Rock 'n Rogue @ 24rpm - Culinary Punk Rock, Made in Detroit

I entered Blagden Alley looking for food.  What I found, instead, was revolution. 

Before revolutions come confessions, however.  And this:

I am not supposed to write about Rogue 24.  The purpose of this blog is to celebrate the efforts of journeymen cooks and streetfood purveyors who serve truly delicious, often remarkable food easily within the financial reach of men and women of the American proletariat working class.  Haute cuisine establishments peddling so-called “molecular gastronomy” to affluent eaters with far, far more sophisticated palates than my own have strictly been off limits since I started this little binary enterprise in food writing a year ago, however often I might work with their chefs, or patronize them myself as eater and enthusiast extraordinaire.  The chance encounter with culinary excellence at a roadside diner whose smoking grill cook is ashing his Pall Mall into the homefries holds far more excitement and, in my opinion, is vastly more deserving of celebration than, say, the gastronomy of a three Michelin star establishment whose excellence is expected and is, after all, a matter of course. 

So why Rogue 24?  Why now?  After all the ink that’s been spilt on the restaurant and its Chef/Operator RJ Cooper, why lift my own pen and add to the fray?  Because I think RJ’s detractors have gotten him all wrong.  I think there has been a fundamental misreading of Cooper’s personality, his culinary aesthetic, and what Rogue 24 sets out to achieve every time Cooper and his team suit up in their whites.  RJ could have dumbed it down.  He could have opened a pizzeria.  He could have opened a barbeque joint.  With the street cred surrounding his James Beard Award and all the celebrity chef buzz following his remarkable appearance on Food Network’s Iron Chef, RJ could have opened a cupcake stand and made a killing.  But he didn’t.  Instead, he built one of the finest, most challenging restaurants in Washington and in one of the most unlikely places.  Cooper clearly endeavored to reinvent the restaurant experience for Washington eaters, transforming it into a journey, a thrill ride, while all the time, and with his usual brash, two-fisted swagger, attempting to create a cuisine that Washingtonians had never before seen.  He tried, as is still trying, to reinvent the wheel.  My meal at Rogue 24 last year was easily the greatest single meal of my life.  Do I say that of Cooper and Rogue 24 simply because I’m just a culinary simpleton from Missouri farm stock too easily impressed by the dazzle and flash of big-city gastronomy and the cult of chef celebrity?  Maybe.  Or do I now sing Rogue’s praises because I’m a food careerist with over twelve years in the business and maybe, just maybe, I know what I fuck I’m talking about?  Maybe, just maybe, I’ve put in the hard time to know when chef like Cooper is putting his soul into his work and leading with his heart.  What I experienced at Rogue 24 was, truly, nothing short of transcendent.  More than just a meal; it was an experience, and its why we pay chefs like RJ Cooper to cook for us, because when they cook as well as RJ does, the journey can be transformative, and we leave a restaurant like Rogue totally stuffed, more than a little drunk, and forever changed.  Because RJ shows his patrons what new possibilities in American gastronomy lie in wait, and how thrilling a restaurant experience can be if the patrons are willing to let go, chill out, and enjoy the trip. 

Another confession.

Chef RJ Cooper.  I know the man.  I have worked with him several times over the last few years at fine events in and around the Washington area.  This, however, is not to suggest we were destined to be pals.  If anything, it’s quite the opposite.  It means we were initially disposed to hating each other’s guts in the deep and abiding way dogs hate cats.  He was the celebrity chef with the Beard Award, the awesome motorcycle and the great hair.  I was the front-of-house guy only very briefly famous for a spread done on me in the Washington Post, and whose waiters were going to find a way to fuck RJ’s shit up.  RJ and I have had several successes together, and maybe, just maybe, RJ has, over the years, found something to like in me.  Our luncheon for a Spanish/Japanese interest with world-famous chef and three Michelin star, Basque mac daddy, Juan Marie Arzac, (which I most certainly did not fuck up) comes to mind.  But while I have found much to admire in Cooper, liking the guy does not make me his apologist.  I’m not shilling for RJ here to generate covers for his restaurant, and I’m most certainly not his bitch.  RJ can take care of himself.  He’s good-looking enough to break hearts, and big enough to break jaws.  But I believe that beneath all those tattoos and Harley Davidson smoke and caustic, in-your-face swagger, beats the heart of a poet, a truly nice guy who just wants to cook for a living and, while at it, change the face of American gastronomy one perfect bite at a time.

The first element of Rogue’s genius lies in the idea of removing choice from the restaurant experience.  Instead of being handed a leather-bound menu thick as the Los Angeles phone book, and later in the meal, an equally daunting wine list by a smirking sommelier, you are, at Rogue, asked to make two choices and two choices only.  They are these:  how many courses do you want to eat (a 16-course progression, or the 24-course full monty), and are you drinking alcohol?  That’s it.  That’s all you’re asked to decide.  And with those decisions made, you are then invited to relax, sit back and enjoy the magical carpet ride that will, for the next three hours, take you into a culinary wonderland of startling textures and flavor pairings so daring that before you know it, dinner at Rogue has become a rush.  It’s as if adrenaline is the magical, secret ingredient of RJ’s cooking, and it builds, incrementally, throughout the night, until dinner at Rogue is suddenly more fun than that time you stole your father’s red convertible to satisfy the pure and simple wonder of discovering how fast you could go.  Eating at Rogue is exactly like that.  You don’t exactly know where you’re going, and you don’t know what’s around the next corner, but you can’t wait to find out what lies ahead. 

Even more central to Rogue’s genius, perhaps, is the idea for design of the restaurant itself:  heighten the Rogue experience by putting an open kitchen in the middle of the dining room and having RJ and his team of cooks serve the tables themselves.  Waiters fuck off, who needs them.  If what Food Network peddles is correlative to food porn, then what Rogue is selling is the chance for patrons to lube up, put on a jimmy, and join in on the fun.  It’s also the area where RJ shines more brightly than any chef I’ve ever worked with, for without the Food Network lights and cameras and makeup, there around the kitchen of Rogue, you see how fucking hard it is to be a chef.  You get a real and palpable sense of how demanding it is to forever be on your feet, in the unrelenting heat of a working kitchen, and how taxing it is to concentrate that long, that hard, on each and every plate that leaves your line, night after night after night, year after year.  Putting a chef, any chef (especially a raging perfectionist like RJ), in the middle of a dining room is an act of daring, a recipe for sure-fire disaster akin to burning down a fat one while pumping gas; bad things are sure to happen.  Except at Rogue.  Twice in my meal at Rogue, RJ spotted two things that raised his famous ire.  The first was that my napkin had fallen to the floor and none among his staff had provided me with a new one.  Second was the fact that my plate, for one of the courses, had not received enough fois gras (his estimation, not mine), so over came RJ himself to remedy his sous chef’s error.  I realize these service gaffs may seem like piddly shit to you, inconsequential, undeserving of a chef’s attention.  But to me it meant the world.  This is what I fucking do for a living.  I shape the experience of clients by paying attention to the shit you wouldn’t think matters.  You can’t fake paying attention like this.  So to have a chef of Cooper’s stature noticing napkins on floors and insufficient fois gras amounts on plates tells me (as it should you) that this guy Cooper isn’t phoning it in.  It tells me RJ is the real deal.  It tells me that cooking, for RJ, is much like a street fight, that the dude is always ready to rumble, and that ten-to-one suckers, I betting RJ’s going to drop his man.  

