The idea was to impress the girl. Not just any girl, mind you, but the girl to whom I had, this last summer,
professed my truest love. Because this
girl (whom we’ll yet call X) was traveling from Chicago see me and discover all
that is great and good about my hometown-for-now of Washington, D.C. This trip would effectively be her first
visit to D.C. in over twenty years, and it was up to me to present D.C. at its
capitol best—its coolest museums, its finest restaurants, its hippest watering
holes. All in the span of a
way-too-brief forty-eight hours.
What to do.
Planning X’s first twenty-four hours in D.C. was a
no-brainer: there would be a trip to the
National Portrait Gallery, followed by Chef-pal Hamilton Johnson’s five-course
tasting menu at Vidalia, followed by cocktails composed by master-mixologist
and friend, Jeff Faile, at Partisan, in Washington’s newly reminted Penn
Quarter. The day would be perfect. Pure magic.
One for the ages. This much I
knew. But how could I possibly improve
on this? How could I best such fun?
I had my doubts. I
had a beer.
Then I had my answer.
We would avoid D.C. altogether.
Instead, I would offer X Virginia
in its purest form, the Virginia we, here, dream about: a rolling October’s drive through horse country. Autumnal foliage. Golden, sun-dappled light. Wood smoke in the air. I would offer a glorious, two-hour drive down
to Monticello to there mutually delight in Mister Jefferson’s hilltop home, and
all the views of Charlottesville and the University of Virginia those splendid gardens
and grounds would surely afford.
So we went. To
Monticello.
To here and now undertake any discussion on the
confoundingly contradictory nature of Thomas Jefferson (as we know it) is a
fool’s errand in the extreme, with the subject being too highly nuanced to be
sufficiently redressed in this silly little blog about food (buy me a beer,
however, and I’ll speak ad infinitum
on the syntactical shell game the estate’s docents deploy when describing
Jefferson’s relationship with slave and lover, Sally Hemmings). Suffice it to say that X and I had a
perfectly delightful time marveling at the apotheosis of Virginia’s greatest
mind. The Colonial-era technological
marvels atop Jefferson’s desk. His
books. His gardens. The dumb waiter he built specifically for
wine. Pure genius. All of it.
But these delights were expected.
It was Thomas Jefferson, after all.
What X and I found so extraordinary was what happened just after we left
Monticello.
Because lunch happened.
That’s what. And not just
anywhere, boy-o, but at Charlottesville’s truly remarkable Wayside Takeout.
X and I sat in a booth with our chicken, our Cheerwine, our hushpuppies, our two sides of greens and slaw, and there we quietly devoured our food in the
kind of happy and stunned silence that attends all truly great meals, where no
one is compelled to speak because there simply are no words, and where only a
quick smile is required to convey one’s own deeply satisfied culinary bliss.
The importance of fried chicken to American gastronomy, in
general, and to African-American foodways, in particular, can hardly be
overstated. Frying was used as the
primary method of preserving chicken by generations of African-Americans,
particularly those traveling across the segregated American South. Fried chicken eaten cold—as it would have
been eaten by entire populations of hungry travelers denied access by Jim Crow to
white-owned restaurants—is the best and truest measure of its greatness, I
believe. So X and I ordered an extra
piece of chicken to take with us on the road, and headed back home. Hours later, just before midnight, and after
the chicken had endured miles of travel and a stint in my fridge, we shared
that piece, in the space on the bed between us, still in its paper box.
And it was freaking great.
That the good people of Wayside Takeout fry and serve
chicken with all the quiet and masterful reverence the dish deserves speaks admirably
of them. That they fry chicken so well and
with absolutely none of the pretense that usually accompanies such culinary
greatness, is nothing short of miraculous.
Go there. Order the
five-piece box. Order some
Cheerwine. And share it with the person
you love. She just might be impressed. Maybe.
