Manifesto: The Blue and White and the Southern Soul

Manifesto: The Blue and White and the Southern Soul: So here's how the topic first comes up: there are three of us in this Washington, D.C. dive bar, late at night, and deep enough into our cu...

The Blue and White and the Southern Soul

So here's how the topic first comes up:  there are three of us in this Washington, D.C. dive bar, late at night, and deep enough into our cups, as they say, to mistake platitudes for epiphanies and to think that ordering two batches of freshly fried pork skins is a really, really good idea.  It's that kind of night.  We are all strangers, we three, but have struck up a quick friendship to trick ourselves into believing that each of us is not actually drinking alone in this Capitol Hill shit hole where the bartender is selling little white pills across the bar and the one, lone waitress is offering to service male patrons in the men's room out back.  Like I said:  it's that kind of night.  One of my companions is from New York City, a photographer by trade; the other is from Atlanta, a motorcycle mechanic, all tattoos and nose rings, and they are arguing, loudly, if affably enough, over the soul of Washington--is it a Southern city, as the New Yorker contends, or does its cold heart and killing pace necessarily relegate it to the North, as the dude from Atlanta maintains?  They bicker back and forth for a minute, trade a few friendly blows to the arms and shoulders, then posit the question to me, the one among us who actually lives here.

"So, which is it?" asks the New Yorker.  "Washington.  Northern or Southern?"

I bite my lip and consider.  I have to get this right.  These guys are all smiles, sure, but three drinks from now it might be blood, not beer, that gets spilled.

"Both," I say.  "Neither."

"Einstein," says the mechanic.  "That's who you are."

The New Yorker looks at me and rolls his eyes.

"Jackass," he says.

That Washington is well below the Mason-Dixon Line should have settled the matter for my drinking companions and me, but everyone here, be they the recently-landed from the outer provinces or long-time residents, is quick to realize that D.C. is at the cultural (and culinary) confluence of two vastly different American traditions.  One can easily see the former home of Robert E. Lee from the rear terrace of the Lincoln Memorial.  President Kennedy famously remarked that Washington was a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm, a quip, however funny, that reveals the essential duality of this place.  We are both, simultaneously Northern and Southern, a fact which looms over us like a kind of historical haunting, and posesses us like a cultural schizophrenia, and which, ultimately makes us something kindred to both and apart from each.  We are neither.  

But where, then, if not in Washington, does the North end and the South begin?

With all due respect to Misters Mason and Dixon, who got it so wrong with their proverbial line in the sand, I believe I alone have the correct answer.

The Southern United States begin at 1024 Wythe Street in Alexandria, Virginia, at the Blue and White Carry Out, and is heralded not by the Stars and Bars, but by some of the best fried chicken you're likely to ever put in your mouth.

I understand if you've driven by and have  been afraid to stop.  Believe me, I do.  The Blue and White not only looks menacing, as far as eateries go, it feels dangerous.  Situated in an industrial section of northern Old Town in spitting distance from Section 8 housing, the Blue and White hardly appears as the culinary power house that it most certainly is.  No, the Blue and White is tiny.  Maybe a 150 square feet--tops--of working space, I'd guess.  And dirty-looking.  And old.  Really old.  As in eighty-five years old.  And did I mention tiny?  The door jam framing the single ingress is so low that patrons taller than 5'8" have to duck when entering.  And once inside, you'd better be on your toes, boy-o, because there is a palpable amalgam of racial tension and requisite Soup-Nazi-like protocol to ordering that, if upset, will undoubtedly result in the diminished quality of your order.

So if the Blue and White is all these things (and is most certainly is) then why bother?  Why not just drive a little farther south and eat at Chipotle with all the other khaki-wearing, button-down, slack-jawed douchebags who flock to Old Town, Alexandria, on any given day?  I'll tell you why, jack-o:  the fried chicken.  Just the smell of it stopped me at 10:30 on a Thursday morning like any other.  Blue sky.  Puffy white clouds.  Just a regular day.  Only it wasn't.  Someone was frying chicken while the rest of the working world was still picking Frosted Flakes out of its collective teeth.  So in I went, into this tiny, filthy shack of a place misbegotten upon a street corner that the march of time (and the ceaseless avarice of real estate developers) had somehow overlooked.

