Best Food Writing 2013

by Holly Hughes

  But you know this. You’ve been there, or some version of there. Food trucks have become to food scenes what porcupines are said to be to a forest: a sign that you’ve got a healthy, vibrant ecosystem at work. And by the time I stood before The Grilled Cheese Truck, midway through a monthlong journey from sea to shining sea, I could already state without equivocation that the nation’s food ecosystem was thriving. I’d had magnificent meals in an airport and in a hospital. My coastal urban bigotry had been undermined by amazing eating in small out-of-the-way cities. Just that morning, on a seedy stretch of the Venice Beach boardwalk, where the air hangs heavy with the smell of medical marijuana and white-man’s dreads, I had breakfasted on artisanal bread pudding and Blue Bottle coffee from a closet-sized counter squirreled amid the henna-tattoo and cheap-sunglass shops.

  It had long since become clear that the fortuitous collision of political, philosophical, health, and fashion movements that together form the Food Revolution had, over the past decade, penetrated nearly every corner of American life. We are now a nation with so many farmers’ markets that The New York Times has reported that farmers are getting a little worried. A nation in which phrases like “Kosher in Fargo?” or “Filipino in Detroit?”—which once would have been failed pitches for fish-out-of-water sitcoms—are now perfectly reasonable queries on foodie boards. We the people have come to rely on, indeed feel entitled to, good food everywhere.

  Given the generally blah economic climate, what, it’s fair to ask, exactly the hell is going on? How to square the seemingly unstoppable upward trajectory of our eating lives with the supposed downward trajectory of nearly everything else?

  The first and most obvious answer is that this is another reflection of the enormous gap between rich and poor. After all, at the same time some of us engage in quests for the perfect taco al pastor, obesity and hunger stalk the land—often, in a perverse histori-nutritional anomaly, side by side. Where I live, in New Orleans, is a so-called “food desert” where locals are hard-pressed to buy a fresh lemon, much less a Meyer lemon.

  But while the Food Revolution may have started as an indulgence of the boom years, it was just as finely tuned to the crash and sluggish present. It is, first of all, a movement built on entrepreneurs—a generation of countercultural capitalists created, at least in part, by the lack of more traditional, stable work. You start cooking in trucks, don’t forget, when you can’t afford brick-and-mortar rent. The foods of the movement, meanwhile, though not cheap, tend to be those that soothe: fatty, melty, salty, sweet. Comfort foods. It’s no surprise that the flavors ascendant over the past ten years are so often rooted in the cuisines of Italy, Asia, and the American South—places that have long made a virtue of elevating the simple foods of poverty. And the ethics espoused—local, community-based, anti-corporate, anti-industrial—are those of an uneasy population reaching for an idealized past. It just happens to be one of the moment’s many dozen paradoxes that the path there is paved with $20 plates of truffled mac and cheese and an endless series of better and better pizzas.

  Not long ago, a nice 85-year-old lady from Grand Forks, North Dakota, wrote an earnest review of a new branch of the Olive Garden in the Grand Forks Herald. Marilyn Hagerty had been filing reviews for the paper for decades without incident, but this one was picked up and ridiculed by food bloggers. It quickly went viral, becoming another weird semiotic data point in the cyclone of lash and backlash that makes up the electronic food conversation.

  In truth, the to-do was less about the provincialism of food than it was about the provincialism of newspapers. But it was notable mostly for how anachronistic it felt. Years ago, Calvin Trillin coined “La Maison de la Casa House” to identify the interchangeable “good restaurant” in any given town. Today’s version of that eatery will feature warm, modern design employing lots of wood and recessed lighting. There will be a large bar and a TV, just to hedge its bets with more conservative locals. It will have a blackboard on which are listed the various sources of its ingredients. The menu, too, will read like a 4-H register, so loaded will it be with the names of various farms. It will offer dishes that vacillate between ambition and comfort and probably err on the side of piling too many ingredients on one plate. It will be called something like Market Table Tasting Market, or perhaps Loin, and it will stand a decent chance of actually being good.

