It's Chicken

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.