The act of eating soul food is inherently a political one.  It's largely a deep-fried cuisine whose high-fat, high-starch content that speaks to the legacy of physical toil and hardship that such calorically-dense foods necessarily evoke.  Food to nourish the soul when one's bodily reality was abject misery.  Unless you think digging ditches is fun.  No.  It's soul food.  Southern food.  Food for black people tasked with doing all the really, really hard work that white people, with our famous and famously collective sense of entitlement, were unwilling to do.

So it did not go unnoticed that a white boy like me (avec starched white shirt and soft white hands) would come into a soul food joint and ask for fried chicken.  Was I embracing the politics of soul food or subverting it, was the question.  Was I okay, down with the program, or just another white dude in an expensive neck tie pretending to own the place?  Behind the glass, in a space no bigger than a walk-in closet (think "Das Boot," only smaller and way more cramped), were four African-American cooks, who politely asked what I'd like to eat while somehow managing to suggest that I should already know what I wanted to eat.  That only suckers and chumps ordered off menus.  So I winged it.  I made something up.  A soul food menu in my head.  I ordered the chicken dinner and the pork chop dinner, hoping they had both.  They smiled.

"I'm guessing you want the white meat," said the cook.

I smiled back.

"I prefer dark meat," I said.  "Always have."

"Greens?"

"You know it."

"Potatoes?"

"Sure."

"Hot sauce?"

"Over everything," I said.  "Never leave home without it."

The cook winked at me.

"Enjoy your dark meat."

I winked back.

"I always do."

What I received was two styrofoam "clam shells" with nearly two pounds of food in each.  A massive lunch by any definition.  So how to eat it?  Back at my office, at my desk, in front of my computer just like any other Gap-loving, gravity-bound white guy would do, or out in the open, in the fresh air, as a real working man would, as soul food was meant to be eaten?  So I ate it on the hood of my car.  At 10:40 on that sunny Thursday morning.  In the middle of traffic.  With my plastic fork and styrofoam plate, I ate.  What I discovered, with equal parts chagrin and delight, was that I was having two very different culinary experiences at the same time.  To explain:  the potatoes, the collard greens, and the brown gravy that was poured over nearly everything, while perfectly eatable, were prefab, industrial, reconstituted and canned, respectively, while my two proteins, the chicken and the pork, were both fried after I had ordered.  Both proteins were fantastic, with the chicken being nearly transcendental, god-like in its perfection, and easily some of the best I've ever had in my life.  And the cheapest.  Both meals, including an ice-cold Royal Crown Cola, cost me just over ten ($10--that's right) American dollars.  Two lunches.  Ten dollars total.  Call it Christmas in August.

But as I ate, there on the hood of my car, in the tiny shadow of that tiny and ancient little shack, all 150 square feet of it, I realized the Blue and White doesn't cook its own potatoes and greens because it can't.  There's no room.  No real estate.  No space.  Anyone who has ever cooked collards, mustards, or kale knows that greens greatly reduce in volume when cooked, they shrink, disappear in fact, and that raw greens that may have taken up a whole shelf of fridge space will produce no more than a few paltry servings of vegetable matter.  For the Blue and White to cook their own greens, they'd have to annex the adjacent building just to serve you a marginally better product, and after eighty-five years of doing this, that simply ain't in the chips, friend-o.

What the Blue and White cooks is protein.  They have a deep fryer and a grill.  Side by side.  Five feet from where you order your lunch.  That's all.  And that's what they cook in and on.  Chicken.  Pork.  Beef.  Fish.  In oil.  On hot, flat steel.  And what they cook is some of the best chicken in the Southern United States.  A bold statement, I know.  But how else to stave off Northern aggression with its hard consonants and gruff manners and Euro-centric cuisine than with chicken that makes you happy to simply be alive and have fry-grease dribbling down your chin?