  That is to say that the coasts and big cities long ago gave up their monopoly on good food scenes. I saw that while eating simple roasted carrots painted with honey at the Red Feather Lounge in Boise, Idaho, and a deep-fried fish head at Jolie in Lafayette, Louisiana. I tasted it in a smoky barrel-aged Manhattan at Frog Hollow Tavern in Augusta, Georgia, and in the Imperial Slam Dunk—a triple shot of Earl Grey tea, brewed with maple syrup and quince paste and topped with a shot of espresso—at MadCap Coffee in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a town once commonly referred to as “Bland Rapids,” as if the official nickname, “the Furniture City,” didn’t convey a sufficient sense of white-breaditude. I could see it in the glistening smoked brisket covered in hickory-hoisin sauce and served on focaccia from the Bone-In Artisan BBQ truck, parked at the farmers’ market in Columbia, South Carolina, where one could also buy small-batch artisanal sea salts with a food-pairing guide—surely some decadent edge of food worship.

  It’s a fair bet that the average supermarket in North Dakota is better today—offering healthier, fresher, and more varied choices—than the same store was in New York City twenty years ago. The idea that there was a fine restaurant to be found in Grand Forks would be less surprising than the notion that all there was to review there was an Olive Garden. We’ve become a country without a Peoria.

  At the Boise, Idaho, airport, a sign welcomed me to the “City of Trees.” Out the window I could see nothing but dusty, camel-colored hills with a few straggly specimens sticking up like broken toothbrush bristles. Feeling very small and truckless in my Ford Fusion, I headed downtown.

  I had come to Boise because I had heard you could get a great cocktail there. Indeed, considering that there is nothing for 350 miles in any direction and that one of those directions is Utah, it’s shocking to report that there’s actually something of a cocktail war in effect between two businesses there: the aforementioned Red Feather and The Modern Hotel and Bar, a onetime Travelodge that’s been transformed into a boutique hotel. In addition to the de rigueur high-thread-count sheets, flat-screen TVs, and an exterior that looks like it’s been beamed in from East Hampton, that now means sophisticated food and drink programs.

  The latter is run by Michael Bowers. He is a serious 27-year-old gay man with thick-rimmed glasses and a tattoo of modern composer Arnold Schoenberg’s name on his forearm. In other words, precisely the kind of person who, until recently, would have automatically migrated to one of the coasts to follow his passions. A local boy whose cocktail experience was once limited to drinking mai tais, Bowers had a scales-falling-from-his-eyes moment over a Ward 8 (rye, grenadine, lemon and orange juices) at the bar Milk & Honey in New York. Instead of staying, though, he returned home committed to bringing Boise serious drinks. He researched recipes on cocktail blogs, learned to shake and stir from YouTube. Most important—because the spread of good food is a conspiracy of producer and consumer—he was confident he would find customers.

  He has—though not totally without some necessary education. “The first time we did an egg-white drink, Boise wasn’t ready,” Bowers says. Both The Modern and Red Feather print drink menus that could double as reference works. Whenever someone orders a boring vodka drink, Bowers politely suggests substituting a Cameron’s Kick, a startlingly light and friendly concoction made from scotch, Irish whiskey, lemon juice, and orgeat. Switching scotch for vodka is one decent definition of culinary cojones, but Bowers reports a 99 percent success rate.

  Of course, he’s not laboring alone in raising the standards of his neighbors. By the time they sit down at The Modern, they’ve probably already heard the word mixology on TV. They’ve already s
een, on Top Chef, something like Bowers’s technique for drawing the essential oils out of coffee beans by setting them on fire. They’ve followed blog posts from friends’ trips to Portland and Seattle. They’re demanding quality even if they’ve never tasted it before. I recently had a conversation with a discerning eater and drinker who spends a good deal of time on the road. He’d just watched an episode of Portlandia for the first time and said, “It’s set in Portland, but I see people like that—who are interested in the same things—everywhere I go.” Given that the man was John Flansburgh of the hipster-nerd heroes They Might Be Giants, this was a little like Jennifer Aniston reporting that one out of every two human beings is a paparazzo. But he was onto something: Mere geography, as a determining factor in how we dress, what we watch, what we listen to, and yes, what we eat, has all but lost its sway. Portlandia wouldn’t be especially funny if, in some way, we all didn’t live there.

