Finding Religion With the (New) Luther - Breakfast at ChurchKey

There are, we know, two kinds of eaters in this world.  There is the deus ex machina, you-are-what-you-eat variety, who regards the human machine as sacrosanct, as a corporeal temple in the ad maiorem gloriam sense, and whose food consumption is wholly (if angrily) based on a differential calculus of sphincter-puckering complexity wherein derivatives such as nutritional content, sustainability, and ethical harvesting and/or slaughter methods determine the function of whether that Twinkie he is so deeply jonesing for gets shoved into his sanctimonious gobhole, or not.  And then there’s the other kind of eater.  The kind like me.  The kind who believes that within the great bosom of the world beats the heart of assassin, that we’re all just food for worms (the old king-that-ate-of-the-fish-that-ate-of-the-worm-that-now-eats-of-the-king ouroboros of Shakespearian logic thang), and that we’re all just polishing the brass on the Titanic before it goes down.  The kind of eater whose world-weariness and fatalism turns him into a gastronomic bon vivant, a lamp shade-wearing, Hunter S. Thompson-styled fuck-it-I’ll-eat-it kind of omnivore willing consume pretty much anything I come across as long as it wasn’t first tazed or tortured or doused in ammonia or purveyed by a king or laughing clown.

For this kind of eater (and if you’re reading this, that’s likely you) I have the breakfast sandwich for you, friend-o.  It’s the New Luther at Washington, D.C.’s magnificent ChurchKey.  There’s just one catch:  it’s not on the menu (you have to ask your server for it).  And it’s only available on Sunday from Noon to 8PM.  But you already knew that, didn’t you, eh hipster?

In it’s original form (whose progenitor, legend has it, is Mulligan’s bar in Decatur, Georgia), the Luther, named for singer Luther Vandross, is an all-beef patty topped with bacon and sandwiched between two Krispy Kreme donuts.  At ChurchKey, the New Luther is decidedly more haute and high-rent.  At ChurchKey, pieces of boneless, buttermilk fried chicken replace the beef burger, the bacon goes uptown with an applewood smoke, and the Krispy Kremes are replaced with two house-made brioche donuts, glazed with maple-chicken jus, and topped with pecans.  Think of it as a bold new riff on the chicken-and-waffles Southern flavor combinations, with salty and sweet doing those naughty things they do so well together.  The chicken is perfect.  The buttermilk comes through magnificently with a lovely bite of black pepper right behind it.  The bacon is wonderfully smoky.  The brioche is perfectly unsweet behind the perfectly pitched goodness of the maple glaze.  (And all this paired with a truly lovely breakfast stout).  One bite of the New Luther and you’ll likely blush.  And you didn't think you could do that anymore, did you?  Blush, that is.

You could go to ChurchKey for any of their 550 beers from over 30 countries.  You could go to ChurchKey for any of their 50 beers they offer on draught.  You could go to ChurchKey for the 5 cask-conditioned ales they keep in constant rotation.  But you won’t.  You’ll go for the New Luther.  The best breakfast sandwich in America.  Says me.  And you’ll go for the London Calling-era Clash aplay on the in-house system.  And the Lipitor endorsement deal that is surely in your post-New Luther future.

