Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans

New Orleans.  For me, it’s not so much a city than it is a place of worship.  It’s my culinary holy land, my Mecca of American gastronomy, where all that is sacrosanct about American cooking—that constant collision of highly divergent culinary cultures—might be attended, by you, by me, as acolytes going before the oracles, for whispers of acumen and insight into the great mysteries of culinary divination.  Wander into any of its vibrant neighborhoods, down any of its magical streets, and you’ll experience a food culture of such spectroscopic vitality, and of such prodigious potency, as to be largely without peer in culinary America.  African.  Spanish.  French.  New Orleans remains at the singular confluence of these extraordinary food traditions, and by their comingling, the city has played parturition to their culinary progeny, with each variant, however unlikely, speaking in an accent unique to the parish unto which it was born.  New Orleans.  It’s a city that has collectively agreed that red beans and rice be eaten on Mondays; a city that affirms that cocktails just might best be enjoyed in the open air, with friends, while sauntering down a city street.  Be still my beating heart.

I go to New Orleans as if on pilgrimage, as if on a devotional journey and spiritual quest.  I’ve been visiting New Orleans, yearly, since I first discovered its formidable charms nearly twenty years ago as a just-back-from-Oxford-University and still-wet-behind-the-ears wonder boy of twenty-six.  After suffering the heresies and heterodoxies of British cooking, as I had for my time abroad, New Orleans was a revelation, my own veritable burning bush whereby the gods of gastronomy first delivered their commandments in gumbos and etouffees.  New Orleans.  Made even more special that my brother, Brian, and his wife, Shae, live there in the Bywater neighborhood.  Oh, crescent-shaped city, object of my strongest piety, and recipient of my most ardent zeal.

But the New Orleans of today is not, of course, the New Orleans with which I first fell in love.  That she-devil named Katrina irreparably changed the city in ways that, lo these eight years later, are just now being understood.  The toll of human life was—we all know from the scars worn across our hearts—horrific.  Equally appalling was first response from our federal government, who—sin of sins—left a great American city alone to die.  But the long-term devastation wrought by Katrina has been far greater than the cost of repairing or rebuilding its infrastructure; Katrina’s truest and most insidious legacy has been to threaten New Orleans, ex post facto, with a spiritual crisis delivered from an invading army of venture capitalists, transient labors, and skinny-jeaned hipsters, whose collective, post-hurricane arrival has demanded of New Orleans a deeply inward gaze to see what of itself will prove resistant to change, or what would be corrupted by the scourge of carpetbaggers who have harried the pace of the city, made it a little less polite, and even changed the way people now drive.

My quest, this Thanksgiving, was to revisit my beloved and most favorite city to see if the Disneyfication of New Orleans (that Devil’s handshake of a social compact that requires a city to stop being itself, while only looking like the place it once was) had metastasized as badly as was now being reported, or if New Orleans was somehow shaking the disease of outside influence and showing new signs of resiliency—even recovery—in the way it was feeding itself, its natives, and nurturing its own culinary soul.

The rules I set for this quest were simple and imposed to achieve a maximum in purity of experience.  No cars.  No "restaurants."  No exceptions.  Ever.  That I must cross the city afoot, or by bike, meant that New Orleans would reach me in tactile, auditory, and olfactory ways that sitting behind the steel and glass of an American automobile would only discourage, even perhaps disallow.  That I must deny myself the not insignificant pleasures of New Orleans’ haute cuisine scene (re:  the culinary favors and free drinks of several notable NOLA chef friends) would require that I venture out of comfort zones, real and metaphorical, and into neighborhoods and local cuisines I would likely find unfamiliar, even challenging; I would eat only street food procured from New Orleans streets I had never before gone.  I had just three full days, my brother’s bicycle, and the kind of good luck that visits only the pure of heart.

DAY ONE - THE PO’ BOY

In New Orleans, the po’ boy is hardly just a sandwich.  It’s iconic.  And it’s central to the city’s workaday food vocabulary and it’s emblematic—even at its etymological inception during the streetcar strike of 1929—of how a city like New Orleans can elevate such quotidian fare like the common sandwich into something truly sublime. Knowledge of how to properly order a po’ boy without having to be asked (re: you oh-so-politely request that your sandwich to come fully dressed) bestows instant street cred upon the prospective eater.  That’s all it takes.  Get that right, and you’re in; you’re suddenly one of us.   

My first po’ boy of the trip would necessarily have to come from my old friends at Domilise’s Po’ Boy & Bar, a place I’ve frequented for years.  Domilise’s is the gold standard in po’ boy purveyance in a city already crowded with deeply talented sandwich makers.  Located in the sleepy, working class neighborhood of Uptown, Domilise’s is a dive in the best possible sense of the word.  It’s unabashedly down-at-the-heels, unpretentious to its core, and, for me, comfortable as an old shoe.  I arrived early, just after breakfast, and found myself the first costumer of the day.  The matron behind the counter was polite enough to pretend to recognize me.  She smiled and asked what I wanted.  I told her I was putting myself in her capable hands, so she served me catfish, her favorite, and, as it happens, the one dish of culinary Americana that I, proud son of Missouri that I am, consider myself expert on.  Catfish it would be.  I took my sandwich and sat with my plate.  The matron stopped what she was doing to watch me eat.  Any good, she asked me, but question was rhetorical.  She knew it would be good.  Damn good.  And she smiled knowingly, almost triumphantly, when I pronounced it the best piece of catfish I had ever eaten.  And it was.  The best.  Catfish.  Ever.  But something bothered me.  It wasn’t the sandwich; it most certainly wasn’t the fish.  It was how much it all cost.  My one small catfish po’ boy ($11.50) and bottle of Barq’s root beer ($1.50) had just set me back a whopping thirteen fucking dollars.  For lunch.  In an out-of-the-way dive.  The pricing seemed mercenary.  It seemed set a levels designed to quickly thin the wallets of visiting food tourists—they with visions of the Food Network dancing in their heads—who were willing to pony up the exorbitant prices for local food authenticity, whatever that word means anymore.  I get it.  Every restaurant is a for-profit enterprise.  Every restaurant lives or dies by food cost, and given the volatility of seafood pricing, food margins are—even in the best of times—undoubtedly razor thin.  But to charge eleven dollars for a piece of deep fried bottom feeder—however expert and loving its preparation—sandwiched inside six inches of white bread seems hostile to the notion that the po’ boy has been—and proudly—the nourishment of blue collar New Orleans from their shared beginnings.  And this made me sad.  Very.  I left Domilise’s determined to find an equally delicious po’ boy that poor boys could actually afford.

