Best Food Writing 2014

by Holly Hughes

  In the words that followed, Turner laid out the structure for Staplehouse and the Giving Kitchen—a restaurant where Ryan could release his long-bottled creative spirit. All of its profit would feed into a foundation to help restaurant workers in need. He promised to get his partners behind the financing and management. And at 8:39 a.m., an hour past sunrise, he hit “send.”

  February and March were months of forward motion for the Hidingers as they turned Turner’s letter into their Magna Carta. Jen quit her job at a children’s clothing store and assembled a group of friends and colleagues for the board of the Giving Kitchen Initiative. Coxe Curry & Associates, the Atlanta-based consulting firm, helped them fast-track 501c3 nonprofit status. The board began granting funds from the Team Hidi event, which raised more than Ryan needed, to various restaurant workers throughout Atlanta.

  More than 13 million people, about a tenth of the U.S. labor force, work in restaurants, yet few receive health benefits. A study conducted by the nonprofit Restaurant Opportunities Center shows that 88 percent of food service employees polled try to work through injury and illness because they can’t afford the time off.

  Ryan Smith and Kara Hidinger, brought closer by these events, decided to marry, and Smith quit his high-profile job cooking at Empire State South to join Hidinger as co-chef at Staplehouse. Jen and Ryan started a crowd-sourced online donation campaign on Indiegogo to solicit funding for Staplehouse—the for-profit restaurant that would donate all proceeds to the Giving Kitchen. In a month, they collected more than $100,000.

  Ryan’s stomach pains subsided and his tumor markers decreased. The treatment appeared to be working. He felt stronger.

  Jen kept their lives busy, filled with crowd-sourced love. She gathered 75 friends and relatives for a surprise 36th birthday for Ryan, a bus ride to Buford Highway for banh mi sandwiches eaten in a parking lot under the stars. The Staplehouse team cooked a feast at the acclaimed Nashville restaurant, City House, raising funds for the Giving Kitchen Initiative. Ryan had never felt such happiness.

  Looking for Answers

  In July, Ryan and Jen went to CTCA for a PET Scan. It’s an advanced imaging procedure that uses radioactive isotopes of sugar injected into the bloodstream to create an accurate accounting of the size and density of cancerous tumors.

  Ryan’s first PET Scan 12 weeks earlier showed numerous liver tumors, and the Hidingers and their oncology team drew up battle plans to focus treatment on the organ. The second scan six weeks later showed a 90 percent decrease in tumor size—a result so hopeful that the staff snapped a picture of the medical team with the Hidingers lined up in the garden, their fists pumping in victory. This next PET scan would be pivotal. If the tumors continued to shrink, then Ryan would be able to discontinue Erbitux, a bi-weekly chemo infusion that leaves him sick and listless for two days after treatment.

  The center sits just off the highway and looks like a palatial version of a traveler’s hotel—like a Courtyard by Marriott re-imagined as the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Visitors walk past a pond with a gazebo and arrive to a smiling concierge behind a marble counter in the grand foyer. A broad carpeted corridor leads to a fancy gift shop, a cafeteria and doctors’ offices. In the very back of the corridor lies the large waiting area for imaging. There are sofas, work carrels, a wide choice of coffee pods. Families camp out here.

  “You go off to ‘Star Trek,’” says Jen, giving Ryan a peck and settling into an overstuffed armchair with a clamshell of salad from the cafeteria. She cracks open her ever-present binder and her laptop to schedule a meeting about light fixtures for Staplehouse. She nervously rubs her wrist right by her tattoo, the state of Indiana with a tiny heart marking home in Indianapolis. Jen has never gone back to the PET Scan area and doesn’t want to see it.

  The imaging tech leads Ryan through a vault-thick door to a reclining chair in one of the five windowless pretreatment rooms. “I sort of meditate,” says Ryan of the hour he must sit motionless in the dark as the radiation seeps like vapor into his organs to paint its shadowy picture. “That’s part of my mental attack on cancer. I focus on visualization that it’s not in my body anymore.” Ryan can wear his street clothes but he must hold his arms uncomfortably over his head during the PET scan, as the detector ring passes around his torso, trailing green laser beams. The tech plugs an iPod into a portable device and presses PLAY. “Is this good?” she asks as Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” fills the aural space. “Sure,” says Ryan.