Go feed your soul.  Give it chicken.  Eat on the hood of car and lick your fingers.  Eat in very, very northern edge of the South.  Eat at the Blue and White.  Why?  Because they give you two pieces of white sandwich bread to mop the brown gravy off your plate.  And because it's ridiculously cheap.  And because it's really good.  And because, after eighty-five years, it's still there.

Go.

And order the dark meat.

Manifesto: Eating Chicago - Three Meals in 36 Hours In the Ci...

Manifesto: Eating Chicago - Three Meals in 36 Hours In the Ci...: "For all its supposed glamor, working in the food business often seems a particularly Promethean endeavor insofar as the topography of one's ..."

Eating Chicago - Three Meals in 36 Hours In the City by the Lake

For all its supposed glamor, working in the food business often seems a particularly Promethean endeavor insofar as the topography of one's occasional agony is emphatically local.  A saute pan and a six-burner industrial range, a hostess station, a mahogany bar lined with prattling drunks, these are the proverbial rocks to which we food professionals seem forever lashed, and those diners, those drunks, they are the eagles which feast on our livers each and every day.  Okay, so it's never really that bad, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that food professionals, to the person, often dream of leaving their places of toil.  We dream of leaving it all behind.  We dream of escape.

So imagine my delight when I was offered the chance to escape D.C. for a short weekend of work in Chicago.  The gig itself was easy, a veritable no-brainer--overseeing a Chicago caterer's wedding rehearsal dinner at the Art Institute for an erstwhile Washington client--but it represented, in the short 36 hours I was allotted in the windy city, a chance to experience all that proletarian Chicago gastronomy had to offer in the slightly askew culinary triptych of dinner, followed by breakfast and lunch, in that order.

First, to dinner.

Simply put, the history of 20th-century American cuisine is the elevation of peasant foods to haute cuisine.  Cases in point:  lobster, grits, sweatbreads, headcheese; each once the daily sustenance of the poor, the proletariate, the unwashed working classes; now all culinary staples on fine dining menus across the country.  That those cold-water crustaceans once eaten by Northeastern button-makers purely for survival called lobster are now emblematic of the gastronomic entitlement of the chattering classes has been the typical culinary trajectory of offal, organs meats, and bottom feeders everywhere.  How truly strange that the rich would now pay such extravagant sums of money to eat what, for centuries, has been the working poor's dietary effluvium.

This upended-Marxian culinary paradigm offends only when the restauranteur intentionally subverts or denies the history of a particular dish (take what was once simply corn meal, now elevated to its present shrimp-and-grits infamy) or the particular protein in question (calf's brains, for instance, or beef tongue) with his menagerie of white linen table clothes, leather-bound wine lists, haughty serving staff, and stiff, Old World cooking practices.  Take what was once shit and make me pay a king's ransom for it?  Make me think you're an innovator for serving it?  That is culinary revisionism.  And it makes douchebags of its practitioners, to the person.  But when the restaurant somehow finds a way to celebrate the humble origins of its fare, when it somehow intimates, by trick of the font used on its menus, say, or some aesthetic or visual cue that perfectly suggests that, yes, what you're about to eat was once eaten by poor people, and yes, the food on the menu was once considered detritus and dross, but man, oh man, it sure is tasty, and man, oh man, have you been missing out--then and only then does the establishment succeed in its perceived culinary freethinking while simultaneously tipping its hat to the lowly beginnings of our shared and collective culinary pasts.  Only then does that restaurant get it right.

I found such a place.  In Chicago, naturally.  One place (of several I'm sure) that celebrates crustaceans, bivalve molluscs, and stomach and intestinal lining, while making you feel both hip and sexy for the sheer act of daring of putting such things in your mouth.

The place is Publican.  At 837 West Fulton Market in Chicago's West Loop.  Imagine a Beard-award-worthy eatery unassumingly situated in a still-vital and working warehouse district, near the El tracks, and situated among slaughter houses, fish mongers, and meat markets such as the famous Columbus Quality Meats.  Imagine a dining room decorated with portraiture of the porcine figure in profile.  It's pigs everywhere you look, and it makes the mouth water, if you are disposed to reveries involving bacon and pork belly.  Be that you, friend, and surly this place will not disappoint.