I wasn’t long in the looking.

The Adam’s Street Grocery sits further Uptown, close to Loyola University, on the quiet and deeply unassuming street it’s named after.  Like all neighborhood groceries of the American South, it serves the needs and predilections unique to its own immediate community, as most national grocery chains simply can’t be bothered.  On the day of my visit, it was serving several tall boys of malt liquor at eleven o’clock in the morning (to wit:  it was Sunday, game day, after all, Saints versus Seahawks, so cutting the proverbial dust with a little pre-game nerve tonic was entirely understandable).  My own good morning to the crowd of drinkers was rejoined with the magical and ubiquitous-in-New-Orleans all right now.  Po’ boys, at the Adam’s Street Grocery, are produced from a deli counter at the extreme rear of the store, where all manner of I’ve-got-my-drink-on food specials—from hot wings to fried egg rolls—are produced.  I was asked by a friendly-enough young man what I’d like on my po’ boy, and as before, I deferred to my host’s own guidance.  He considered, and quickly produced a roast beef po’ boy, dressed with brown gravy, and precisely of the same size, heft, and likely caloric density as the sandwich I’d just received at Domilise’s, but for a fraction of the price:  $2.99.  I took the sandwich outside and ate next to my brother’s bicycle.  The roast beef was standard issue deli meat; the gravy was utility jus straight from the can.  But what was astonishing about my Adam’s Street Grocery, and what sent me running back into the store, was the bread.  The bread.  Holy shit.  The fucking bread.  It was nothing like anything I’ve tasted in this country, and it recalled (with perfect Proustian synesthesia) the bread I’d eaten in my time, years back, in Paris.  The smallish Asian man behind the Adam’s Street Grocery counter looked worried that I’d returned with jus on my chin and a crazed look in my eye.  The bread was all I could say before the man wrote the baker’s name on a tiny slip of paper.  Dong Phuong, or DP Bakery, a Vietnamese baker, supplies the bread on which the grocery’s sandwiches are proudly served.   Embarrassed that I’d startled the man, I coughed up the $10 for an Adam’s Street Grocery souvenir t-shirt, and left the store on the wobbly legs of a man drunk on epiphany.

Because I now knew who was producing the best baguette in America. 

Dong fucking Phuong.

That the Vietnamese would outclass local French and Italian bakers should not have surprised to me.  Here in my current hometown of Washington, D.C., our large and ever-vital Vietnamese community has long dazzled American eaters with their extraordinary bahn mi sandwiches.  So it should have seemed almost inevitable that the Vietnamese would thrive in any place—be it D.C. or New Orleans—that rewards the kind of quiet culinary genius the Vietnamese so neatly possess.  My brother took my news about DP Bakery with a shrug.  Like, duh, dude.  Brian and Shae routinely trek across the Mississippi to the West Bank community of Algiers to score Vietnamese sundries at the Hong Kong Market, a Vietnamese superstore, where a person might procure decidedly Asian delicacies like duck heads and pig faces, should the fancy ever strike.  More interesting to me, however, was that Hong Kong Market advertised “Vietnamese po’ boy” sandwiches.  An investigation was in order.  So my brother and I drove (yeah, yeah, I know, no cars) to Algiers.  For those unfamiliar with the charms of the West Bank, just imagine New Orleans after the zombie apocalypse, and you’ll get the idea.  It’s the kind a place a writer like William S. Burroughs might build a love nest for him and his heroin habit (he lived at 509 Wagner for years 1948 and 1949), or the kind of place in which a people in diaspora—like the Vietnamese—might settle and find really, really pleasant after suffering the ravages of a gruesome civil war.  The Hong Kong Market itself is situated in an Asian-centric strip mall not unlike our own Eden Center here in Washington, and it’s host to any number of business interests, where anything from back rubs to bubble tea might be had for a price.  And like our own Eden Center, to enter Hong Kong Market is to effectively leave the United States of America.  It’s a wonderland of the exotic.  Its sounds; its smells:  they’re entirely Asian.  To procure my “Vietnamese po’ boy” sandwich (every bit the bahn mi I had expected) a series of hand signals was required to guide my sandwich maker to the desired ingredients.  Pate.  Head Cheese.  Sliced pork.  Vietnamese meatball.  Cilantro.  Daikon.  It was magnificent.  An epic sandwich for the eating.  Every element a minor miracle of flavor made transcendent by that fucking bread.

And all of it for just $3.22.  

I can only hope my old friends at Domolise’s are paying attention.

Enough said.