The third and final component in Rogue’s mad trinity of culinary genius is, of course, the food itself.  But I’m not going to write about RJ’s food because I’m not qualified.  I haven’t spent the last twenty years trying to redefine American cuisine by taking it apart and putting it back together again the way you dismantle and reassemble a favorite uncle’s Dodge Charger (only to find that it now runs faster).  For critiques of RJ’s cooking, I send you to Yelp, where every douchebag out there working in a cubicle, wearing khakis, and carrying a wallet deigns himself qualified to publically criticize the life’s work of truly great chef’s just because he doesn’t understand what he’s eating or what the restaurant is all about.  Suffice it to say that when RJ appears tableside with instructions on how best to consume the next course (“inhale the smoke first” or “chug it like a beer”), you realize that you’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy, and that the dish before you in no way resembles anything served at grandma’s house, and that culinary revelation is waiting for you at the end of your fork. 

 

I’ve followed the press on Rogue for a year now the way a baseball fan follows news of a favorite team.  In none of the coverage, however, have I ever sensed that any critic “gets” Rogue 24.  Why, for instance, has no critic explored RJ’s motives in locating his restaurant in an alley, for fuck’s sake, in one of the most violent (until recently) neighborhoods in DC?  Why has no critic considered RJ’s place of birth (Detroit) and how that might inform the way he approaches gastronomy?  Why has no critic “read” RJ’s own personal aesthetic and decoded the lack of bullshit in his tattoos, his Harley, his taste in music?  That ain’t trendy, people; that’s real.

My theory, posited for your approval, in the form of an equation:

RJ Cooper + Rogue 24 = the culinary equivalent of punk rock.  And not just any punk rock.  I’m talking Iggy and the Stooges rolling naked in broken glass and peanut butter, Detroit style.

RJ and I are from the same place.  Not the same city, mind you (he’s from Detroit; I’m from D.C. via Missouri), but the same mindset.  We are both from happy, white, middle class families.  We were both, as children, fed and loved.  But somehow we both decided to say fuck it to our families for the far more dubious pleasure of inhabiting the punk/post-punk club scenes of our native cities.  And while I was being kicked in the face by the bare-footed Henry Rollins at the original 9:30 Club on F Street, RJ was being stabbed (three times!) in the chest at a 7 Seconds show in Detroit.  And just how tough was Detroit back in the day (as if it’s not now)?  When I first visited Detroit (think early-90s), I was touring with an awesome rockabilly band, Three Blue Teardrops.  I was filling in for my friend Rick on bass.  The minute I first stepped onto a Detroit sidewalk, a man walked up to me and said this:  I’m going to kill you.  Three songs into our first set, someone threw a beer bottle at me, shattering it across my bass.  Tough city.  Such is RJ’s pedigree.

When I look at Rogue, I see perhaps the only haute cuisine restaurant in America that truly and purely embodies the punk rock ethos unique to our generation.  When I look at the place in Blagden Alley, I see a restaurant that says, fuck off, you’re not cool enough to eat here.  But when I consider RJ’s cooking, I see a culinary effort that strives for purity, and that is trying to change the world.  And that’s punk rock in a nutshell, folks.  It’s about brutal honesty.  It’s about trying to change the world by tearing it down and searching for the essential truth therein.  Why no food critic has yet drawn the comparison between Rogue 24 and punk rock is beyond me. 

And just to get it off my chest, I’ll conclude with this:  “molecular gastronomy” happens every time you poach an egg, so let’s move on and look more deeply at what RJ (among others) is really doing with food.

And yes, Rogue 24, is expensive, to be sure.  But you should eat there.  At least once in your lifetime.  Because RJ is easily one of the best cooks of our generation.  And if you care anything about the course of American gastronomy, you’ll want to have something to tell the kids.

A link to RJ's Rogue 24:  Rogue24

A link to the new me:  Proletariateats | Gastronomy For The Masses

Eating In Empty Lots - Part l - The Crab Shack

If farm-to-table is the Platonic ideal for the food production-to-consumption model, the whole pasture-to-pie hole routine, then surely ocean-to-foodtruck comes in a close second.  For what culinary encounter could be better than chancing upon a seafood purveyor beached in a gravel parking lot strangely redolent of Old Bay?  By what gastronomic kismet would have you able to simply (if randomly) roll up to this truly improbable foodtruck, only to drive off, minutes later, with a garbage bag full of steaming crustations and a quickening across your heart?  Because it’s written in the stars.  Because the sensei of gastronomic excellence have so ordained.  You will eat at The Crab Shack, grasshopper, and yes, you will like it.  Such is their decree.

I know of The Crab Shack only because it suddenly appeared in my neighborhood one morning in a weed-choked empty lot, between a rarely-driven schoolbus (shown beside; the owner operates a CDL class when the mood strikes) and a psychic/palm reader’s place of business, if that’s what they’re calling the business of reading palms, these days.  Why would a seafood truck be here, I wondered.  Stolen, I thought.  Left to rust, I speculated.  Tomfoolery, I decided.  Madness.  For what kind of lunatic would find an overgrown, abandoned lot in a mostly-residential (and highly unfashionable) neighborhood of Alexandria South suitable for peddling a highly-perishable food product from a trailer better suited to hauling ponies around the childrens' birthday circuit?

John would.  That’s who.  The sole proprietor of this unlikely enterprise.  And he's no madman.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  He’s comfortably into middle age and wears the hair, tattoos, and complexion of a Native American who has known hard work for most of his life.  An old soul.  Knowing and wise.  But also someone with whom you’d want to address in careful tones of deference and respect.  Someone who you’d want  to have your back in a barroom throwdown, someone who could likely drop his opponent like a bag of rocks.  And if that’s not reason enough to be nice when ordering, John’s elderly father hangs out inside the trailer as well.  Wears a Fedora.  Fingers a cane.  And never blinks through what can only be described as an ex-pugilist’s leer.  Imagine William S. Burroughs in the person of an elderly erstwhile crabber and you’ll have the idea, boy-o.

Seafood stands like this are commonplace across the American South.  Travel the two-lane black tops of the Virginia Tidewater, the Carolina Low Country, north to south, and you’ll encounter an almost-endless procession of shrimpers or crabbers peddling the day’s catch from the tarpaulin-covered backs of their bombed-out F-150s.  But here, in this part Northern Virginia, that never happens.  It simply isn’t done.  Fisherman do not sell their catch from pickups, let alone trailers retrofitted with refrigeration and the ability to steam and season one’s catch for roadside patrons.  The county does not let them.  To have John tell it, he wanted to locate on land he's owned for years.  But Fairfax County shook him down for thousands in licensing fees and permits (to protect, no doubt, the proprietary fiscal interests of such culinary brick-and-mortar fixtures as Hooterbees and T.G.I. McFucksters).

So here he is, beached in a gravel parking lot between the psychic’s place and a big yellow school bus, a place almost existential in the loneliness it evokes.  But John’s loss is our gain.  Because his Crab Shack is exactly the kind of food purveyance my neighborhood (or any neighborhood, for that matter) needs.  Local.  Seasonal.  Fresh as it gets.  Because John sources his crabs and shrimp from Wanchese, North Carolina, a fishing collective on Roanoke Island, Dare County, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, widely known for producing some of the finest crustations in the mid-Atlantic.