Your link for ChurchKey:  churchkeydc.com

Eating in Gas Stations Part Two - The Taco Bar

Let’s call this the turducken business model for culinary success.  To wit:  if stuffing a chicken into a duck and inside a turkey gives us turducken, then surely stuffing a taco bar into a liquor store and inside a gas station offers us the same misguided entrepreneurial portmanteau that is Taco Bar.  Situated inside a drab and perfectly unremarkable W Express gas station and set contiguous to the Lube Center and your typical soul-sucking suburban strip sprawl, Taco Bar is a culinary dead zone, a no-one-here-gets-out-alive kind of place, beautifully bad, surely, but deliciously devoid of hipster irony and foodie scenester self-congratulations inherent in discovering the worst restaurant location ever, which, following the inverted sentential logic on which our hipster Bizarro Food World now runs, makes it the best restaurant location ever.  But this is Gaithersburg, Maryland.  A place where coolness crawls off to curl up and die.  How better for a restaurateur to attract the culinary life-blood of foot traffic than to locate his business at the great American confluence of petroleum and booze.  Surely the happy motorist, suddenly finding himself peckish, is equally inclined to order the taqitos fritos as is a pro-card-carrying booze hound well into his two-day bender intent on shoving as much choriqueso into his gobhole to keep his blood-alcohol ratio under that magical .08.   It’s pure genius.  It’s so wrong that it’s somehow right.  It’s also why on a cold February day with better things to do I would drive over an hour to a “city” I abhor to eat a fucking gas station taco.

The idea of pairing restaurants and gas stations is old as motoring itself.  The advent of the automobile is arguably the single most important event in American gastronomy since the advent of refrigeration.  It’s the culinary Big Bang of the early 20th Century.  Cars have determined how we eat.  Where we eat.  What we eat.  The idea that road food should not be both delicious and healthful is the cultural blight and condition of late-modernity whose proliferation I blame on those culinary Evil Empires who dispatch black-hearted henchman disguised as kings and clowns to peddle their fecal-infused shit burgers to children while simultaneously dumbing-down the collective culinary IQs of young Americans and saddling them with the burden of carrying Type II diabetes to an early grave.  Some of the greatest meals of my life have been eaten inside gas stations.  I shit you not.  There was the best cheeseburger of my life (so far) in that Bucksnort, Tennessee, Shell station.  The best menudo I’ve ever put in my mouth courtesy of that combination gas station/laundromat in south Phoenix.  Food that enlivens the inner Neal Cassidy road warrior in every American motorist and which sets our highways ablaze with eaters made happy by truly great gas-n-go culinary achievement.   

Taco Bar of Gaithersburg, Maryland, is such a magical place.  Park your car past the petrol pumps, walk inside liquor store crowded with wine bottles, and you’ll find of Washington’s tiniest and most unlikely culinary treasures.  I ordered six tacos.  That’s one of every taco that Taco Bar offers con horchata to wash it all down.  I was soon given a single, white styrofoam plate, on which all six tacos were laid out, concentrically, with laudable aesthetic aptitude, resulting in wrist-spraining heft.  If meat is murder, as a cherished band of my youth alleges, then I was the Charles Manson to this carnage of what was surely a three-pound meat massacre.

Taco Bar emphatically avows strict attendance to a purely Mexican taco making orthodoxy (it calls itself Fast Mexican Food, no less), but what I received was more Salvadoran than Mexican in that my six different proteins were laid atop their twelve corn tortillas (double-ply, yo) naked of any cheese or sour cream or salsa.  The lovely matron who took my order directed me to the Fixin’s Bar (to co-opt the parlance of the Roy Rogers burger joints of my youth) and invited me to partake of complimentary salsas and peppers.  I declined.  I took the naked meat before me as a sign.  A dare, in fact.  For here were food purveyors bold enough not to hide behind the fake beards and Grocho noses of condiments and customer-driven seasoning.  So I picked up my plastic fork and dug in.  (The tacos pictured below were later hired at Taco Bar as body-doubles for that all-important money shot required of this exercise in food porn.)

I expected my first taco to be my least favorite.  Pollo.  Chicken.  The protein of the uninspired eaters and cooks alike and usually a culinary yawn.  But no.  Oh, no.  This chicken was marvelously seasoned, with notes simultaneously hinting at heat and sweet.  And it was delightfully rico, rich, with a true depth of flavor.  It was also tender and moist.  Nothing in the protein was overcooked enough to bite back.  It was a small, quiet triumph and a harbinger of better things to come.