DAY TWO - OYSTERS

It’s easy to forget—while one is beached and blissed-out on brandy in some Bourbon Street bar—that New Orleans is surrounded by water.  The gulf.  The river.  The lake.  It’s water, water everywhere.  The crustations and bivalves that come from these waters are at the heart how the people of New Orleans define themselves as eaters.  In no other American city are crawfish, shrimp, and oysters devoured with the same ferocity or relish as they are in the Crescent City.  Seafood is also where visiting food tourists most often go terribly, terribly wrong.  You’ll see them lined up outside some highly marginal oyster house in the French Quarter for the all-too-dubious pleasure of landing a table where Guy Fieri once slurped an oyster and threw a fake gang sign at a television camera.  And that’s okay with the locals.  Really.  Because they know the good stuff is to be found far and wide of the Quarter at the venerable Cooter Brown’s, an Uptown institution.  And while Cooter Brown’s bills itself as a tavern and oyster bar, my experience there was more like that of a house party.  The kind of kegger that teenagers might throw.  The kind that happen when the adults have fled, and no one’s in charge.  And that’s a good thing, because a little culinary chaos is a whole lot of fun.  Granted, my meal at Cooter Brown’s happened to coincide with the oh-so-dramatic final play of the Alabama/Auburn game (spoiler:  Auburn won), so the sight (and sound) of eight-five strangers yelling at television screens was, I guess, something of an anomaly, perhaps.  I went with Brian and Shae, who have been frequenting Cooter Brown’s for years now.  We ordered oysters.  Two dozen on the half shell.  I ordered beer, of which Cooter Brown’s offers hundreds from around the world.  Our oysters came from Area 3 of nearby Lake Bourne.  Big.  Meaty.  Beyond fresh tasting, and utterly delicious.  My beer, Hopitoulis (the name’s a play on words) came from the NOLA Brewing Company, located a half-mile down from where we sat, from their brewery on Tchoupitoulas Street.  If there’s a pairing in this world that harkens culinary divinity more than oysters and cold, local beer, I’ve yet to encounter it.  The experience of slurping bivalves while shoulder-to-shoulder, on benches, at wooden picnic tables, with a rowdy mob of high-fiving, fist-pumping, and deeply drunken strangers from the South is, on many levels, living at its best. 

DAY THREE – TAMALES & YA-KA-MEIN

Show me the hungry traveler who reconnoiters the foodstuff of the urban American South and fails to bump his nose on that hard-to-see-coming-but-unmistakable-when-it-happens sliding glass door of racial tension, and I’ll show you the culinary journeyer who’s doing it all wrong.  Any culinary quest, especially those across the American South, requires (for the white food tourist, at least) that one forsake the creature comforts of room service, that one disavow the pickled promises of the in-room mini bar, and venture out, way out, to those neighborhoods and barrios, where beats the true heart of all American cities, and where the site of white people (the kind, at least, so given to  Volkswagens, flat-fronted Banana Republic chinos, and black Labradors named Rex) bring a decidedly mixed response among the local population.  But that’s the point.  America has always been—and will always be—about collision.  It’s about cultural cross-pollination.  About finding commonality and camaraderie in the other.

When I first declared my intention of seeking out the Crescent City’s finest examples of tamales and ya-ka-mein (long-storied food staples among the city’s African-American population) to a crowd of fellow tipplers in my favorite 9^th Ward bar this last Thanksgiving, I was told by the bartender (an earnest and well-intended sock-headed hipster) that I was wasting my time.  That white people simply didn’t eat those things, and that the prizes of my own culinary quest were unattainable—shining examples of New Orleans’ black-only cuisine.  I was gobsmacked.  I hardly knew what to say.  How could such a flimsy and deeply false correlative like this be accepted as doctrine amid the newly emergent zeitgeist of post-racial American gastronomy (re: post-racial insofar as the culinary traditions of the perennially impoverished have been embraced by the forces of haute cuisine) by people seemingly smart enough to know better?  How could food—this food, any food—be remanded, purely, to the confines of race or ethnicity?  How could food be black or white?  And wasn’t food, like music, always at the vanguard of all cultural diplomacy and exchange?  It was madness, this mindset, and it made me angry.  How angry?  Angry enough to rise from my barstool, walk outside, and climb onto the seat of my brother’s bicycle.  Fuck the hipsters.  It would be tamales now, I decided.  Ya-ka-mein or bust.

I wasn’t long in the looking.  Just off the sidewalk in the neighborhood of East Riverside stands the magnificent Magazine Deli, so named for the busy city street just spitting distance from its take-away window.  Shack.  Shanty.  Hut.  Hovel.  Magazine Deli is all of these things, surely.  But look a little closer, talk to its proprietor, peer behind its sliding wire fly-screen, and you discover a temple of culinary worship devoted to African American street food.  Ya-ka-mein.  Tamales.  Sno balls [sic].  The holy trinity of Crescent City gastronomy.  Magazine Deli has all three.  Except the day of my visit (falling so closely to Thanksgiving, as it did).  That day presented one and only one culinary offering:  tamales.  So tamales it would be. 

Brought to the Mississippi Delta by Mexican migrant workers in the early 1900s, the tamale (known in New Orleans and regionally as hot tamales) has played a vital nutritional role in the development of the agrarian American South (insofar as we equate dietary calories with increased labor production).  Corn meal.   Ground meat.  Paprika.  Garlic.  Cayenne.  All of it rolled in a cornhusk and packed with enough caloric density to sustain a Delta field hand though a workday of—by today’s standards—almost unimaginable toil.  Tamales.  Robert Johnson sang about them in his 1936 masterpiece, “They’re Red Hot.”  Reverend Moses Mason sang about them in his equally inspired “Molly Man” of 1928.  Dial the former up on Spotify (insert irony here) and you’ll get a pure, if auditory whiff of what how completely the tamale pervades African American foodways.  My own tamales, those made by Magazine Deli and delivered in a small, Styrofoam clamshell, were, in fact, everything I’d hoped them to be:  large caliber culinary bullets easily capable of penetrating, and quickly dispatching, the most resilient of hungers.  I expressed my delight in what I was eating, and was repaid with the name and address of what the proprietor of Magazine Deli assured me was the second best ya-ka-mein in the city, second only, of course, to his own.  Laughter.  Handshakes.  Hugs.  This from a man with whom local hipsters had forecast an interaction rife with odium and contempt.  Alas.  Hipster wisdom at hipster its best. 