I stopped on a recent Saturday afternoon and approached this foodtruck misbegotten in the gastronomic wasteland that is this part of Fairfax County.  John greeted me.  He smiled.  Then he asked me what I’d like to eat.  I looked.  But my cursory glance at the menu was made superfluous by the sudden whiff of Old Bay adrift on the air.  Crabs.  A dozen, I said, followed by an emphatic and most polite please.  John left the trailer out the back door, threw a dozen of the little bastards in his steamer, and, moments later, walked out into the parking lot with a garbage bag full of the most glorious crabs I’ve yet encountered this season.  And as John tied off the bag and handed it to me, I understood by the glimmer in his eye that this was no mere food-for-money exchange.  This was more than that.  A proffering.  A gift.  A bequeathment.  Money had nothing to do with it.  For what John knew then, and what I was soon to learn as I ripped the bag open with my bare teeth, is that the act of sitting down at a wooden table in summer with a bag of perfectly steamed blue crabs and an ice-cold beer is one of the most transcendent culinary experiences a person can have.  Ever.  I experienced it.  And so should you.

The Crab Shack is located in the 5700 block of Telegraph Road in Alexandria, Virginia.  John is open for business (at the time of this writing) on weekends, midday to late afternoon.  Visit him.  Buy his food.  If you’re disinclined to eating in empty lots, I promise you a seat at my kitchen table.  And my beer is always cold.

Call John at 703.507.5607 for insight, wisdom, and directions.

Notes From the Underground - Lunch at Taqueria X

Everything about this culinary undertaking is against the law.  This taqueria.  My fellow luncheoneers (few as they are).  This drink in my hand.  The food on my plate. The immigrant woman cooking it.  All of it:  illegal.  But word on the street decries these tacos now before me as some of the best a Washingtonian will likely ever eat, so long as that same eater deigns to risk robbery, arrest, or poisoning by third-world food handling practices for what this underground eatery promises (on its own business card, no less) as sabrosos tacos Mexicanos, and what local chef friends swear to be the most authentic Mexican in the entire mid-Atlantic, even if eating it might land you a night in the pokey.  But arrest for food reportedly this good is a chance I’ll take.  Because if a life spent seeking kicks in such adrenaline-based and ill-advised enterprises as boxing, or motorcycles, or a Hunter S. Thompson-inspired flirtation with the American handgun, has taught me anything, it’s this:  when in doubt, never hesitate.  Just fucking do it.  Jump.  So here I am.  In this high-rise immigrant filing cabinet of an apartment building.  In this old lady’s teeny, tiny kitchen.  To break the law with the simple act of buying food.  So I lift a taco, one of four on two plates, and begin to eat.  What happens next defies retelling.  It’s the stuff of hallucination.  A synesthetic experience second to none.  I suddenly hear imaginary voices.  And accordion music.  And feel all-too-real heat from a Sonoran sun calling water onto my face, but from a fire within.  It’s as if I’m suddenly back in extreme southwestern Arizona, but a mile from the Rio Grande, where, in my wayward youth, I encountered the best tacos of my life.  This now is the kind of culinary out-of-body experience that has the angels of gastronomy telling me to walk toward the light.  And when I come to my senses (a sip of horchata breaks the spell) I see the duena standing there, behind the counter of her tiny kitchenette.  She’s nodding at me.  Grinning.  Beatific.  Implacable.  And all-knowing as the smiling Buddha.  She asks me a question in Spanish, a language I strangely now understand even better than my native own.  Te gustas?  Do I like the food?  A simple question requiring but a monosyllable, one way or the other, for response.  And for the first time in a very, very long time, I really have absolutely no idea what to say.

The trick to eating in an underground restaurant is, of course, to actually first find it.  They are elusive as Bigfoot.  Hard to hunt as the mythical snipe.  And their pursuit is, more often than not, a dupe’s errand that breaks hearts, ridicules appetites, and imparts the kind of self-loathing that makes you want to break shit with your fists.  How many times have I entered abandoned basements, snuck into apartments, all in the pursuit of carnitas or ramen, only to find an empty room in ruin with broken bottles, condoms wrappers, and the detritus of my own shattered dreams.  But my “intel” on Taqueria X (as we’ll call it) is solid.  It’s jake.  I have an address.  I have a phone number.  And best of all, I have a dining companion.  Someone who’s actually been here before.  So on a sunny Sunday after a brisk morning run, we head over to that strange and liminal space that bridges the equally strange neighborhoods of Chinatown and Dupont East (not the real neighborhoods, yo).  We find the find the building and call the number we’ve been given.  Someone answers, mutters something in Spanish, and hangs up.  A second-story window opens above us and a key fob flies out.  Everyone around us is watching this.  We are the only gringos around, conspicuous as Secret Service agents (my friend’s built like a brick house and rocking the blonde-and-blue thing), but no one contests our being here.  No one will meet our eyes.  So we enter a building that smells powerfully of every ramshackle immigrant flop house I’ve ever been in.  You know the smell.  Laundry detergent.  Pet urine.  The odor of unending physical toil.  But it also smells of food.  Boiled chicken.  Fried corn meal.  The promise of a full stomach.  The smell of hope.  So we take the stairs and find the door and knock.  We wait.  Nothing.  So we knock again.  The door opens and we are admitted into one of the smallest apartment kitchens I have ever seen.  There is an old man cooking.  And an old woman at the four-burner electric stove.  And their son.  The son invites us to lunch and we sit within arms reach of the kitchen counter at a card table next to four fellow lunchoneers who flirt dangerously, but wholly successfully, with hipsterness.  With six at the table, Taqueria X is now officially at capacity.  Maxed out.  Bulging at the seams.  Before me is a television playing Telemundo.  Behind me:  a wall of Mexican perfumes and beauty products, should the need arise.  We are asked what we’d like to drink.  Tecate comes cold out of a cooler.  My horchata is poured from an erstwhile flower vase.  Then we are asked what we’d like to eat.  There are menu cards on the table, but the menus are sin precios, without prices.  The duena is now looking at us, so we are careful to order much more than we will ever be able to eat.  I order chicken tamales, tacos de lengua, (beef tongue), tacos de res (beef) tacos de puerco y cabeza de res (pork and beef head), tacos al pastor (pressed pork).  My friend orders birria, a goat stew.  The duena nods as smiles, and within minutes, a feast of impossible bounty is laid out before us.  With a second nod from our host cook, we are invited to eat.

And this is when I begin to see things.  When I begin to hear imaginary music.  And when I, in the parlance of my youth, begin trippin balls.  It’s truly hallucinatory.  Because the food now before me is much more than lunch.  It’s food unsullied by gringo notions of food laws or refrigeration.  It’s food completely untouched by our profoundly fucked-up North American notion of food cultivation and often-schizophrenic sense of national cuisine.  It’s Mexican cuisine in its purest form.  It’s deeply and profoundly delicious.  So good, in fact that I’ve managed to dispatch my entire meal of four tacos and one tamale with such gnashing frenzy that my just-made hipster friends beside me are now looking at me the way zoo patrons might regard a spotted cheetah newly escaped of its cage.  But the duena is pleased.  She smiles and brings a serving of chapulines, or crickets, on a small plate.  My friend asks her in Spanish if they are fresh.  The duena chuckles and tells us she found them on the street that morning with the rats we just ate in our tacos.  The chapulines are at once earthy and refreshing in their crunch and spice.  They are, as everything here at Taqueria X, a revelation, pure and profound.