Taco numero dos was the only offering that left me indifferent to the culinary good things at hand.  It was the bistec, the grilled skirt steak, cubed to the verge of being minced, and the only protein at Taco Bar I found under-seasoned and overcooked.  A bit of a culinary snooze fest.  Something I could move beyond and remain untroubled by my decision to sneak off in the middle of the night, on tiptoes, without kissing my sleeping dinner companion adios.

The pastor taco is where I decided hints of culinary greatness were afoot at Taco Bar.  The pork is first marinated in pineapple juice (a fruit whose juice, when not paired with vodka, most resembles, for me, the Libby’s Fruit Cocktail syrup of my 1970s Missouri youth), and then hit with high flame.  Whomever was at the grill this day was a true master.  The pork evoked the perfect meat-to-carbon ratio on the sear and the pineapple juice imparted nothing but acidity and complexity.  Nothing Libby-like going on here and clearly what food enthusiasts consider winning.

Next came the chorizo.  Bold.  Zesty.  But not overly seasoned or greasy.  Good stuff.  A solid, if predicable, offering.  Chorizo is, for me, the veritable culinary spokesperson for Mexican street cuisine.  Chorizo is the guy who tells you how rough he had it growing up around all the cholos and pachucos of his barrio before slipping you the business card of his buddy with the tooth-whitening business.  The authenticity factor just doesn’t jive, but I am always happy to listen to him talk.

And then came the lengua, or beef tongue.  Lawdy Miss Clawdy was this tongue taco good.  Delicate, earthy, succulent, even grassy.  And perfectly cooked.  No.  Let’s not say this tongue was cooked.  Let’s say it was melted, for that’s what this otherwise tough and unforgiving section of offal did in my mouth, bite after bite, time and again.  It melted.  The offal wasn’t awful; it was delicious.

And if that not-insignificant culinary hat-trick we’re enough to place Taco Bar’s offerings in the realm of the real and serious culinary contenders, my final taco was among the most transcendent in recent memory.  The suadero is rib meat grilled and shaved off the bone.  It’s steaming pile of shredded protein, black carbon char, and melted animal fat dashed across a corn tortilla with the kind of haphazard greatness that will have you wondering where such a taco has been every waking moment of your adult life.  Nothing I put in my mouth this day was better than the suadero.

And as for my usual attempts and identifying and quantifying so-called authenticity in “ethnic” eating establishments, I was given these signifiers for consideration:  all-Latina staff who hand trimmed and portioned vast amounts of beef and pork well within plain view of me the entire duration of my stay; a decidedly all-Latino, all-Spanish speaking patronage (no gringos aqui, ese); a sign posted in Spanish warning patrons that eating the suadero might result in traces of rib bone being lodged in their throats; a small dog carried in under the pretense of pleasing the matron with its curly-haired cuteness, but which, I suspect, was brought in, via some unseen Bat Signal, to nibble my considerable all-meat droppings off the liquor store floor.  (I’m bad with a fork, what can I say.)

Tacos at the Taco Bar.  Were they the best tacos the best I’ve ever eaten?  Not by a long shot.  Were they the tacos the best I’ve ever eaten inside a liquor store shoved inside a gas station?  Truly.  Without a doubt.

Go buy some.  Tacos are good for the soul.  But you already knew that.

