitchen, we are the same blood, so we stay in the kitchen.
Despite having ventured through several degrees and academic pursuits, food is the subject that drives me. For years I spent more time in restaurants than in the studio, initially as a means by which to support my studio practice, but more recently, I have come to embrace the industry and the work as an environment in which I thrive, and a language in which I’m fluent. But beyond having a faculty for the subject, I have come to realize that I love it. I can talk about food for longer than most people would like to listen. I will taste anything and everything, often twice. Foods that I don’t like initially, I spend more time with, parsing their components to ensure that it is my taste and not their new-ness that I am objecting against. In the past 10 years I have tracked food network stars, rising chefs, food trends and the once burgeoning, now global obsession with food. In that time it has been my work, my hobby, and my connection to my family. It is only here and now that I am also able to recognize with confidence and pleasure that it is also my future.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Hello World
The Regulars
18,976,457 people share this city. This is New York City, perhaps the only place in the world where you can be surrounded, literally by millions of people and be completely alone. Everyone in this city, at some time, has reveled in this anonymity and been oppressed by it, sometimes simultaneously. For the most part, New York is an immigrant culture. Even moving from one borough makes you a stranger. Almost everyone is from somewhere else. But everyone wants a place that is home.
There are thousands of food blogs floating around on the internet. I apologize in advance to the cosmic ether that inventories all of human invention. Perhaps the phenomenon of the blog is the true marker of our civilizations descent, but perhaps it is the ultimate evolution of our democracy. At a time when our republic is woefully stalled, there seems to be an abundance of recipes for pork fat dipped in chocolate and chilies, pureed, fermented, then poached and set into an aspic using humane gelatin made from the toenails of the chef himself.
Someone, somewhere is doing something wildly inventive that will be the next flash, the new wave; they are blazing the path for our new and glorious culinary future.
But in other restaurants, people are cooking for us, making our favorite dishes, cooking everyday, to be our everyday. New York City is blessed with more than 20,000 restaurants and each one makes something that is perfect. Specifically, this is not the perfect of technical and flawless execution. It is not perfect in its ultimate assumption of the ideal. It is not that glorious and pristine presentation of a single carrot. It is the perfection of a Wednesday night, exhausted from work, unable to make another decision, and knowing that the dumplings will be exactly as you remember them, that bowl of short rib stew will warm you through the night, or the cacio e pepe will still remind you of simple pleasures and minor miracles. There is a perfection in opening a door and feeling your day slip away because this restaurant you know and love, knows you and loves you too. Maybe there is one thing on that menu that reminds you of how much you miss her, or maybe it reminds you of how much better you are today than that day you first tasted a green curry infused with kaffir lime leaves. Oh jungle curry, and I though I knew you-I thought I knew me.
Restaurants become homes. Their owners become family. This blog is a celebration of those places, those dishes, those people, our places, our dishes, our people. This is my ongoing dinner party and you are invited. To begin, I’m starting with the places I know and love, but if you read this and want to share your perfect place, let’s have dinner!
Eat what you love with those you love and be thankful for the home you have.
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