  In Boise, I remember eventually sitting before a skyline of empty glasses, each having contained some spirit or combination of spirits Bowers just had to have me try. I remember eating some ethereal gnocchi from The Modern’s kitchen. I remember discussing organic gardening at a table containing an MFA student, a philosophy professor, a farmer, and a belly dancer. And I remember finally plummeting into bed with a final thought that I felt reasonably confident had never been thought before: that I’d had such a good time in Boise, I’d have nothing left for Las Vegas.

  Vegas! You didn’t think we could avoid Vegas? Vegas is such a ruthless beast of commodification—its hungry tendrils relentlessly probing American culture to see what can be turned into fresh dollars—that it is always important. Eating in Las Vegas was once strictly about signifiers of the good life—prime rib! lobster tail! king-crab legs!—at rock-bottom prices. Then the casinos got hip to the fact that high-end food had become something that gamblers would want to spend money on, another badge like Gucci or Chanel; in came the first generation of celebrity chefs, who were handed blank checks, glitzy spaces, and little obligation to be present past opening weekend. The food, while more important than the bad old buffet days, was still secondary to the flash.

  And now? I headed for The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, branded as the Strip’s first hipster casino, which is another way of saying a fifty-two-story memorial to the Death of Hipsterism. I passed by video art of botanical prints in the lobby and rode an elevator playing Devendra Banhart up to the high-end food court area. At Jaleo, José Andrés’s tapas and molecular-gastronomy restaurant, I noshed on buttery jamón ibérico and wobbly science-fiction-like reverse-spherified olives—the modern answers to prime rib. But across the way, at the dark, quiet bar of a genetically engineered replica of Scott Conant’s New York Italian joint, Scarpetta, I ate a tangle of perfectly cooked pasta, topped with a fresh tomato sauce and ribbons of torn basil. Not long ago, nearly anywhere in America, such a dish would have been found on a children’s menu, if at all. That it holds pride of place on a menu in the most au courant casino on the strip is as revolutionary as finding fine food in one-time gourmet wastelands. It does, though, raise the same question that hovers over the new Korean Steak Tacos to be found at T.G.I. Friday’s, or over Domino’s Pizza’s no-substitution “Artisan” pizzas: Who’s winning? Has the Food Revolution really changed the corporate food business, or has it just provided it with new slogans? The cynic in me might assume the latter, but it was the optimist running his finger around the bowl to catch the last bits of sauce at Scarpetta.

  It was the same hopeful fool who, not long before, had found himself pushing through Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport, headed for One Flew South, chef Duane Nutter’s upscale eatery tucked into a corner of Terminal E. Walking in was like entering the Star Trek holodeck set on Soothing Restaurant World, and once again I was rewarded, this time by a dish I’d never seen before—a deconstructed fish “chowder” in which rich white miso stood in for cream while a large clamshell held the remaining ingredients: celery, potato, and a cube of fatty salmon. It would have been a pleasing revelation anywhere in the world. I was getting used to this. We all are.

  Indeed, there is no place left—geographic or institutional—where good food would be noteworthy simply for being unlikely. Well, not quite no place. . . . At one point, I found myself in a hospital on the outskirts of Raleigh, North Carolina, surrounded by men in white coats. Each, thankfully, was at the top of his field. One described for me the other’s credentials, how he had gone to the very best schools and run a successful practice elsewhere before being recruited to this facility. I was in the very best hands, he assured me, clapping his colleague on the back: “You should taste his cannoli!”

  I was standing in the vast kitchen serving Rex Hospital, where Jim McGrody has brought the Food Revolution to the shitshow that is American health care. Around us, McGrody’s team of sous-chefs, some of whom attended the Culinary Institute of America, were at work: A cook was grilling yellow squash in batches. Another lifted a tawny, glistening roasted pork loin from an oven while yet another mixed fresh sausage with spinach and rice, to make stuffing.