  Forty-five minutes later, he is back in the bright waiting area. “Are you radioactive?” Jen asks, slamming shut her laptop. “Can’t hang out with any kids today,” he retorts.

  The next day Ryan and Jen return to hear the results. They will either head home to celebrate or stay for a late round of Erbitux. They stand in the hallway outside Dr. Randolph’s office and make small talk. Jen attempts one of her quick, brilliant smiles but it melts off her face as her eyes widen and well up. She holds her binder in one hand and rubs her forehead with the other. Rubs and rubs it like a spot on a rug. Ryan sneaks an arm around her back, kisses the top of her head. The urge to cry subsides. Thank you, she conveys tacitly, nuzzling her head briefly against her tall husband’s shoulder. The corners of her mouth turn up.

  They are escorted to Dr. Randolph’s empty office to wait for a few minutes. Jen, jumpy, gets up to take care of some quick Staplehouse business. Ryan appears calm. Is he? “I mean, we’ll manage this or we won’t. Something’s going to happen. But I’m not worried about me. It’s her. Your friends and family.”

  Jen returns and Dr. Randolph pounds into the room—a life force, loud, cheerful, full of hugs. “You’re smiling, cut to the chase,” says Ryan. “Is it good news?”

  Randolph pauses an instant. “It’s good news still, but not as good as I want it.” The PET scan suggested that Ryan’s therapy may have plateaued—the chemo has lost its efficacy. Randolph floats the idea of a radiation treatment. Jen listens with a dim, unwavering smile plastered on her face.

  “Is this a good thing?” Ryan asks.

  “It’s a neutral thing,” answers the oncologist. “Do you have any questions?”

  “Do you have a new liver?” Ryan asks.

  “I’ll take it between two buns,” Jen jokes.

  That night Ryan goes upstairs to the chemo infusion center to receive the Erbitux. He sits in the waiting room to check in and tries to take the news in whatever passes for stride. He looks up at the wall-mounted TV, broadcasting the Maury Povich show. A woman in a too-tight dress and too-high heels totters to the stage, and Povich incites the crowd. Catcalls and wolf whistles ensue.

  Ryan is quietly crying, his eyes transfixed by the screen, deep with sadness. “I think about how much I and everybody else takes life for granted. This,” he says, staring at the poor woman making a spectacle of herself, “is weird. It’s an alternate reality.” He talks evenly in a shallow voice, not sobbing, yet the tears keep falling, separate from his voice. He is sad for all of us.

  “I’m completely comfortable with the whole soul and religion part of it,” he continues. “It’s just that this is such a cool experience. I don’t want to leave it. I’m so lucky and privileged to have the life I’ve had up to this point. We’re lucky to be Americans, to have all this.” The Midwest good guy.

  Healing Power of Food

  A plateau flattens out, not as far as the eye can see but for a moment of uncertain calm before the elevation changes. For Ryan, the slope has not been going in the desired direction since that July PET scan. His tumor markers have been rising, a little at first, then faster. The cancer, as Jen writes in one of the letters she routinely sends out to family and friends “is doing what it’s supposed to do—it’s growing.”

  Ryan has since discontinued Erbitux in favor of a cocktail of five new chemo drugs. “It is a plan,” he says flatly. “That’s what we need.”

  As health permits, there are outings—to a Kentucky bourbon distillery, to North Georgia to run around Burt�
�s Pumpkin Farm with Ryan’s dad. In her weekly letter, Jen called the farm “Ryan’s favorite place on earth.” On Sundays, he and Smith like to shop the Grant Park farmers market and then go home to make lunch. The chemo has dulled Ryan’s taste buds; he needs more acid and salt to make food taste right. Since his diagnosis, he has been following a paleo diet and has been scrupulous about eating organic and local produce. “Food is your first medicine,” he realizes now. “What you eat has everything to do with your personal health.”

  Smith—famous for his house-cured meats and sausages at Empire State South—has changed his diet, too, and has shed considerable weight. As Jen says, he’s “juicing like a [expletive].”