While but a short, five-minute ride from Magazine Street, the Red Rooster Snowball Stand seems another world away.  Located in the neighborhood of Central City (where, by all outward appearances, the city’s poverty seems at its most abject) the Red Rooster has quietly emerged as the new paradigm for development-done-right.  It’s the for-us-by-us business model in the best possible sense, and the vibe there is more gathering place and community center than a just for-profit restaurant.  It’s beautiful.  It’s new.  The occasion of my visit found the sidewalk picnic tables just beyond the take-away windows crowded with neighborhood eaters speculating on the Saints’ upcoming chances, and trading local gossip.  I stepped up to the window and placed my order:  one beef ya-ka-mein.  What I received, moments later, was nothing short of a culinary revelation. 

The etymology of “ya-ka-mein” is curious as the dish itself.  It’s believed to derive from the Chinese phrase “yat-gaw-mien” [phonetic] for “one order of noodles” (Chinese labors were brought into mid-19^th century New Orleans to build the railroads between it and Houston).  The dish of today involves a seemingly inharmonious amalgam of beef broth, spaghetti noodles, scallion, and hard-boiled egg.  The results—what locals still call “Old Sober” for its restorative properties to those afflicted with hangover—are unexpectedly delicious.  Salty.  Rich.  Possessing an umami of surprising complexity.  Ya-ka-mein.  Like soup, only better.  Like the whispered history of an entire city secreted inside a tiny Styrofoam cup.

DAY FOUR – DEPARTURE – MOLE AS CODA

I had them.  And bad.  Those last-day-in-New Orleans blues.  I woke that morning, a moody bastard, not wanting to leave my favorite city with which I felt—and deeply—a love of place, newly rekindled, and afire in my heart.  So I fled my brother’s house, knowing I had time for one (and only one) last meal in New Orleans before my flight home.  And of course, like all desperate people, I overreached.  The idea was to eat in, and photograph, a 9^th Ward local grocery.  A sundry store, which, in addition to selling household staples like milk and bread, potted meats and peanut butter, also served lunch to local workers.  Fried chicken.  Red beans and rice.  Field greens.  Southern classics.  But my presence—and especially that of my ubiquitous and ever-raised iPhone camera—seemed to disturb, and set on edge local, say, entrepreneurs whose business models were founded on, well, not being photographed.  Ever.

Crestfallen, defeated, I aborted the mission, and started back to my brother’s house.  And while cutting through the lower Bywater, I chanced upon a construction crew at lunch.  White guys.  With lunch pails and sardonic smiles and dick jokes aplenty.  But what caught my attention was the throng of Latino laborers across the street and gathered around a burgundy minivan.  In the air was the whiff of chili powder.  Cumin.  I approached and everyone there visibly tensed and went silent.  Chins down.  Eyes to the ground.  Was I la migra?  La policia?  Was I some gringo health inspector with a hard on for immigrant busts?  I spoke in Spanish.  Restaurant Spanish.  I said hello.  There was laughter among the men, affirming, yes, my Spanish really did suck.  I asked if I, too, might get lunch.  The proprietrix smiled.  Si, flaco.  She opened, in turn, each of her six coolers, and urged me to look inside.  Chicken.  Beans.  Rice.  Chiles rellenos.  Mole.  Fucking mole. 

Todo, I told her.  Todo, por favor.

To say the mole was simply good would be an understatement of epic proportions.  It was beyond good.  It was transcendental.  For me, however, that was beside the point.  What made my heart sing, what made me lightheaded with ebullience, there, on the curb of that Bywater street, eating mole with a plastic fork from a Styrofoam clamshell, was the fact that I—you, anyone—could experience food this good—and as good, if not better, than say, the bread at DB Bakery, or the oysters at Cooter Brown’s, or the ya-ka-mein at Red Rooster—made in a home kitchen, and sold out of the back of a beat-up minivan. This was New Orleans.  This was at the very essence of the city I knew and so well loved.  I knew, too, that however greatly she had suffered by Katrina, and how terribly she endured under that invading army of hipsters and carpet bagging venture capitalists, she had emerged from the experience a better place.  Of greater resilience.  Of purer soul.

New Orleans.  My gastronomic holy land.  The city I most love.  Spared from philistines.  Immaculate, still, in her glory.

She’s going to be just fine.

I just know she will.

The Epistolary Response - A Love Letter to Anonymous, The Reader

Dear Anonymous:

Thank you for commenting on my blog.  I appreciate the feedback, for it is every writer’s deepest, darkest fear that our words—be they charged with Nabokovian pyrotechnics, or laden and gravity-bound with my own utilitarian linguistic dead weight—will fail to find readership, and that we, as writers, are somehow and forever remanded to inhabit that 3AM of the soul of truly anonymous literary toil.  Writers, even lowly bloggers like myself, have proven remarkably deft at propagating the self-mythologizing persona of the “lone wolf,” whose own elaborate pose of self-exile is meticulously calibrated to render us impervious to the slings and arrows of the outside world.  But really, we are just like everyone else—seeking the acceptance of our peers, while courting approval from a most-fickle followership the way a Labrador retriever begs for a pat on the head.

We crave your attention.  Really we do.