Your link to Taco Bar:  Taco Bar II - Home

What It Means To Miss New Orleans With Chef David Guas

This is the one place I didn’t want to tell you about.  The one place I wanted kept secret.  The one place I wanted all to myself.  My fellow Gen X’ers who cut their sonic teeth on the “alternative” music of our day (re:  Black Flag, Bauhaus, Joy Division) will surely recognize the impulse:  you alone have discovered the worlds’ greatest and most obscure band, and you alone love this band so much that the very idea of anyone else listening to or even loving this same band sends you into fits of near-suicidal apoplexy.  So it is with me and Arlington’s almost impossibly wonderful Bayou Bakery.  The fifteen-year-old boy in me wants to tell you that I alone am cool enough to have ever heard of Bayou Baker, let alone actually understand the cultural and culinary greatness afoot here.  Stay away, I want to say.  Poseurs need not apply.  But asking you to stay away from Bayou Bakery is akin to me, as a teenager, first discovering Boy and asking you not to listen to U2 even though Joshua Tree is soon on it’s way.  It ain’t gonna happen.  You’re going to become a U2 fan.  You and everyone else you’ve ever known.  So it is with Bayou Bakery.  One bite of Chef/Ower David Guas’ food and you’ll be begging for backstage passes.

I well remember my first visit to Bayou Bakery.  The basket of Zapp’s potato chips atop the bakery case.  The Dr. John on the house speakers.  The smell of chicory on the laughing air.  I remember, too, each of these totems of pure Crescent City gris-gris taking me on a Wildean-sized synesthetic magic carpet ride back to my beloved Decatur Street in the French Quarter.  Just the act of standing before Bayou Bakery’s chalkboard menu, surrounded by a perfect facsimile of my favorite American city, was magical in itself.  But then came the discovery of Bayou Bakery’s food.  The thrill of finding pickled eggs (made pink by beet juice in brine) this far north.  The exquisite agony of accidently snorting an entire gram of confectionary sugar off my beignet.  Not to mention the instant and abiding man-crush I felt for David Guas upon discovering the greatest muffuletta I’ve ever tasted outside of New Orleans.  It was love.  For Guas.  For Bayou Bakey.  The kind of love leaves you wanting more.  One visit to Bayou Bakery and I was hooked.  Heavy as lead.

Call me an idiot to all things culinary.  Fine.  Brand me a food professional hack.  Cool.  Tell me I don’t shit from gastronomic Shinola.  Surely a case might be made for that.  But slander my devotion to the food of New Orleans (and all the knowledge that attends such reverence) and I’ll break your jaw (lovingly, of course).  Because I’ve been traveling to New Orleans as a culinary pilgrim my entire adult life the way an acolyte worships at the feet of an oracle.  Because I honeymooned there.  Because my brother lives in the middle 9^th.   Because there is no city in North America with a richer, more storied, or more vibrant culinary tradition than New Orleans.  Nowhere else in the United States is the daily business of eating more central to workaday Americans than it is in New Orleans.  Does Chicago have anything approaching the greatness of the Po’ Boy?  Does New York have anything close of the Crescent City’s collective agreement that red beans and rice be eaten, city-wide, each and every Monday?  Does Los Angeles have anything as important to ritual or municipal pride like the King Cake?  New Orleans stands, now and forever, as the primogeniture of American culinary fusion.  African.  Spanish.  French.  Native American.  Italian.  Cajun and Creole.  It’s all still there.  Alive and kicking.  Everything that started two full centuries before gastronomic miscegenation was too cool for school and too hip to see its own feet.

So enter the 2011 advent of David Guas’ Bayou Bakery.  More than just a supremely delicious culinary destination for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, Bayou Bakery is a veritable museum of New Orleans food history with a curator of living history (in the person of Guas) who has already forgotten more about the food and culture of his native Louisiana than I’ll ever be lucky enough to learn.  Conversation with Guas about the food of New Orleans is a white-knuckled joy ride at break-neck speed through such highly nuanced subjects as roux and mirepoix, tasso and file.  The dude knows his food history.  He more than knows it, actually.  He lives it.  Day in.  Day out.  That we should all be so lucky to have his job.  But lucky we are.  Because Guas cooks.  For you and me.  For all of us.  He cooks and bakes beyond what passes as merely good.  He cooks with all the proselytizing fervor of a Bible-tent revivalist intent on saving the world one lost culinary soul at a time.