  The two Ryans spread their shopping haul across the kitchen counter. Smith cuts eggplants next to a jar of pickled ring bologna—an Indiana specialty that Ryan wants to reproduce at Staplehouse. Next to that are Resveratrol tablets, an antioxidant found in grape skins, and Afinitor, an FDA-approved drug for advanced cancers.

  Ryan cuts an onion the way chefs cut onions, down and sideways and across, the dice so fine as to be translucent, like onion snow. He sizzles these bits in a heavy pan and adds a drop or two of honey that slicks the bottom with erupting bubbles. A dash of apple cider vinegar hisses and deglazes the pan. Another chef might draw attention to the French name—gastrique—for this sauce foundation. For Ryan it is a beginning, an invisible step that diners won’t be able to put their fingers on but will make them wonder why his food has so much flavor. He adds slivered rainbow peppers from a local farm and a drop of sweet grape barbecue sauce from a canning jar he put up last year.

  Ryan knows that some people—particularly ones who lurk at the bottom of comment sections of online forums—have voiced suspicions about the whole Staplehouse/Giving Kitchen model. Does “nonprofit” mean they’ll be drawing outsized salaries from the funds raised during their Indiegogo campaign? “I hope people can understand there is no motive here,” Ryan says. “The situation sucked so bad, we wanted it to be something good. This is not my retirement job. This is about being sure people are taken care of.”

  In the garden behind Staplehouse a creeping fig climbs a pitted concrete wall, its vine laden with bell-shaped green fruit. “You can’t eat these,” says Ryan, breaking one open to reveal spongy, juiceless flesh. “But it’s got this great tropical smell—lychee, coconutty. I’m thinking it would make a great infusion for a cocktail.” He wants to preserve this essence, have it ready for the restaurant’s anticipated February opening.

  For Ryan, cooking locally means that he finds potential everywhere, growing all around him.

  And cooking seasonally? It means thinking ahead. Ryan knows the seasons will pass, one after the next. As a chef he captures the flavor—the joy—of now.

  * Kessler, John. “Savoring the Now.” From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 6, 2013 © 2013 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.(www.ajc.com)

  THE TAO OF BIANCO

  By Dave Mondy

  From Edible Baja Arizona

  Exploring the food culture of his new Arizona home, Dave Mondy—storyteller, memoirist, and transplanted Minnesotan—started right at the top: profiling renowned Phoenix pizza wizard Chris Bianco, facing a crossroads in his career.

  The Best Pizza in America is the best pizza in America, but it’s not the best pizza in America. Does that make sense?

  Of course it does, or doesn’t. The maker of The Best Pizza in America could clear this up—but he’d rather not. He’d rather you just eat his pizza. Let me explain: Chris Bianco, the chef and owner of Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix, has been called the best pizza chef in the United States (by the New York Times, by Bon Appétit). He’s been called “the godfather of American pizza” (by GQ) and an “acknowledged master of his discipline” (by Gourmet); he’s the only American pizza chef to win a James Beard Award.

  But Bianco himself dislikes the labels, shrugs off superlatives, and seems allergic to accolades. Of his pizza, he’ll say, “I hope it’s never better than your mother’s or your favorite.” Regarding his plaudits, he’ll reply, “We all get our 15 minutes of fame, and I think I’m overtime on mine.”

  And yet, he works maniacally to make the best pizza possible—he still rises at 7 a.m. and works until midnight; still shops for ingredients at the local farmers’ market, still makes his own mozzarella, still kneads the dough. “Oh,” he’ll tell you, “I need it.” He wants things precise—farmers have been known to hold rulers up to their arugula because Bianco prefers it to be a certain length (these farmers also happen to love him). The man is casually exacting. The best pizza in America is and isn’t the best pizza in America; is a koan; is a paradox; is a palindrome. A man. A plan. A pizza.

  Read this sentence. During the time it took you to do so, Americans inhaled more than 350 slices of pizza. As you first glanced at the “R” in “Read”—well, a full pizza disappeared. Americans eat more than 2,500 pizzas every minute. We love it: Tick tick tick, chomp chomp chomp.