  McGrody has been a lifelong institutional chef, first in the army and then at various universities. It was while working at his first hospital, in Washington, D.C., that he began to believe that the food he was in charge of serving seemed antithetical to anything resembling healing. He began to fantasize about a better way. “Cooks in our hospitals know how to make veal stock. They know how to make pan gravy using the fond,” McGrody writes in his memoir/manifesto, What We Feed Our Patients. “The days of canned peas and three-compartment plates . . . are over.”

  The kitchen at Rex went a long way toward fulfilling that fantasy. In an office off the kitchen floor, an army of operators fielded orders from patients in the hospital’s 433 beds. Each is provided with a room-service-style menu featuring such items as pecan-crusted sautéed chicken topped with maple-butter pan sauce and lime-and-ginger-glazed salmon. A software program alerted the operators to any allergies or other proscriptions: a diabetic ordering four chocolate “mud” shakes, for instance. Even those patients labeled “non-appropriates”—those who can’t swallow traditional food—are treated to dignified fare like fresh peas pureed and molded into actual pea shapes, or blueberry panna cotta made from low-fat yogurt. Ingredients were overwhelmingly fresh. Across the board, the notion that healthy and tasty are not mutually exclusive, a lesson that has perhaps had a harder time penetrating the South than many other places, was emphasized—not by lecture but by example. “When I die,” McGrody told me, “I want my tombstone to read ‘The Man Who Killed Off Fruit Cocktail.’”

  It’s instinctive that healthful, good-tasting food sourced locally and served lovingly makes sense in terms of healing and investment in one’s community. That, of course, doesn’t answer why it’s been allowed to happen. The fact that McGrody’s program has provided a net gain of $1.9 million over three years does. Partly, that represents a savings over the industrial-catering company that previously handled food service. But it also reflects an increase in revenue from patients who choose Rex over other hospitals—just as they might choose Boise’s Modern Hotel and its cocktail program over a motel with a sports bar specializing in appletinis. McGrody heard about one who demanded to be taken to the “Rex Carlton.” Grassroots locavorism and hidden hipster speakeasies are all well and good; it’s when the market speaks through once monolithic, indifferent institutions that we know something serious is afoot.

  And so finally east, across the amber waves of grain to New York, the land of my birth. To find a proper example of the Food Revolution in New York City was a challenge, only because the revolution has succeeded so wildly here that it’s become the establishment. From the windy shores of the Rockaways, toward which cadres of foodies troop each summer to eat tacos from beachfront shacks, to the once industrial lots of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, now lousy with food trucks, there are few cities in which Good Food Everywhere could be taken quite so literally. Even the Upper West
Side, which used to be a reliable object of mockery for its lack of decent eating, has a Momofuku Milk Bar.

  The only answer was to venture to the one place I would never go on my own: the very bastion of old, stodgy, arrogant New York, the belly of the beast. I speak, of course, of Yankee Stadium.

  I will allow that I write from the point of view of a lifelong Mets fan and Yankee hater. Nevertheless, I think it’s fairly objective to point out that the mighty Yankees have lagged behind the city’s trend toward good food in its sports facilities, whether Shake Shack at the Mets’ Citi Field or the Andrew Carmellini menu unveiled last season at Madison Square Garden. Perhaps this is on the theory that their fans can subsist entirely on a diet of monuments. Whatever the reason, the stadium has stood as evidence that while it is indeed now possible to get good food everywhere, it remains equally possible to get bad food anywhere.

  I had never been to the new Yankee Stadium. You enter through an archway in a massive facade at once as oppressive as something from Imperial Rome and as shiny and neon-ringed as a space station. The aesthetic could be called Planet Mussolini. Yet even here, deep in the recesses of the spookily named Great Hall, where one must avert one’s eyes lest one be brainwashed by images of DiMaggio, Yogi, and The Mick, among the $9 Bud Lights and the $5 bags of oversalted peanuts, all but ignored though lines stretched everywhere else, there sat a lonesome little booth that marked the end of my journey.