Take Guas’ muffuletta:  Capicola.  Salami.  Pepperoni.  Ham.  Emmentaler and provolone.  And don’t forget the essential “olive salad.”  And all of it on perfectly crusted bread.  Invented at the French Quarter’s Central Grocery in 1906 by Sicilian grocer Salvatore Lupo, the muffuletta is the signature sandwich of New Orleans.  Get this wrong and NOLA expats and food devotees will hang you by your toes from the highest branch.  And yet Guas makes a muffuletta that is beyond good.  It’s like finding faith in one’s fellow man.  And it’s also the first thing I put in my mouth after this autumn’s Hurricane Irene left me without power (and refrigeration).   The muffuletta wasn’t merely delicious.  It was soul-cleansing.  Life-affirming.  And it should give Central Grocery cause to smile that such apostolic mission work continues here in our nation’s capital, and this far north.    

Still not convinced?  Take Guas’ unbelievably delicious sausage biscuit.  The biscuit itself, in every way flaky, moist, and perfectly Southern, is reason enough to hug the stranger at the table next to you, but the sausage, made by Washington-area charcuterie maestro Jamie Stachowski, might very well lead you to finding religion, for surely by Grace alone could sausage like Stachowski’s ever be allowed to exist.  For all the yet-unmoved agnostic hard-cases, I offer Guas’ truly transcendental bacon biscuit.  It consists of just that:  three strips of smoked bacon laid inside two biscuit halves; the perfect (and I mean perfect) culinary understatement.  Because please, dear reader, consider this next sentence with the diligence and care it deserves:  the bacon is from Benton’s in Tennessee and it is the best bacon I’ve ever tasted.  Ever.  Spike my vein and you’ll find but two substances afloat in my blood:  bacon and booze.  So when I say this is the best bacon I’ve ever tasted, I mean it’s the best bacon I’ve ever tasted.  Brothers and sisters, let me hear an amen.

For the atheistic hold-outs, or those for whom the recent frontal lobotomy is now kicking in and who still don't get it, Guas offers the perfunctory Big Voodoo Daddies of Crescent City Cuisine.  Gumbo.  Jambalaya. Grits.  Collards.  Etouffee. Hot peanuts (boiled with Benton’s bacon, no less).  Chopped pork.  It’s all here.  Not some caricature of Big Easy cuisine. This isn’t food for tourists or skinny-jeaned wannabes.  No way.  This fare is the real fucking deal.  And all of it vital and popping with the flavors of someone who grew up eating the very stuff at his grandmother’s kitchen table.  Someone who grew up knowing the best roux came in non-blonde.  Someone who might jack you up for adding file to his gumbo.

I’m now of an age to know that I must eventually destroy everything I have ever loved.  Memories of ex-girlfriends.  Mix-tape cassettes of once-obscure bands.  Nightclubs frequented long ago and for whom I still pine.  I’m the General Sherman to their Atlanta.  It’s all going down in flames.  I know this.  I know, too, that, with any luck, I’ll now have to stand in a line twenty people deep every time I visit Bayou Bakery.  But that’s okay.  Because I’m now of an age to know that something as good as Bayou Bakery must not remain secret, even if that secret has been wildly popular for Washingtonians for almost a year now.  A man of my age, now graying at the temples, should be comfortable with sitting in the corner of his favorite local eatery, listening to the 80s alt-rock playlist on his iPhone, licking confectionary sugar off his fingers, and knowing, truly and deeply, just what it means to miss New Orleans.

You’ll know David Guas when you visit Bayou Bakery.  How so?  He’ll be the handsomest man in the room.  And for the love of Baby Jesus, friends, order the muffuletta.   

Your link to Bayou Bakery:   Bayou Bakery

Manifesto: Eating in Gas Stations - The Political Sandwich

Manifesto: Eating in Gas Stations - The Political Sandwich: Who does this? What kind of entrepreneurial madman would put an upscale eatery serving fare for wayward foodie hipsters in bespoke denim i...