So imagine my delight when I discover a reader’s comment in my Inbox, be that comment positive, as most are, or negative, as some, like your own, inevitably must be (and sadly tantamount to graffiti sprayed across binary walls by reader’s red right hand).  Good or bad, reader remarks offer the writer, this writer, any writer, what he craves most:  tangible evidence that his words have not only found a reader, but carried sufficient literary potency to elicit a response.

With that admission, however, comes the secret confession that writers (bloggers and blog editors, especially) are strongly cautioned not to read reader feedback, lest we too quickly indulge the impulse to take credit for the intellectual prowess on parade in our own work, or, as is more often the case, to satisfy the craving to tell a reader to go fuck himself for the thought-crime of getting it wrong, as was my first impulse when I first read your remarks.  But we can’t help it.  We are helpless when it comes to this.  Reader comments are like crack; our compulsion to devour them is without defense.

Your own comment on my work is brief, but it manages, in just three, terse, pucker-mouthed little sentences, to get nearly everything about what I was trying to convey in this (and all of my blog posts about the cultural significance of American street food) utterly, if beautifully, wrong.  Ordinarily, I’d take feedback like this on the chin; I’d take my lumps, deserved or not, and move on, for even the poorest of readers—those literalists demonstrably inept at detecting any trace of irony or self-deprecating humor afoot in text or subtext—are still readers, nevertheless.  But your feedback is somehow different.  It’s wrong in a way that begs redress.  So please allow me the courtesy of apologizing (in etymologically Greek sense of the word) for my post by explaining what I was trying to get across.

[Read the original post to which Anonymous has responded by clicking here:  Manifesto: Mr. Anthony: Grillmaster]

Sentence One:  This is poorly written. 

The dirty little secret about food, as a subject, is this:  it’s boring.  What drives any narrative—real or imaginary—is conflict, and there’s usually precious little of that when describing most any meal served outside a professional kitchen, be it fare worthy of Michelin stars, or grilled meat served in a styrofoam clamshell on the side of the road.  Worse, yet, for the food writer is the undeniable fact that the language fails its subject.  English is famously inadequate and bereft of words for describing food and sex.  Just as the pornographer trying to meet his deadline for Penthouse Letters must resort to calling a penis a shaft or rod or cock, the food writer must overreach by turning delicious into unctuous, and by turning a prepared dish from merely good into something sublime.  My writing on Mr. Anthony is hardly Shakespeare, I’ll grant you that.  It takes too-liberal grammatical license in its use of sentence fragments—lots and lots of those—in an albeit sophomoric attempt to subvert, even defeat, the then-prevailing, all-too-banal tonality of food writing, by coming off (or not) as street-smart and edgy.  It’s also hyperbolic, over-testosteroned, and too-cool-for-school, and while it might fail—even greatly—as a piece of food writing, the prose, as a whole, is emphatically not poor.  But of course, your second and third sentences below are about to fail to support your topic sentence.  But the grammarian in you already knew that, didn’t you?

I digress.

Sentence Two:  This is far beyond an inaccurate representation of the neighborhood, but it’s completely filled with jargon and racist undertone.

This first:  fuck you for calling me a racist.  Post after post, my blog ridicules white privilege and mocks white people’s (of which I am most fixedly one) often-silly hang-ups and conceits about food cultivation and consumption (notice the piece in question is largely an exercise in self-effacement, laughing, at I do, at my insistence on peppering Mr. Anthony with truly idiotic questions about, say, his “sourcing”).  Post after post, I attempt to creating narrative tension by putting myself in situations that most VW-driving, yoga-pant-wearing, latte-sipping white people would find uncomfortable, because—let’s face it—much of white privilege is based on the exclusion of brown people.

The neighborhood you so rightly defend is a nice place filled with truly wonderful people.  But before its recent “discovery” and subsequent gentrification by a veritable conquering army of white people (and the resulting diaspora of brown people fleeing the suddenly way-too-high rent) it was a deeply troubled area that I, through my own work in the food business, came to know well, and where, after work, for instance, I once caught a man trying to pry the windshield off my car (a VW, no less) to sell for parts.  And as for my racist “jargon,” I call Mr. Anthony an “oracle,” and myself an “acolyte.”  Let me break this down for you:  an oracle is Latin in derivation and is defined as a holy person, a high priest, who tells of the future by speaking on behalf of divine agency.  In other words, an oracle talks to god.  High praise to be sure.  An “acolyte,” (what I’ve called myself in the piece) is Greek in derivation, and means attendant.  My “jargon” well suggests that I consider Mr. Anthony is superior to me in most every way.  More simply put:  Mr. Anthony is really, really good.  Me:  not so much.  This language, my “jargon,” as you put it, fails, and miserably so, to meet any qualifying standard for hate-speech, or racist patois.  Sorry about that.  It just doesn’t. 

Every writer’s creed is to never let the truth stand in the way of a good story, and while I gleefully exaggerated the perceived risks and dangers of Mr. Anthony’s neighborhood, calling it “the Compton of Northern Virginia” is laughably, absurdly correlative.  The comparison would (and does) suggest that I’m trying to be funny.  I’m making a joke.  I’m trying to make you laugh.  Really I am.

Sentence Three:  I understand you’re only a blogger, but please try and have some consideration and unbiased posts when you’re discussing people and the communities involved.