My dinner companion and I were seated at the end of a long, single table, shoulder to shoulder with our fellow patrons, be they hipsters in skinny jeans, or foodies intent on photographing their every bite.  (I'll plead the fifth on that one, daddy-o.)  Service successfully approximates family style, and dishes, once ordered, are set between or among guests, who serve themselves on small, six-inch plates.

Our aperitif were, respectively, a Vander Mill Cider from Lake Spring, Michigan, for madame, and a Dreadnaught IPA from Three Floyds Brewing Company, Munster, Indiana, which, at 9.5%, rang monsieur's head like a bell.

We ordered with the open-mouthed, squinty-eyed precision of two drunks throwing darts at a tavern wall, then sat back and smiled though the din (it's a noisy, even rawkus place) and waited.  First up were the Kusshi Oysters, which were, as advertised on the menu, precious and ultra-clean.  The six we had were a small triumph.  Next up were the spicy pork rinds from Becker Lane Organic Farm, Dyerson, Iowa, which arrived in a Belgium-style metal chip cone, and which tasted not unlike the culinary love-child of a drunken piece of popcorn and a lonely, if randy, Cheeto.  Crunchy.  Mildly spicy.  Pure cracklin' glory.  Then the shrimp arrived.  Four tails and two shrimp heads (which, admittedly, I was compelled to suck), on a bed of squid ink fettucine, corn, and calabrian chilis.  This was shrimp (read:  bottomfeeders, once and proudly the food of the poor) done in understated elegance.  No showing off here.  Just simple shrimpy goodness.  Take it or leave it, it seemed to say.  Following the shrimp was what I considered the triumph of the evening:  the marinated tripe from Swan Creek Farm of North Adams, Michigan.  Tripe, the red-headed stepchild, if you will, of priggish Anglo dining habits everywhere.  Even the lowly beef liver is held in higher esteem.  And yet, with its cherry tomatoes, caperberries (the largest I've ever seen if you're into that sort of thing--ehem), oregano and manchego.  Not the best tasting dish of the night by any means, mind you, but it's the most transcendent use of tripe I've yet experienced.  Think tripe transformed into a noodle dish and there you'll have it.  This was followed by the perfectly cooked country ribs from Slagel Family Farm of Fairbury, Illinois.  Spot on with it's unapologetic presentation:  meat on a plate.  The melons, radishes and sungold tomatoes were clearly an afterthought, and rightly so.  Who needs veggies when beholding such lovely, pure meat on a plate?  They would simply complicate the matter and compromise your mission of gnawing on bones and to wear mouth painted in animal blood.  And for dessert?  Why naturally it was another round of raw oysters on the halfshell, fresh as briny as the sea itself, however unlikely that might be in metropolitan middle-America.  I'll be back to Publican.  The blood sausage is calling as is the cucussu and the boudin blanc.  And that's not a promise, Publican.  That's a threat.  Your entire right side of the menu is going down next time, chump, it's going down I say.  I'm going to eat it all.  You can bet the ranch on it.

And then there's the delicate matter of breakfast.

Where does one eat in Chicago the morning following such a glorious and unexpected dinner?  Why, Wishbone on 1001 West Washington Boulevard, also in the West Loop.  Billed as Southern Reconstruction Cooking, Wishbone delivers exactly that.  Humble, familiar breakfast favorites delivered with understated southern panache in this most northern of cities.  So maybe it wasn't the best southern breakfast I've ever had (my eggs were slightly overpoached, and well, yeah, I deserved it for being the only douchebag in the place with the arrogance to order poached--not fried--eggs during a very busy Saturday morning rush) but it was one of my most unexpected breakfasts I've had outside of the South.  I ordered the Catfish.  That's right, catfish.  The favored fish protein of generations of my Missouri-farmer forebears.  For breakfast, no less.  Pan-seared, then blackened and finished in the oven.  It came out hot and perfectly cooked.  Initially, I had had my doubts when ordering.  A frozen-cum-highly perishable piece of fish protein for breakfast during the weekend rush.  I expressed these doubts to our server, Anthony, who hailed from Louisiana, and who assured me that yes, I should order the fish, and that yes, good things were about to happen in my mouth.  Bless you, Saint Anthony, and may the breakfast gods of Southern cooking always be with you.