Eating in Gas Stations - Part One - The Political Sandwich

Who does this?  What kind of entrepreneurial madman would put an upscale eatery serving fare for wayward foodie hipsters in bespoke denim inside a decidedly bombed out gas station situated in the gastronomic wasteland of long-troubled inner city neighborhood?  Who would do such a thing?  A fiscal self-saboteur in the final throes of, say, bladder cancer or a nasty divorce, intent on total financial shipwreck to effectively dump his empire of net worth overboard and into a roiling sea of bankruptcy?  Or would it be the Birkenstock-wearing, patchouli-smelling child of privilege, some last goateed survivor of the dot.com age with elbow patches on his corduroy blazer and who is still delusional on the conviction that complimentary Wi-Fi and the free-trade coffee of pseudo-liberal self-congratulations will inspire denizens of this blighted urban ghetto to rise up in revolution?  Neither?  Both?

Restaurants, so goes the long-prevailing wisdom of food purveyance, thrive or perish not just on the savor of their fare, but where, precisely, they are located.  The ultimate success of a restaurant is based on a highly nuanced algorithm of Newtonian complexity involving foot traffic, proximity to public transportation, population density, parking, lunch traffic, real traffic, with the caprice of chance and calculus of bad or good luck thrown in to boot.  Culinary empires rise or fall on where, exactly, a restaurant peddles its fare.  Location, location, location is the maxim whispered under every restaurateur’s breath, the dictum tattooed across his soul.

Unless it’s not.  Unless the idea of the perfect location is, in fact, the worst possible location ever.  Unless shoving a high-end sandwich boutique up the ass crack of an otherwise unassuming and innocent inner city gas station is the blueprint for culinary excellence and financial triumph.  Unless you know the implicit fuck you inherent in subverting the expectations of the general eating public will act like equal parts cat nip and fish chum on hoards of local hipsters tipsy at 1AM on microbrew and happily willing to shell out fifteen bucks for a fucking sandwich.  Be the genius behind this location strategy sinisterly Machiavellian or blissfully accidental, it works.  It worked on me as it’s surely worked on thousands of others.  Because for an eater like me, like all of us, it’s not the location of a meal, but the context of a culinary experience that matters.  The success or failure of a meal is often not food-based, but situational.  Someone promising to feed me really great food in a shit hole is simply something I cannot pass up.  So on a sunny January late afternoon, I hurried to Washington’s 14^th and W Streets and the woebegone Lowest Price Gas Station that stands there to see what all the foodie hipster buzz on Fast Gourmet was all about.

In my experience, the rule is this:  if you have to tell me you’re gourmet, you’re likely not.  But once inside Fast Gourmet, I understood why they might have felt compelled to err on the side of obviousness, and why they might want to drive the point home.  Because inside the dining area of Fast Gourmet, all 300-or-so square feet of it, was a perfect microcosm of all that gentrification (or so-called “urban renewal”) brings to a city.  In the rear of the dining area were gathered a dozen or so neighborhood folks, all of them African American, whom the tide of poverty and institutional inequity had beached there, back by the locked bathrooms, with no where else to go and with nothing else to do other than to watch me, some over-educated white fucker in an Italian-made camel hair coat walk up to the Fast Gourmet counter and order a $13 sandwich and a $4 Pellegrino to wash it down.  Did the presence of Fast Gourmet awaken and enliven their culinary wonder, affording access to truly wholesome and delicious foods heretofore unavailable?   Or did the advent of Fast Gourmet ruin the availability of otherwise affordable and perfectly palatable, even delicious, gas station favorites like hotdogs and pizza?  Clearly none of the local folks were here for anything but a sense of community and bodily warmth.  Yet none failed to be anything but hospitable and downright polite.  So I ordered my sandwich and sat at the rear-most table beside them all, eavesdropping on all the neighborhood gossip and quickly forgetting my own white urban neo-imperialist guilt to tackle the formidable task at hand:  devouring a sandwich nearly the size of my head.