Congratulations, Anonymous.  You’ve just scored a hit, a very palpable hit.  That one hurt.  You’re right:  I am “only” a blogger, the proverbial red headed stepchild of the publishing world, and the literary equivalent of the pimple-faced teenager, knock-kneed and rawboned, with an Adam’s apple two sizes two big for my throat, with whom none of the pretty girls at the high school prom will dance.  No one pays me to write.  As “only” a blogger, I sit alone in a quiet room and write about food I’ve already eaten.  I do this for my own amusement.  I do this for free.  It’s sad, I know.  But as “only” a blogger, I am also unfettered by corporate concerns, unshackled from the interests of advertisers (my whole proto-Marxist shtick should have hipped you to that, yo), and I can write whatever I well fucking please in a continued and deeply earnest attempt to celebrate, even champion, area purveyors of street food—most of them brown skinned, some of them operating outside the law—whom my “bias” and years in the food industry deems worthy of calling to the public’s attention.  This “mission” of mine comes with a sense of responsibility I don’t take lightly, and I fully understand that this medium (with me in it) has the power to change people’s lives for a day, a week, forever.  Over the last two years, I’ve been lucky enough to receive notes of thanks from local cooks who’ve enjoyed that rare and sudden post-blog surge in sales and buzz after being the subject of one of my posts.  For that reason, and because I know the world is watching, I have only rarely—if ever—publish negative or unfavorable reviews about any of the journeymen food purveyors I profile.  Bad experiences go unrecorded, lost to the ages, and hidden beyond the reach of any binary perpetuity.  And while the tone of my blog might often be snarky, the words I choose are—and will remain—unfailingly nice.

Ordinarily, I consider the reader comments section the preferred habitat of the feckless fuck.  Who else would anonymously disparage the work of an otherwise well-meaning writer, who is, indeed, “only” a blogger?  But my initial anger at you for your profoundly myopic and misguided reading of my work (not to mention that your ham-fisted, limp-dicked, coming-at-you-sideways accusation of racism really pissed me off) has given way to something else, a different emotion entirely.  My anger has transmogrified into gratitude, for you, Anonymous, have given your “only a blogger” pal, the greatest gift a reader could give:  you’ve given me something to write about, and for that, I am grateful.

Some parting advice:  if you really do get your ya-ya’s out by posting anonymous content on blog posts that are already two years old, and if you really get your rocks off by namelessly, facelessly shitting on someone else's honest work, I’ve got the place for you.  All of your friends are there already.  Check it out.

It’s called Yelp.

I know you’ll like it.

They say it’s warm there.

Take care.

Your Blogger Pal,

Chris  

From Not to Haute - The Dirty Water Dog Redeemed

It had all the makings of a delightful afternoon.  A classic.  Five chef friends and me gathered in an almost-empty restaurant in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood to collectively vanish from the world of gastronomy for a golden hour or two.  There was wine in our glasses.  Sunlight in the window.  Cheese on our plates.  And our own, self-imposed no-cell-phones-allowed policy promised a tipsy two hours for which we might be lost to the world, and during which absolutely nothing—and I mean nothing—would get done.  There would be eating.  There would be drinking.  But that would be all.  So we sat and laughed over any number of woefully predictable food industry topics—which District chefs were expanding, which were shuttering, which were buggering the bus boy behind the grease trap out back—until the sunlight paled in the windows and the conversation, now wine-soaked, turned more philosophical.  It turned to food.  So we spoke, each and in turn, about recent food epiphanies we’d experienced in travels over the holiday season.  For one chef, life had changed after partaking in the ritual eating of ortolan in southern France on New Year’s Eve.  For another, it was the discovery of hake throat (or what the Basque’s call kokotxas) in San Sebastian from an old man, who sold the live fish off his boat.  (For me, the only writer in the room just barely credentialed enough to sit tableside thanks to a highly successful, decades-long run as a front-of-house guy, it was Carolina barbecue, but you already knew that, didn’t you.)  It wasn’t until the last chef to speak recounted his encounter with the chivito in Uruguay that things went sideways at the table.  Things went wrong on a scale not seen since the Yalta land-grab of 1945, when F.D.R. told Stalin to kiss his lily-white gringo ass.  For not only did this chef friend describe this encounter with the sandwich in almost-pornographic detail (tales of melted cheeses that resembled body fluids; simulated moans of bodily pleasure that had our fellow diners—few as they were—rolling their eyes in disgust), he loudly lamented the fact that the hamburger, and not something as truly magnificent as Uruguay’s internationally celebrated sandwich, the chivito, should represent the United States as its national dish.  We each put down our wine glasses and blinked at one another.  We each did the math.  Was the fucking hamburger really the national dish of The United Stated of America?  Silence.  Really?  Then everyone spoke at once.  There was shouting.  Name-calling.  Pounding on the table.  Then other stuff happened.  Stemware fell over.  Flowers were upended.  Flatware hit the floor.  At issue was not just the hamburger’s national identity, but other things, too:  the vast disparities in burger excellence (the argument juxtaposing Nebraskan pink slime with beer-bathed Wagyu beef from Japan, for example); or culinary empires built on burger-pimping charlatanism by one DC-based douche-o-licious celebrity “chef” in particular (hint:  his nickname rhymes with “bike,” though reports have him riding a scooter these days).  That’s how quickly the discussion devolved into culinary chaos.  And it was loud.  Very.  So I waited until my fellow luncheoneers had paused to breathe (or refill their glasses) before launching into my own diatribe.