When it’s time to pay and leave, we ask for the bill.  But there is no bill.  Prices exist only in the duena’s head and nothing has been written down.  There is, however, the greater and far more ephemeral matter of how much we owe.  The idea rooted in the shaky calculus of how much food we consumed by a factor of just how much cash I might be carrying inside my brand new lululemon running pants.  The duena speaks: $45.  Not cheap, by any means, for what we’ve eaten, especially considering that with one well-placed phone call I could have the lights shut off in this joint.  But I’m purchasing far, far more than just lunch, am I not?  I’m paying for the experience itself, the element of risk, both hers and mine, the thrill of adventure.  I’m buying (if not merely renting) the culinary love child of the Aztecs and conquistador Cortes, the product of a five hundred year old gastronomic miscegenation between European and indigenous American cuisines.  All of it embodied in this tiny little woman.  All of it housed in this crammed little apartment with its Telemundo and wall of Mexican beauty products.  All of it delicious enough to make me bug out and lose my shit at a card table already thick with sock-headed hipsters. That this smiling little woman could be fined, jailed, or event deported for the act of illegally feeding paying strangers in her tiny home saddens me, deeply, and no doubt proves (in the starkest terms, I think) just how fucked up ideas regarding food cultivation and purveyance have gotten in North America.  That Monsanto (el Diablo primero) can peddle herbicide glyphosate (that's Roundup, sports fans), genetically engineered (GE) seed, and bovine growth hormone, at mind-boggling profit AND still sleep like babies at night is a far, far greater evil than this sweet little old lady slinging tacos in her home kitchen.  That McDonalds (el Diablo segundo) openly and freely puts ammonia-treated "beef product" (the now-infamous pink slime) infused with bovine fecal matter in its burgers is a far, far greater injustice than this immigrant family pouring me horchata from a decommissioned flower vase, no?  Can we not agree, to the person, that the risks of becoming sick or developing food-borne disease are far, far greater from consuming the shit that Monsanto is pimping than what this sweet old lady is serving in her own home?  Can we not agree that this so-called underground restaurant is emphatically NOT serving protein tainted with cow shit? 

The good news in all of this, friends and fellow eaters, is that for every Monsanto, monolith of un-Godly food cultivation that it is, there is a duena like this, serving the freshest and best food she can possibly produce.  And fresh and good the food at Taqueria X most certainly is.  It’s more than just good.  It’s an affirmation of the culinary possibilities that yet abound in this country and a testament to the culinary defiance of poor people feeding themselves through centuries of shared tradition and on their very own terms.

The only rub is that I can’t tell you where Taqueria X is.  That would be a betrayal.  A pinche gringo move.  So here’s the deal:  if I know you well enough, or if the degree of our separation is, say, less than two, contact me and I’ll give you the scoop.  I can tell you that Taqueria X is open only on the weekends, from 7AM to 7PM.  I can also tell you I will surely be there when you do visit.  I’ll be eating crickets.  And I’ll be walking Spanish down the hall.

Bob's Barbecue and the Ballad of Butner, North Carolina

Every serious eater I know has one:  a culinary ground zero.  Be they taquerias for some, or Vietnamese noodle shops for others, these ground zeros are places of gastronomic reckoning where everything these eaters might have known (or thought they knew) about food is suddenly and irrevocably blown to smithereens, destroyed by that otherwise innocuous morsel of street food at the end of their plastic forks.  They are places of epiphany, agencies of awakening, these eateries, and they show the newly hatched culinary enthusiast that food is not merely fodder for one’s own gob hole whose sole purpose is to kill the biological imperative of appetite, or to negate the physiological response of smoking a joint and jonesing for a jumbo cheese pizza.  No, these places are the holy places of cuisine where the oracles of gastronomy labor in near-total obscurity under mysterious shrouds of grill smoke and in whose cuisines are secreted a thousand tales telling of who they are and from whence they came.  In such places, an eater can learn about the world in a single afternoon, and it often tastes of salvation.

For me, that place is Bob’s.  Situated in north-central North Carolina just off I-85 at the end of an otherwise unremarkable service road where weary travelers go to gas up and buy smokes, and where culinary ambition would seemingly want to crawl off and die, Bob’s Barbecue, with it’s naugahyde chairs and V.F.W. karaoke-night vibe, was where I first became the eater I am today, where I was first dimly able to decode the signs and signifiers on my plate, and where I first realized I had my head so far up my own ass I was incapable of really and truly understanding anything about American cuisine.  You should forgive me that.  I was then a young culinary turk from Missouri farm country newly embarked on a career in the Washington food world, and like all recent converts insecure in their convictions, I was comically overzealous in my adherence to the orthodoxy of my new faith.  If the food wasn’t somehow a derivation of Franco gastronomy, I wasn’t fucking eating it.  No poulet basquaise on the menu?  No coq au vin?  I’ll go hungry thank you very much was the vibe I was throwing at restaurateurs in those days.  Quite a bold culinary stance to take on a road trip from Washington to Atlanta, I know, because Wendy’s, then as now, wasn’t exactly down with the whole sous vide thing, and McDonalds didn’t offer cote de boeuf on its 99 cent menu.  But it was lunchtime and I was hungry.  Really, really hungry.  As in:  eat or black out at the wheel.  So I pulled off the interstate at Butner and navigated the blight—the McDonalds, the Sonic, the Hardee’s—that American road food has become, determined, in my delirium, that I would rather capture and consume a local house pet before capitulating to the culinary menace of those evil golden arches.  No cocker spaniels died that day, I am pleased to report, because I happened to find Bob’s, looking for all the world like a shopworn Veterans of Foreign Wars bingo palace, but promising authentic North Carolina barbecue by the pig smoke adrift on the mid-day air. 

So I rolled into the gravel lot and entered Bob’s, convinced, as any twenty-something culinary know-it-all would be, that the food before me was going to be bad, hardly worth eating, food for rednecks, a simpleton’s cuisine.  But I was hungry enough to eat my left hand, and no matter how bad Bob’s might be, it would be infinitely better, I knew, than the shit purveyed by the evil laughing clown down the street.  So I ordered.  Grudgingly.  Then I sat.  And ate.  And when I emerged from Bob’s, thirty, maybe forty minutes later, I was different somehow.  Forever changed.  For what I encountered inside Bob’s was an American cuisine so pure, so elemental, so fucking good, that I realized with the kind of clarity that comes only to fools and idiot savants, that I was wrong about everything.  My fixation on haute cuisine, on so-called molecular gastronomy, on the cult of Escoffier, all it had been misguided, a fool’s errand, all of it deeply and profoundly wrong.  I hail from Missouri, after all.  Both sets of grandparents were farmers for crying eye.  I could ride a horse and shoot a gun before I could write my own name.  Bob’s food reminded me of this.  It was a looking glass, of sorts, in which I saw who I really was as an eater, and that this culinary identity of mine was somehow eternally fixed by the topography of my birth.  A new world of gastronomic possibility opened up for me inside Bob’s, a decidedly working-class, farm-and-labor culinary landscape decidedly devoid of the fussy, ephemeral, and sauce-heavy cuisines so central to the largely unsuccessful apprenticeship of my own food self-education.  Driving away from Bob’s after that first visit, I resolved to toss my black turtlenecks, chuck my Gitanes, and pawn my well-thumbed copy of La Technique the moment I got home, and I felt suddenly unencumbered, light-headed, and free at last.