And then came lunch.  This was to be my last meal in Chicago this trip, so I went alone, without local guidance or insider intelligence.  I simply took the El to Lawrence Avenue in the Uptown neighborhood and starting walking south towards the Loop, looking for perfect Mexican cuisine, and, if luck would have it, the perfect taco.  This would have been a very different expedition here in my native D.C.  There are few Mexicans nationals here.  Our Latino population is largely composed of Central American immigrants and their contributions to the culinary scene here are naturally, even necessarily, devoid of the storied taco.  But the Latino population of Chicago is decidedly Mexican.  So much so, in fact, that El Presidente de Mexico will often visit Chicago before stopping off at the White House, so vital and populous is the Mexican-American population of Chicago.  So I wish I might chalk it up to something other than sheer dumb luck that I should walk into what surly must be one of the finest taquerias on the North Side of the city.  You might be forgiven if you mistook Los 3 Panchos Place at 1155 West Diversey Parkway for a coin-laundry, so unassuming and seemingly provincial is this humble culinary power house.  Walk inside and you'll find a counter and five booths in a space half the size of the typical dentist's waiting room.  A T.V. with Telemundo on it.  A crazy Mexican prostitute laughing at the cars passing by.  And she even louder than the T.V.  That's all.  Oh, and a picture of the Pope taped to the back wall.  My order was decidedly simple; I gave the cook a one-in-three chance of getting it right:  tres carne asada tacos con todo (that's three steak tacos with everything to all you pinche gringos out there) and an order of horchata, which, if you've never had the keen pleasure of throwing the stuff back, is rice-milk flavored with sugar, cinnamon and vanilla.  It's like waiting ice for the fire about to rage in your mouth.  A dip in the proverbial pool of shady sweetness.  A respite from the coming heat.  Three steak tacos are given to me with a large, clear bottle of salsa verde, a puree likely made of tomatillos and jalapenos (think tangy and hot), on a hard plastic plate.  And I get a fork.  But the tacos are minor masterpieces of culinary compression.  A small amount of grilled meat, iceberg lettuce, tomato, and queso blanco laid over two corn tortillas and dashed, by me, with green sauce.  This should not have been all that good.  It most certainly should not even approached great.  And yet, what I put in my mouth exploded with flavor.  It stunned me.  Overwhelmed me.  I found it extraordinary.  Transcendent.  I simply could not believe what I was tasting.  So I tried to isolate the component parts.  I tasted the cheese.  Good, fresh, with slight acidity to it.  The cheese bit back.  Good.  Then to the iceberg lettuce:  just your average lettuce, nothing remarkable here.  The sour cream did as sour cream does.  Cool.  But when I had isolated the steak, I knew I had found the little man behind the curtain, so to speak, for there, there was a perfectly tender, perfectly seasoned, perfectly charred piece of skirt steak.  We are talking meaty perfection here, folks.  Meat as good as meat gets.  Like ever.  In any shape, cut or form.  So I restored the taco to its former architecture, meat and lettuce and cheese stacked in that perfect order, and resumed its quiet, if ferocious, destruction.  When I had dispatched all three tacos and looked up, the Mexican hooker was staring at me, afraid to laugh, it seemed, and my arms were wet to the elbows with tomatillo sauce.

Chicago.  Three meals in thirty-six hours and not an inglorious bite of food in all that time.  Is there a better city for the proletariate palate in America?  I'll try to find one.  Believe me.  But in the meantime, I think not.  I shall return Chicago.  And I'll be bringing my appetite.

I'm coming.

Be ready.

You know who you are.