  And yet, we generally think that eating pizza is unhealthy. We think of it as fast food—a more benign fast food than, say, burgers, but not by much; we’d never call it health food. But what if pizza were a health food? What if, when you ate pizza, you thought, “Well, at least that’s one good thing I did for my body today.”

  Such is the promise of Bianco’s product: a pizza that might not only be good for you, but—composed entirely of local ingredients—might also be good for the place where you live?

  But that promise requires staying close to home. “I don’t want an imitation or a cloned deal,” Bianco told the Arizona Republic in 2006. “The place is so small and cramped and I’m sweaty and it’s loud, but somewhere in the chaos of it all, you find a sense of place.” Bianco so loved that sense of place that during his first two decades, he had a hand in creating nearly every pizza at Pizzeria Bianco. Two-hundred and fifty pizzas a night, and Bianco’s digits danced over nearly every one, night in, night out—until he eventually acquiesced to excessive demand for his wares. He opened a sandwich shop in 2005. Then he opened a bar next to his original pizza place, to accommodate overflow; then he opened an alternate “Italian restaurant” locale in Phoenix.

  But it wasn’t until just one year ago that Bianco agreed to create a new Pizzeria Bianco. This time, 150 miles southeast from the original. This time, in Tucson.

  “Is this a chain?” an old woman asked. She was asking the bartender this at the original Pizzeria Bianco—an innocent question; she’d simply enjoyed a great meal and wondered if she could have a similar experience closer to her house—and she had no way of knowing that Chris Bianco himself sat a few stools away.

  I was interviewing him—or had been interviewing him—but once he’d heard her question, he couldn’t concentrate on anything else. “Is this a chain?” he asked himself. “Well, we’re not the dog on a fucking leash, I can tell you that. We’re just a link in the chain. Hopefully a good link.”

  How does one become the best pizza chef in America? Let us zoom backward, as if this were a comic book, to see his “origin story.” First panel: Rowdy, hardscrabble kids goof around in a back alley in New York—perhaps they play street ball. Next panel, say a third floor window: a saddened child looks down, wishing he could play, too—but he can’t; he has asthma. Last panel: Young Chris is slumped in the corner, turned away from the window, knowing he can’t go outside—but, curiously, he doesn’t look sad. His eyes are somehow bright—he’s watching the magic happening at the stove; he’s reading his aunt’s Gourmet magazines.

  Next page of the comic book: TEN YEARS LATER! We see a young man-boy Bianco leaving the little shop in the Bronx, Mike’s Deli, where he learned to make the magnificent mozzarella that would be a key weapon in his utility belt.

  Bianco drops out of h
igh school, but finds salvation in restaurant work. “I started to cook,” he told me, “because I felt incredibly insecure. I needed to know, we need to know, that it’s all right. That’s why we cook, why we break bread, why we offer someone a pint. To feel it’s all right.”

  And then, Bianco’s big ticket out was an actual ticket. Bianco won a plane ticket to anywhere in America, and so he chose . . . Phoenix? He still can’t say why, but apparently his instinct was well founded. “When I got here, I felt connected.”

  To finish up this history, a rapid montage: See Bianco making mozzarella in his little Phoenix apartment, then selling it at the back door of various Italian restaurants. See Bianco being offered a small corner at a local grocery—a little corner with a wood-burning stove where he could try to make some pizza. See the pizza sell extremely well. See a thought balloon form above Bianco’s head: “I could open my own pizza shop.” See Bianco work for a few years as a sous chef. See Bianco travel through Italy, sharpening his skills. See Bianco return to Phoenix.

  See him open Pizzeria Bianco.

  •

  Bianco made such good pizza that after just four years there were lines around the block on Saturday nights. You can still find these lines. The original Pizzeria Bianco hasn’t expanded from its original small space, and it doesn’t take reservations.

  But Bianco is still focused on the present, and on the future. If you want to talk about his past, he’ll want to talk about his new restaurant. “It just felt right,” he said. “I mean, maybe it’s that I’m getting older. I think I start to think about what I want to leave behind.”

  Right or not, he said that expansion had been “the last thing I wanted to do. [But] it’s like with a puppy or a significant other,” he said. “When you’re looking? Very hard to find. But if you’re not looking . . .”