I told them this:

Forget the hamburger.  Forget the calamity of culinary falsehoods propagated by that golden-arched confederacy of laughing clowns and red-caped kings about the culinary supremacy—in our hearts, on our plates—of a puck-shaped piece of meat, sandwiched between two “enriched” flour buns, topped with “secret sauce” and infused with enough bovine fecal matter to kill a full-sized human adult, at an outdoor picnic, on a sunny day in May.  The hamburger isn’t your friend, boy-o.  Not those kind.  Never was.  Never will be.  Consider, instead, finding fulfillment in the hot dog.  The ultimate in street food.  The quintessence of American nose-to-tail eating.  And by virtue of its sheer ubiquity—from the ballpark, to the airport, to the push-cart down at the local Home Depot—what must surely be our national dish.  This is not to suggest the hot dog is healthier than that burger at your average fast food joint.  Intestinal casing stuffed with a nitrate-rich meat slurry of ground-up animal elbows and assholes hardly trumps a shit-tainted patty of ground beef on the Upton Sinclair scale of food crimes.  But that’s not the point.  It’s not about being good for you.  It’s about honesty.  Truth in advertising.  Occupational integrity.  And how the ingredients, however questionable, are marketed to a legion of faithful eaters.  For while the hamburger’s most colossal, clown-faced pimp smilingly assures us the burger in that kids’ meal is not only safe, but in fact, nutritious, the hot dog has long demanded of its eater that he operate under the rule of implied consent.  As in:  sure, those might be pig’s noses and chicken lips you’re eating inside your footlong, but you knew that when you ordered, didn’t you, tough guy?  Connoisseurs of these nasty bits have long known that frequent booster shots immunizing against Hepatitis A are well-advised for the habitué of that city-corner stand, whose third-world style sous vide bath smells kind of off, and not entirely unlike that of New York City sewer water.

Then I raised my glass and drank.  I had just spoken my masterpiece, written my own Hamlet, and I proudly scored it like this:  Hot Dog: 1/Hamburger: nil.

But my chef friends were little moved.  Gastronomic hairsplitting between the greatness (or not) of street foods like hot dogs and hamburgers—just as I had done—was about as pure an exercise in adolescent intellectual masturbation as that ninth grade, post-bong-hit-in-your-bedroom discourse on who rocked it harder, Zeppelin or The Who.  That my monologue failed—in every way—to somehow encompass—within my impassioned defense—the looming endangerment of fois gras at the hands of PETA-leery legislatures, and that it failed to address the way the EU was now adjudicating the export of white truffles, my audience was all too happy to file my defense of the hot dog under who-the-fuck-cares-dude.  They rose and turned on their cellphones and hugged each other goodbye.  Lunch was over.  The world was waiting outside.  There were kitchens to pilot, after all.  Culinary empires to run.  Lobbyists and politicians to feed.  The hot dog as America’s food was on its own, and so was I, off from work for the night, and alone on that chilly street in Georgetown, with nothing better to do than watch traffic build as the day bled out across the sky.  But as any savvy Washingtonian knows, the best thing about finding yourself alone on the street is the simple fact that you are surrounded by food.  Street food.  It’s everywhere—much of it glorious—and ready for the eating. 

Hot dogs were out there in the city.   I knew they were.  And have one (or three) I must.

Stand X – Washington, D.C.

So I hopped a red bike (surely you’ve noticed those now-nearly-ubiquitous communal bikes provided by Capital Bikeshare, and if you haven’t, shame on you) and peddled over to the corner of 12^th Street and Independence Avenue, where stands the very apotheosis of what the dirty water dog hawker stand is supposed to look like.  To smell like.  To be.  Located at the very heart of Washington’s tourist corridor of the National Mall, this hot dog stand looms like a culinary Venus fly trap set there to ensnare tired, over-stimulated, museum-weary travelers from Iowa or Wisconsin, who gladly line up eight-deep to shell out two bucks for a iconic food they’ve eaten a million times before, and will, no doubt, eat a million times again.  But I understand this kind of eating.  Really I do.  For the act of travel awakens, in many, the opposing impulse to hunger for, and cling to, the familiar.  So after stumbling (often teary-eyed) out of the Holocaust Museum, after contemplating the loss of six million people to a badly-mustachioed, murderous tyrant, a hot dog, paired with orange-flavored Gatorade, and a four-pack of Nutter Butters, must surely seem like a good idea.  Even at a hot dog stand as seemingly inhospitable as this.  Which is not to suggest the proprietors of this location are anything but warm and friendly people.  It’s just that a tourist from Debuque would have to work awfully hard to unearth the proprietor’s largess.  There is, after all, the matter of language.  The middle-aged woman peddling dogs the day of my visit seemed recently arrived from Cambodia, or Laos, and her linguistic bag of tools contained words relating only to the hot dog; mustard and sauerkraut were in her wheelhouse, but my observations on the briskness of the day went without rejoinder, and she stared at me as if were some dimwitted child who had just stuck my finger into a wall socket.  There is also the matter of food handling practices, which, here, are done roughly, without discernable love of the ingredient, and most noticeably, without gloves (that being problematic for a food stand without running water, without a place to wash one’s hands).

But for this eater, however, none of that mattered.  Assimilation to American (food) culture is often a long, strange trip for immigrant food workers, and any bumps in the road I’d experienced in procuring my meal were instantly forgiven upon receiving that museum-grade piece of American street food wrapped in foil.  Unlovingly plucked from a warm bath of brackish, strange-smelling water, then wedged into an “enriched” white bun, and briskly dashed with yellow mustard and kraut, this street-bought hot dog satisfied every nitrate-laden, buzz-inducing craving for meat-in-a-tube I’d been enduring since noon.  I ate it in five bites, then balled up foil, and licked the mustard from hands.  And while surely far, far from the pinnacle of fine dining, my dirty water dog did what it supposed to do:  deliver a hot, savory, even marginally nutritious meal at a price nearly anyone could afford.  Such is the very essence of street food, and it’s the reason I’ll be returning to this stand, and citywide others just like it, tourists from Iowa and all. 