I had ordered the El Chivito.  It was huge.  A monster.  And the unofficial national dish of Uruguay.  The El Chivito is made of beef tenderloin (pounded cutlet thin), Black Forest Ham, melted mozzarella, green olives, bacon, lettuce, tomato, hard boiled egg, and an escabeche made from onion, red peppers, and garlic in olive oil.  It was delicious.  No doubt about that.  But was it thirteen dollars worth of deliciousness?  Was it dollar-for-dollar, inch-for-inch, a better sandwich than what I could grab at the local Blimpie inside the Shell station in my own neighborhood?

The ultimate decision would have to come from Amy T. of Living Social fame.  Amy just happened to come into Fast Gourmet as I was pondering this quandary.  It was a chance meeting and our first.  For those of you who haven’t yet had the pleasure, Amy’s the kind of woman for whom you stop what you’re doing to watch cross a room (that means she’s a hottie for all you sporting lads out there).  She sat at the counter opposite me and installed herself with a laptop and a Smartphone and a plate of really delicious looking food and began to encrypt her own Fast Gourmet experience into binary code.  Imagine a laughably absurd episode of Spy v. Spy and you’ve got the idea.  The irony that two “food writers” had converged on the same eatery devoid of any actual paying customers was not lost on me, nor was the hunch that I was party to everything I detested about gentrification.  I was, as usual, guilty as guilty could be.

So I decided to lighten it up a bit.  I decided to speak with Amy.  And being the smooth operator I am, introduced myself just as Amy was taking a bite of her sandwich, forcing her to answer my greeting with a mouthful of food.  She was having the lamb wrap with yogurt sauce and mint and yes, it was very, very good.

Amy smiled then and I knew the matter had been settled; the jury was in.  Fast Gourmet had been declared delicious by an industry professional whose very livelihood depended on her ability to suss out truly tasty food for an eating public perhaps too anxious or too busy to discover something like Fast Gourmet on their own.  And wasn’t cultural cross-pollination the point of this grand American experiment anyway?  Did not racial comingling and collision produce every great American and world shaping idea and art form?  Jazz?  Civil rights?  Rock ‘n roll?  Would not some ultimate good come from the influx of sudsy hipsters and khaki-wearing suburban foodie douchebags into this neighborhood?  Would they not see how others far less privileged than themselves were forced to live, with their noses pressed against the Fast Gourmet glass, forever unable to afford the deliciousness inside?  Would they not pay attention?

Or maybe I should take my cue from Amy, who is, no doubt far, far wiser than me.  Maybe sometimes a sandwich is just a sandwich.  Maybe I should chill out.  Maybe I should just shut up, sit down, and fucking eat.

Your link to Fast Express is below.  Enjoy the aroma.  I know I did.

 fast

  

Channeling Your Inner Che -- El Pollo Rico

So I'm late to the party yet again.  El Pollo Rico.  Every area restaurant critic or food blogger worth her salt has already made the pilgrimage.  It's now a been-there-done-that kind of food destination for the culinary pen.  It's even a notch in the iconic belt of Anthony Bourdain.  And yet, as any party-goer who has ever crushed a can of Miller Lite against his frontal lobe well knows, parties themselves run on a kind of Pynchonian entropy.  Revelers fight.  Drink themselves sick.  Throw up.  Sneak off to screw like spider monkeys.  And yet the party manages to go on, through daylight and into dark again, as if by its own phenomenological volition and the 180 beats per minute coming from the overheated sub-woofer of the shared and collective soul.  And so seems to be the case with Arlington, Virginia's never-say-die and always-terrific El Pollo Rico.  Washington-area streets remain abuzz to this day, years into El Pollo Rico's hugely successful run, with tales of the proverbial gastronomic three-kegger that just won't quit and reports of chicken so good that even the stuffiest of gastronomes are reduced to behaving like frat boys bereft of their emotional equilibrium and pride.