I visited Bob’s Barbecue last week on a road trip to Asheville.  It was as I had remembered it:  a squat and Post Office-like building marooned at the barren end of a Carolina service road.  And if the women behind the counter were not the same woman in person, they were the same in type:  sweet little old ladies in aprons and hair nets and rose water perfume whom you might imagine having just arrived from a Southern Baptist bake sale and who call you darlin’ as they serve you the kind of barbecue that changes lives.  For Bob’s service methods employ a relic of the old South; Bob’s serves cafeteria style.  You take a tray (by the glass pie case loaded with sweet goodness) and order your protein (presumably pork, though fried catfish and chicken livers are available) from a lady whose job it is to scoop an enormous dollop of chopped pork (with creamy cole slaw) onto a Frisbee-sized bun.  She plates your pork sandwich on Styrofoam, then passes it to the hushpuppy lady.  The hushpuppy lady deposits a gloved handful of hushpuppies into a paper basket, then pushes your tray to the green bean lady.  The green bean lady scoops an enormous portion of bacon-infused beans onto your plate, then hands you the tray and sends you down the line to the cashier.  The little old cashier smiles and asks you if you’d like tea.  You do.  She hands you a Styrofoam cup filled with shaved ice, takes your money, and sends you off with yet another smile and the promise of bottomless hushpuppies.  Oh, yes.  That’s right.  Unlimited fried corn meal.  So you fill your cup with (very) sweet tea, take a seat at a simulated wood grain table, and tuck into some of the best barbecue you’re likely to ever encounter. 

Barbecue aficionados will be quick to point out that Bob’s, by decree of its location, is necessarily of the Lexington school of barbecue, which emphasizes pork shoulder (Eastern Carolina utilizes all parts of the pig except the squeal) and whose approach to sauce is milder and relatively more laid back on the topic of catsup (it usually contains but a dram) than Eastern Carolina orthodoxy allows.  I strongly favor Bob’s pumped up, eastern-styled counterpart (see my earlier blog entry on Wilber’s Barbecue of Goldsboro for that) and yeah, Bob’s pig could certainly benefit from a much bigger dose of hickory smoke, but I dare you to find a barbecue joint anywhere in the state that serves up a superior or more highly distilled essence of rural North Carolina itself.  I can find really good barbecue almost anywhere in that great state, sure.  But nowhere else in my extensive Carolina adventures have I ever found a truer, purer, more crystalline specimen of what it means to eat smoked, chopped pig, shoulder to shoulder with farmers, with mechanics, with sweet little old ladies from the local Southern Baptist Church.  It’s why we eat.  Nourishment.  Reprieve from toil.  Communion with the people at the true still point of this turning world.  And for this eater, Bob’s is my church; it’s patrons, my Carolina congregation.

For the record:  Bob’s serves the best hushpuppies I’ve ever eaten.  And when you visit Bob’s, as I know you will, please wear rose water as your perfume, ladies, and gents, make sure that’s pomade billowing your lovely locks, and for the love of Pete, one and all, enjoy the aroma.  It gets no finer anywhere else in Carolina.

They have no website, praise Jesus, so there is no link to offer.  But there is this.  An address.

Bob's Barbecue

1589 Lake Road

Creedmoor, North Carolina 27522

919.528.2081

Talking Italian With A. Litteri

It’s a dirty little secret of mine that I am now ready to confess:  I hate Italian food.  But wait.  Don’t get me wrong.  I am NOT talking about the Italian food of, say, that mad Italian genius from the Le Marche region, Fabbio Trabocchi of Fiola fame, who is not only revolutionizing Italian cuisine as we know it, but who has cooked some of the best food of any kind I have ever put in my mouth.  Nor am I talking about the kind of Italian food produced in the home kitchens of friends like Tom and Erica Petrilli, whose Italian dishes are so deeply delicious, and whose collaborative culinary prowess is so profoundly beyond my own, that tasting Tom’s red sauce makes me want to bang my head on the table, dent my soul, and cut a hole in my heart, because I know I will never, ever cook as well as Tom does, no matter how hard I try.  So maybe it’s not Italian food I hate, after all.  Maybe it’s that other stuff, the fake stuff, that basest and most low-brow culinary detritus that tries (and fails) to pass itself off as “Italian” food that I truly and deeply despise.  That stuff produced in the very non-Italian Sysco industrial faux-food processing facilities around the United States and later passed-off as “authentic” Italian cuisine by such Slobodan Milosevic-caliber gastro-war criminals as Bertucci’s, the Olive Garden, and Carrabba’s Italian Grill.  I know what you’re thinking:  Only an idiot with a culinary IQ of 6 would confuse Fabio’s cooking with the garbage that comes out of an Olive Garden kitchen.  Only a fuckwhit would fail to notice the shared gastronomic DNA of what comes out of an Old Spaghetti Factory kitchen with what comes out of a can of Chef Boyardee.  Agreed.  But where I’m from, the American Heartland (re:  “fly-over” states for you perennial coastal dwellers) the “authenticity” of these culinary shit holes is almost always without dispute.  In Iowa, in Kansas, in my native Missouri, the dross purveyed by the Macaroni Grill is Italian food for most people.  This means that for army of Midwestern eaters, Olive Garden’s fried fucking calamari is surely as authentically “Italian” as Fabio’s own and purely transcendent pine-smoked venison (with cipollini onions, foie gras, and rosemary, and likely the best venison dish anywhere in America, folks).  This also means that for a legion of farmbelt gastronomes-in-utero (as I was once) a Ragu red sauce-styled cuisine of laughable kiddie-food complexity (sugar, salt, and the occasional shot of dairy fat) is all they’ll quite possibly ever know of one of the world’s great and most sublime of cuisines. 

Unless.

Unless Fate seizes them by the short hairs and drags them half way across the country to A. Litteri, Inc.—that Holy Roman epicenter of all Washington-area Italian groceries, that Caesarian godhead for all D.C.-area Italian sandwich shops, and that veritable Puzoian Paradise where all Italophiles go to have their livers fattened and their bellies distended on an almost pharmacological array of Italian victuals that no Brando-in-waiting could ever possibly refuse, nor any garden variety Scorsesean wanna-be could forego without being considered a total mook. 

Because these are some truly mean streets one must navigate to find Litteri.  Because Litteri is located in Northeast Washington’s Union Market, an utterly bombed out four-square-block warehouse and meat-packing district hosting African butchers, Chinese butchers, Halal butchers, and other shady-looking sundries and restaurant supply vendors where you’ll need a business license (or a cool pair of Andrew Jacksons) to enter.  Union Market appears as the kind of place one might visit when needing to purchase a handgun or healthy white baby (in the parlance of the Cohen brothers), or where a person might unburden himself of his own extra kidney or trade-in his poorly used liver for a new one.  Union Market is just that kind of place and it’s what A. Litteri, Inc. has called home (and where the dead mobsters have been buried) since 1926.  It feels like the Capone era inside Litteri.  It smells like it, too.  An olfactory amalgam of spices, pistol oil, and cured meat.  And that’s a good thing.  How so? 