The Bottom Dollar Dog – Alexandria

Central to American gastronomy over the last several years has been the idea that street food, through better sourcing, and more careful preparation, can be elevated to something…finer.  To this end, the hot dog is no exception.  Enter, then, The Bottom Dollar Dog:  a tiny brick and mortal store hidden in the heart of Old Town, Alexandria, in that strange limimal space between the white-collar offices of South Washington Street, and the Section 8 housing project of South Columbus Street.  Opened by co-owners and twentysomethings Keith Williams-Parker and Patrick Thompson in May 2012, The Bottom Dollar Dog operates in the very same space that once housed the sandwich shop operated by Keith’s late grandfather, Walter, for over 60 years.  And if that’s not reason enough to want these lads to succeed, know this:  their hot dogs strike that oh-so-tricky balance between being “crafted” by someone who cares about your food’s appearance and taste, and some thing that an ironworker from the Wilson Bridge project could grab on his lunch break without fear of being called nancy boy by his thick-necked union buddies down at the job site.  Just fussy enough for foodies craving culinary nostalgia, and proudly blue collar enough for working class stiffs like, well, chefs and food industry professionals like me, the hot dogs of The Bottom Dollar Dog are remarkably egalitarian; culinary exclusion is clearly not their jam.  Hipsters (which Keith and Patrick are not) take heed.

Service at The Bottom Dollar Dog is walk-up and take-away.  You order through a wire screen from a wonderfully restrained number of options, then stand back on the sidewalk and wait.  I ordered a chili dog with cheese and onions, with a Cheerwine to wash it down (I’m a dirty slut for the stuff) and mingled al fresco with several middle-aged, white-collar professionals, the middle-management crowd, who were clearly enjoying their newly found liberation from Subway and TGI McFucksters.  Life—for all of us—was good.  Waiting outside, away from the office, away from the wife—who forbids such indulgences—was good.  And before I knew it, Keith (or Patrick) was holding a brown paper bag in which was sequestered my chili dog.  And as I tore into it, there on the hood of my car, I was delighted to discover what northerners will recognize as a Nathan’s, or what southerners (especially those from Carolina) might know as a Red Rocket: a cherry-red meat-in-tube product, always good, whose iridescent color imparts no meaningful flavor to the experience, just a color-that-does-not-appear-in-nature thrill ride for the eater.  And the chili?  A just-as-good-as-Ben’s amalgam of Jack ‘n Diane goodness (remember them sucking on one of these outside the Tasty Freeze, boy-o) that speaks to you in an accent that just might be from Cincinnati.

I have driven past this location for years, hoping that something, someone, would move into the tiny spot and do the community proud.  Clearly, I got my wish.  We all did.  Next time I go, it’ll be for breakfast, for waffles, because word around the campfire has it that they’re good, really, really, good, but that’s another story, now isn’t it?

[Reader's note:  The Bottom Dollar dog has since closed.  Bummer.]

Link:  The Bottom Dollar Dog | About

Haute Dogs & Fries – Alexandria

Disinclined to like.  Those are the three words I committed to my notebook upon entering Alexandria’s Haute Dogs in Old Town North.  After all, the place was…nice.  Too nice to purvey the venerated hotdog, I thought.  This place, I mused, took the street out of street food and made it wear a pair of flat-fronted khakis.  There were the gorgeous exposed brick walls, after all.  Smart pin-spot lighting.  Friendly staff.  A large, something-to-please-everyone menu.  The place had it all.  So why disinclined to like?  Because the name of the place, Haute Dogs, had set me on edge the way a place will when calling itself gourmet; because if you have to tell me you are, then you’re not.  Because I’ve too often experienced the correlation between dirt, danger, and transcendence of flavor.  Because nice interior too often serves to disguise culinary mediocrity and middle-of-the-road, take-no-risks eating, like what Jackson Browne or Huey Lewis are to rock ‘n roll:  safe. 

Good thing I write in pencil.

My correlative between dirt and flavor is, in this case, false.

I was wrong.

So much for first impressions.

To wit:  Haute Dogs is a revelation.  It’s a glory.  It’s the one place I’ve discovered that realizes where the hot dog has been, and where it’s headed.  I’ve been to Haute Dogs several times now to make sure my proclamation of one of the best hot dogs I’ve yet eaten could bear up under increased scrutiny and repetition.  And yet, those experiences at Haute Dogs have revealed just that:  one of the best hot dogs I’ve yet eaten.  There.  I’ve said it.  Twice.

How so the magic? 

Reverence for the ingredient is my theory.  The hot dogs are all beef.  No gluten.  No dairy.  No sugar.  Just cow.  And the bun on which they’re served is not a mere vehicle for the dog either.  Not here.  No way.  Here, the bun is New England style—think the kind of bun that encases the fabled lobster roll—and is toasted en buerre on the flattop grill beside your cooking dog.  I don’t know from whence the hot dogs come, but I do know their sausages and brats are locally sourced from Loudoun County (Fields of Athenry and Lothar’s Gourmet Sausages).  The love of ingredient does not stop there, either.  Even the freaking condiments taste fresh, are fresh, and enliven what is already a deeply delicious dog.  And all of this delivered in a cardboard box lest incidental contact with its contents otherwise sully its architectural perfection.

The L.A. Dog—let it be known—is my favorite:  cheese, bacon, jalapenos, and so West Coast for the way the cheese was the yin to the jalapenos’ yang, and for the way the bacon established the fact, that no matter the outcome of such a culinary tussle between such seemingly opposing flavor profiles—hot peppers, cooling dairy—everything would be alright because it already was.

The triumph of Haute Dogs is the elevation of the once-lowly meat tube without all the foodie skullduggery or over-thinking what, in essence, it a blissfully uncomplicated food.  America’s food.  And on that I’m sure my five chefs and me could agree.

See you out there.  I’ll be the guy with mustard on my chin.

Link: http://www.hautedogsandfries.com/featured/haute-dogs-fries-old-town-alexandria/http://www.hautedogsandfries.com/featured/haute-dogs-fries-old-town-alexandria/