The parking lot of El Pollo Rico is a study in Keatsian negative capability.  It's a shit hole that smells like heaven.  A blacktopped ruin that simultaneously repulses and attracts.  And likely cheapest date to free you of all epistemological bounds short of the famed "happy ending" you are ever likely to have.  It's seriously choked with traffic, the noon of my visit, and blighted with a whirling Charlie-don't-surf density of haze that smells exactly like charcoal and melted chicken fat, and which hits the brain like olfactory crack and makes you want to rip animal flesh off bones with your bare teeth.  It smells like...victory...so in I go.

Entering El Pollo Rico is no less vexing.  It's like to walking into a Foo Fighters show the precise moment Chris Shiflett decides to shred his lead through a stack of Marshall amps.  It's an auditory shit show that throws you off balance.  A din that keeps you dizzy.  There's the hiss of a hundred cooking chickens.  The roar of happy patrons.  The constant and unending pounding of a meat cleaver splitting chicken bones on a butcher's block.  And Spanish.  Lots of it.  Everywhere.  A parade of incessant noise.

This might explain how a guy like me, now hardly a neophyte in divining strange, even esoteric  culinary mojo, could stand slack-jawed before a menu sign, offering a single protein and two sides in perfectly legible English, and ask the middle-aged Peruvian pelon in front of me what I should eat.

The Peruvian looks at me like I am drunk or high or just plain fucking with him.  Deciding none of these scenarios is in play, he frowns and shakes his head.  It's a frown of pity.

"The chicken," he says.  "You order the chicken.  Dios mio."

It's so loud I can hardly make out what he says.

On my comrade's advice, I order a whole chicken with French fries (fried yucca is not offered) with a Mexican Coca-Cola and Inca Cola (imagine drinking bubble gum) to wash it down.  I do so in Spanish evidently so terrible that the young man behind the counter wielding the butcher's cleaver feels compelled to mention that in no way does my Spanish fail to suck.  I pay in cash (it cost less than twenty bucks), take a table in back, and tuck into my meal.

My understanding of how El Pollo Rico prepares their chicken is this:  they bathe their chicken in a top-secret marinade of Peruvian spices smuggled through customs in body cavities (I joke), then skewer the chicken on a large rotisserie, and finally roast the chicken over open-flame charcoal.  When the chicken is cooked, it's removed from the skewer and hacked by some erstwhile grammarian into four steaming, succulent sections.  The chicken is plated on styrofoam and paired with two sauces, one a kind of perky, yellow mayonnaise, and another of what I guessed to be a puree of jalepeno peppers and salt.

What comes of this preparation and open-flame cooking goes well, well beyond a simple kegger in one's mouth.  It is the food of South American revolution.  The stuff that can still oust tyrants, topple dictators, and set whole populations of the proletariate to riot with the desire to have something this rico, this amazing on their tables every night.  It is chicken that asks you to rise up and take back (gastronomically speaking) what is rightfully yours.  And so I take it down.  Section by section.  Bone by bone.  An entire roasted chicken dispatched with a simple one-two combination of my top incisors and my bare hands.  And when I look up from the carnage, people are pretending not to stare.  Except the Peruvian pelon.  He stares openly and smiles across the dining room as if to say he now understands I'm not the idiot he's taken me for after all, I'm just a lost gringo soul looking for a South American culinary flag to march behind.  But find it I have.  At 932 North Kenmore Street in Arlington, Virginia.  El Pollo Rico.  Revolutionaries they are, and revolutionaries to the man.

So I smile back at my newest bald friend, as if in benediction, as if to say viva revolucion, or, as it translates in American English, party on, dude.  Better late to the party than never, I say.

Manifesto: Questing Carolina -- Searching For (and Finding) t...

Manifesto: Questing Carolina -- Searching For (and Finding) t...: Writing about barbecue is like writing about religion: no matter how unitarian your embrace of all forms of smoked protein, no matter how p...