Because to enter Litteri is to fall down a culinary rabbit hole and enter an Italian fairyland of Old World gastronomy.  It’s a Platonic repository of every Italian food ever made exists in its one perfect form.  Floor to ceiling, front to back, Litteri is jam-packed with every Italian foodstuff a hungry gourmand could possibly imagine.  At the very front of the store are cases of highly quaffable wines selling at low-low prices ($3 a bottle and no doubt freshly fallen off the back of a truck).  Beyond that is the olive oil display.  Doubled-sided shelving stretching half the length of the store and crowded with hundreds of brands of olive oil, from the stuff so rare and expensive as to have likely been “imported” inside a human body cavity on a commercial jet liner, to varieties of oil just pedestrian enough to double as lube for your contractor’s nail gun.  Behind the oil display is shelving (and fridge space) devoted entirely to pasta.  Litteri has stockpiled enough fresh, frozen, and dried pasta (in shapes I’d never before seen) to get a person or three through the next plague or apocalypse.  End-capping the oil and pasta displays are shelves devoted entirely to potted fish (sardines and tuna), to capers, to olives, to canned tomatoes, to spices.  It’s easily the most densely stocked market I’ve ever seen.  It’s dizzying in its variety.  Vexing in its bounty.  Overwhelming in its offering.  But none of it, none of it, is why I’ve come to A. Litteri, Inc.

I’ve come for what you’ll find in the very, very back of the store.  I’ve come for Litteri’s made-to-order sandwiches, which, as I’m about to discover, are some of the very, very best that Washington (and Italian-American street cuisine) has to offer.  But tread carefully around the deli counter.  Be smart.  There are rules here.  There is a protocol.  You don’t rush the old man behind the counter.  You don’t bark your order at some pimple-faced, purple-shirted “Sandwich Artist.”  You write down your request in pencil on a form stacked on the counter.  Then you write your name.  Because you are accountable.  Because you will be nice while ordering your sandwich.  Because they know your name and can likely find out where you live.  So you choose two meats for your sandwich (capicola and prosciuttini, in my case).  Then you choose your two cheeses (I go with provolone and fresh mozzarella).  Then you choose your toppings (lettuce, tomato, onions, hot peppers) and condiments (Italian seasoning and dressing, yellow mustard, mayo).  You are then asked to make the most important decision of your sandwich eating experience; you are asked to choose your bread.  I go with the 9” hard roll (and so should you).  I say please and thank you while submitting my sandwich request.  I say it twice, and for my good manners, I am rewarded a nine-inch sandwich wrapped in white butcher’s paper.  I pay a very reasonable $5.95 and carry my sandwich, football-like, across pavement aglitter with broken glass, to the empty Subway parking lot directly across the street.  I sit on a short retaining wall next to a trash dumpster and tuck into what is surely among the best sandwiches of my life.  I bite at it.  I tear at it.  I rip and gnash.  And I know even then, even with a mouthful of prosciuttini and provolone, even with Italian dressing dribbling from my chin, that describing the perfect sandwich will be akin to describing the perfect sneeze in that both, sandwiches and sneezes, are so commonplace in life that describing an encounter with either would be tantamount to describing the properties of something truly banal—like a really good morning shower.  You’ll know it when you find it.  Oh yes you will.  But even as my powers of description fail me then (as they fail me now), I know that A. Litteri is where I will buy all of my sandwiches.  From now on.  For the rest of my time in Washington.  Because Taylor Gourmet is now dead to me.  Potbelly, a cruel, cruel joke.  A. Litteri, Inc has it all.  It’s a veritable Vatican City of culinary spirituality and material gastronomic wealth.  It’s where they’re keeping the good stuff.  It’s where I will from now go like some culinary pilgrim having once glimpsed heaven and hungry, very, very, for more. 

A. Litteri, Inc. is located at 517-519 Morse Street, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002

Their link is here:  Home Page A. Litteri, Inc.

You should also visit Fabbio at Fiola with someone you love or someone you desperately want to sleep with.  Fiola's link is here:  Home - Fiola Restaurant

And luckily, not everyone shares my opinion of Olive Garden.  Some people actually like it.  Here's Marilyn Hagerty's now-famous review in the Grand Forks Herald:  THE EATBEAT: Long-awaited Olive Garden receives warm welcome | Grand Forks Herald | Grand Forks, North Dakota

The (Un) Dangerous Taco of Pat's Market, Alexandria

It’s what American cities do best.  They change.  When they improve, we call it urban renewal.  Gentrification.  Gastronomic manifest destiny.  Whatever you call it, it first appears, innocuously enough, as the new corner Starbucks.  Then it transmogrifies into a hipster burger joint.  Then it shape-shifts into that Whole Foods built where the old A & P used to be.  And before you can say Kenny G., the entire neighborhood is swarming with white people.  Like it or not, that’s how gentrification works.  For those professionals able to afford such free-wheeling luxury, these newly minted cityscapes represent a fairyland of easy living.  What’s not to like about being able to score a pound of prosciutto, your own dry cleaning, and a cup of bubble tea in the space of one city block?  I, for one, will cop to it.  Guilty as charged.  Without a doubt.  Were I to live in such a neighborhood, I would certainly be that guy carrying a chai latte in one hand and my pet Chihuahua in the other.  Or, well, maybe not.

But what do we call it when this kind of renewal happens in reverse?  What do we call it when a brown person improves on what a white guy first tried?  What do we call it when a Salvadoran cook and entrepreneur buys a terribly rundown but long-cherished family marketplace in a traditionally all-white neighborhood (with a golf course across the street) and turns the place into one of the most unlikely and easily most delicious purveyors of Salvadoran food around?  I call it progress.  I call it Pat’s Market in Alexandria, Virginia, and Pat’s is exactly what culinary revitalization tastes like. 

I won’t kid you; imagining culinary excellence coming from a place like Pat’s takes more than creativity; it requires the kind of blind faith known only to sky-divers and bungee jumpers, and which tells them, against all reason, that everything is going be all right in the end.  That no one is going to get hurt.  Pat’s is more than down-at-the-heels and rough-around-the-edges.  It’s dangerous-looking.  The kind of place that looks to serve up complimentary sides of hepatitis and botulism with every order.  The kind of place that appears to have brought a third-world sensibility of safe-food-handling practices to compliment its third-world cuisine. 

But that first-take on Pat’s would be shortsighted.  Myopic.  For what the true gastronome sees when he enters Pat’s is not the shelves of potted meats, the hanging bags of pork rinds, the displays of LIVE BAIT.  No, what the real eater first spies is the Salvadoran couple behind the counter.  The el who is filling an old ketchup squeeze-bottle with salsa.  The ella who is swaddled in a white cooking apron and stands beside a four-burner range and a flat top grill.  Ah!  Food is cooked here, is the gourmand’s first epiphany.  What the savvy eater next essays is the menu printed on copier paper and taped to the counter like the report card of someone else’s honor student, someone else’s kid.  The hanging menu offers cheeseburgers, French fries, wings, pizza.  The menu is a red herring, a gastronomic sleight of hand, an expert exercise in culinary misdirection, is the gourmand’s second insight.  Something strange is afoot here.  Pat’s Market has my full and undivided attention.

So I ask the man behind the counter for something to eat.  Lunch is what I need.  The request makes him go all shifty-eyed, makes him nervous.  That or my short-hair/Ray Bay aviator approach to personal aesthetics which screams health inspector and la migra to guys like this everywhere.  The proprietor motions to the menu and suggests the cheese steak.  The cheese steak?   I tell him I work in the food business.  Not some pinche zapatero, but a careerist.  A lifer.  I tell him I won’t eat gringo food on my day off.  This makes him relax, visibly.  His shoulders fall forward and he lets out his breath.  I think I even detect a smile.  When the man suggests pupusas I know we’re destined for friendship, he and I.  When he suggests a tongue taco, I know it’s going to be a culinary love between us, real and true.  Such things happen when a perfect stranger reads the secret desires aflame in your soul.  And sometimes a tongue taco is all it takes.

But as with all young love, things can get really strange really quickly.  The proprietor comes around from behind the counter and walks to the very back corner of the store.  There, he enters a mid-century walk-in unit that looks like a bank vault, and once in, stays inside for a good seven minutes.  I know it’s a full seven minutes because the cook doesn’t speak English.  Because there’s no one else inside the store.  And because I take out my iPhone (that requisite douchewear accessory of foodies everywhere) and seek an app designed to somehow defeat awkward situations such as this.  Just as I thought:  there is no app for that. 

The proprietor emerges with two metal mixing bowls filled with meat.   The cubed tongue in one hand.  A bowl of diced flank steak in the other.  He passes by me without a word and once behind the counter, begins to season and toss the meat with his bare hands.  The woman warms the pupusas and tortillas on the grill, and once brown at the edges, removes the starches to make room for the meat.  And in what feels like just seven exhilarating seconds, I am presented with two styrofoam clamshells full of what smells like really good Salvadoran food and for which I am charged a pittance (two tacos, two pupusas and Mexican Coke for well under ten dollars).

I smile, pay, and abscond to a nearby park where I plan to eat what I hope might be, at best, barely-eatable Salvadoran food consumed in the warm sunshine of a late-winter’s day.  At the very least, I hope to be full at meal’s end.  And if I am to get my greatest wish, if there is an Easter Bunny after all, the food will not make me sick. 

What I discover on my first, second, even third sorties into my two clamshells is something approaching short-order genius and nothing short of the best Salvadoran food I have yet tasted.  The pupusas are rich, almost springy and fresh tasting (most unusual for pupusas).  They are paired, in their clamshell, with two dollops of fresh slaw, topped with salsa, whose flavors are shocking in their brightness and freshness.  I am thunderstruck.  I am also confused by flavors this vivid in Central American cooking.  So I move on to the tacos.  Temples of my familiar.  My favorite go-to meal and something I can happily eat every day of my life.

The beef taco is rich in flavor, vibrant, grassy, highly seasoned and, somehow, altogether familiar tasting.  The tongue is, simply put, the best tongue taco I’ve ever tasted insofar as the flavors are spot-on and that it is more of a melting process (as opposed to the regular seven-chews-per-bite gringo mastication routine) that delivers the tongue down my gullet.  The tacos are made of the freshest tortillas I ever recall eating.  And the pico de gallo that comes in the clamshell—fresh enough to be called bombastic.  I pick it apart to discover a rough and irregular dicing of the tomatoes and onions that delivers the most significant epiphany of the day:  this food is homemade.

So I do something I’ve never done before.  Something foolish.  I go back.  I get in my car and drive back to Pat’s Markets.  I want an explanation.  I want an answer to a single question:  how can their food be this fucking good?  The couple behind the counter does not look happy to see me again.  Have I come back to bust them on the internal serving temperature of their flank steak?  Or have I come back to avenge the bone in my throat?  The same gringo in the space of half and hour surely means bad, bad things are about to happen.  Things involving knife fighting and deportation.  So I smile and offer my business card and try to put them at ease with assurances that their food is, in my opinion, easily the best Salvadoran fare in the area.  They already know this.  But saying so puts the proprietor at ease.  Introductions are made.  His name is Manuel, hers Janira.  They purchased the already-distressed Pat’s Market six-years before from an Indian family, all Hindu and vegetarian, who sold (but never ate) high-end deli meat (the market was built in 1960 and named for the long-dead original owner’s still-living wife).  Manual does a respectable business selling traditional Salvadoran food to always-ravenous Latino laborers, breakfast and lunch.  The menu taped to the counter is for the benefit of stray gringos who wander into Pat’s without fully understanding that the United States end in the parking lot outside.  Inside Pat’s, they’re in El Salvador, no two ways about it.  You're off the reservation, pal.  

But the food, I ask Manuel, how do you do it?  How do you make it taste like that?

Manuel’s answer to my first question does not surprise me:  everything is made in-house at Pat’s; the slaw, the pico de gallo, the tortillas, even the pizza, all made fresh, daily, by hand, by the lovely Janira.  It’s Manuel’s answer to the second part of my question that catches me totally off guard.  It shocks me.  Manuel tells me the secret ingredients in the pupusas are the two cheeses Janira uses—mozzarella and provolone.  Then Manuel leans in closer and imparts the holy trinity of seasoning used in Janira’s beef tacos:  French’s yellow mustard, mayonnaise, and Italian salad dressing.

My first impulse is to bolt.  I’ve been had.  Taken for a sucker.  Played for the kind of gringo fool who can’t tell the difference between authentic Salvadoran food and gastronomic hocus-pocus.  But one hard look at Manuel convinces me otherwise.  Here is this sweet little man who came from profound third-world poverty with no money, no English—just the dream of taking some ruined old gringo grocery and piloting that leaky old thing toward culinary greatness.  One hard look at Manuel reminds me to ask myself on just what third-world gastronomy is based, after all.  Third-world cuisine is about taking whatever ingredients are at hand, be they queso fresco or provolone, alguashte or French’s yellow mustard, and making the most delicious food possible.  So the very impulse that drives Manuel and Janira to season their food with North American condiments is exactly what make their Salvadoran tacos and pupusas authentic.

Manuel and I shake hands as I am leaving.  He tells me he hopes I will return for more tacos.  Come back for the best and most authentic Salvadoran food I’ve yet had the pleasure to taste?  Of course I will.  Because Pat’s continues the heritage of culinary revitalization of America.  Because it’s what the future tastes like.  Because it’s deeply and truly delicious.

Pat’s Market is located at 1401 Belle Haven Road, Alexandria, Virginia, 22307.

I can’t wait to see you there.

[Reader's note:  word on the street is that Pat's has closed.  Bummer.]

Fire Walk With Me - The Adana Burger at Balkan Grill

Let's consider the hamburger, shall we?  The average American consumes over 230 pounds of the stuff a year.  Be it the evil, ammonia-drenched, feces-covered 99 cent shit served out of the typical drive-thru window, or the truly good stuff from Wagyu stock, bathed in beer its whole life and routinely serviced by a Geisha’s right hand, then sold, later, in trendy burger joints for upwards of $25 a pop, gastronomy in America, or whatever it is we call the daily business of cooking and eating, would, for most, be unthinkable, a strange and alien culinary landscape, a place truly un-American.  So what happens when our national dish goes abroad?  What becomes of the burger in, say, Europe?  Does it travel the continent like some well-meaning but dimwitted Jamesian waif, the victim of incessant ridicule, the object of depthless contempt, a symbol of all that is wrong with America?  Or is it something else?  Does the hamburger go abroad like a culinary assassin and rogue agent of the American empire, secretly warring upon centuries of European culinary tradition, and loosed upon the continent like some gonzo-gastro Colonel Kurtz armed with trans-fats, intent on making everyone fat, dumb, and happy?

I once lived in Europe.  I lived there just long enough to discover that everywhere (and I mean everywhere) I went, there would be hundreds of white-shoed, khaki-pants-and-fanny-pack wearing Americans lined up twenty-deep beneath the Golden Arches of, say, Paris, Amsterdam, or Oxford, clamoring for a taste of Omaha, shouldering their way forward for a whiff of old Debuque.  To this day I can’t decide if my fellow travelers sought Big Macs as a panacea for being homesick, or if their ruin as eaters was already complete.  Were they intimidated by the culinary unknown, or had Ronald already had his way with them?  Were they the psychologically damaged suckers who identified with their abusers as described in psychology’s proto-Freudian object relations theory?  Or was it more simple than that?  Was it just that these Americans were the typical monoglots who go abroad too frightened to order off menus printed the local language?  Were they, as eaters, forever lost?

Seeing a young American wolf down Royale Deluxe (that’s a Royale with Cheese for all you Pulp Fiction fans out there) on the Champs-Elysees broke my heart.  That was it for me and the hamburger for a while.  We were done.  Officially broken up.  Friends no more.  I didn’t eat ground meat in pressed or patty form the rest of my time in Europe.  And that’s too bad.  Because there is a long and still-vital tradition of European hamburger making (and eating) in the Old World.  And no, I’m not talking about the tradition of Hamburg Steak from the 17^th Century (the Germans are on their own here).  I’m talking about the amazingly varied and truly delicious tradition of meat in patty form that is the cornerstone of streetfood in Balkan cuisine.

I now know about Balkan burgers only because a sudden culinary whim brought me into Alexandria’s delightful Balkan Grill to have me staring at an illustrated menu featuring not one, but two burgers deeply rooted in the Balkan streetfood tradition.  Only these pucks of delicious protein are not called hamburgers in Bosnian.  They’re called pljeskavica and are traditionally made of mixed ground meats, then grilled or fried, and served between what Americans would call a bun, but which Serbs call lipinja, and more resembles pita bread in gluten content than, say, does that Sunbeam bun you grew up with.  The pljeskavica is traditionally served with raw onions, peppers, tomatoes, and something magical called kaymak, and which, to Americans, will resemble sour cream on first glance, but which resembles, when tasted, crème fraiche or clotted cream.

This first pljeskavica was billed on the menu as the Bosnian Burger.  Below the Bosnian Burger was pictured something called the Adana Burger, beside which was handwritten the word HOT in ball-point pen.  I knew that Adana was a city southern Turkey not particularly prominent on the Southeastern European culinary map, but the promise of a spicy burger (even hot) intrigued me so much that I ordered it and a second dish called borek (fillo pastry stuffed with cheese) just in case the burger should somehow disappoint.  The proprietor took my order with Old World formality and retreated to the kitchen, leaving me alone to wait.

Balkan Grill is a neighborhood joint in my very own neighborhood of Alexandria south, as it just so happens.  Alexandria’s “hood,” if you will.  Balkan Grill is located in a strip mall that I’ve only patronized when my thirst for a late-night beer outweighs the likelihood that I’ll have to fistfight some hard-case at the local 7-11 beercase (more on that later).  The restaurant itself is tiny, designed for take-away, and seats six on a good day.  But it’s bright and clean and really everything you’d ever want in a local eatery.  There was a reach-in fridge full of soft drinks set next to a nearly sold-out pastry case of homemade-looking Bosnian/Turkish pastry.  Balkan Grill is conjoined to the equally surprising Euro Foods market, which offers all the Occidental canned, bottled, and wrapped exotics you’d hope to find in a European sundry.  I might have walked past Balkan Grill everyday in my six years here in the hood, but others far wiser than I have clearly not made the same mistake.  In my brief time at Balkan Grill, there was a steady stream of Bosnian-speaking and Russian-speaking luncheoneers, all of them women, all of them in search of an American husband were the tightness of their jeans any harbinger of their intent.  That Balkan Grill was on the radar of European expatriates jonesing for the taste of home seemed a very good sign indeed.

And one look at my food as it came out and I knew why Balkan Grill was a favorite among the Southeastern European crowd.  Before me were two huge plates of food.  One with a monster borek on it.  The other with the biggest hamburger I have ever seen.  The Adana burger was huge.  Colossal.  As big around as the top of my head.  It was presented as promised:  a meat patty of epic proportions laid between two slices of lipinja and garnished on the side with raw onions, green peppers, tomatoes, and a large dollop of kaymak.  I looked at the Adana burger, then at the two pretty tight-jeaned Bosnian nationals waiting for their food.  They winked at me and smiled and nodded me on like some fool about to plunge over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel, so I picked up my mammoth burger and took a bite.

Before I describe the Adana, a confession:  when it comes to hot food, I’m that guy.  I’m the guy who carries a bottle of Tabasco in his professional bag of tricks to enliven the staff meal I receive at the end of every event I supervise.  I drown my shift meal in hot sauce both to enliven my food and send my chefs into fits of apoplectic rage.  So I know my heat.  I’ve got the Scoville Scale tattooed on my culinary soul.

The heat I encountered in the Adana burger was, in a word, incendiary for a puck-shaped piece of ground protein.  It lit a fire in my mouth.  It called tears into my eyes.  It made me run for that cooling dollop of kaymak the way a frightened child runs for his mother.  The kaymak worked like magic.  Out went the flames.  And with the fire in my mouth extinguished, I was better able to detect spices in the meat which were unfamiliar but which hinted at the seasoning found in American breakfast sausage.  So I took another bite.  And another.  And another.  And as any heat-junkie well knows, food this hot only compels the eater to consume more and more.  It’s the white-knuckled rush of eating hot food.  That fabled endorphin high.  I ate and ate until my belly was distended, until I was wet as a long-distance runner in July, until the mighty Adana burger was no more than a memory on my plate.  The two Bosnian girls looked at me, rolled their eyes, and laughed.  Only a Bosnian fool would have me as a husband.  Ha ha ha.

Twelve years in the world of haute cuisine has taught me to believe that I know a helluva lot about food.  One late-winter’s visit to the truly excellent Balkan Grill has taught me that I know virtually nothing.  It has taught me there are untold numbers of age-old culinary traditions out there in the great wide world just waiting to be encountered by culinary enthusiasts like me.  As luck would have it, I always travel with my appetite; I’m always hungry for more.  Consider the hamburger.

Your link to Balkan Grill: Balkan Grill

And yeah, the borek was delicious.  Meet me there and I'll bring the beer.  Promise.