Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

  But, while I’d like to think all the virtual ink we food writers spill on great restaurants, talented chefs, and go-to food destinations benefits everyone, practically guaranteeing you’ll never have to endure a bad meal again, I also worry that it takes some of the fun and the adventure away from traveling and eating. That it detracts from your own sense of discovery; your ability to throw caution to the wind. To make the best out of an ordinary meal at an ordinary restaurant. To screw up. Or to find something truly special—completely on your own.

  If I’d been honest with that friend of mine, I would have told him that the best meal I ever had in New Orleans was at a restaurant that I would never in my life recommend to him, or anyone else for that matter. It was eaten in 1998 at a tourist trap just off Bourbon Street (I’d give you the name, but it never occurred to me to write it down). It was only my second time in the city, my first visit as an adult, and all I remember about the place is that it was mostly empty, that a kind old man in an old polyester tuxedo led me to my table. And, while the food was nothing more than passable, I’m still thinking about it 18 years later.

  Part of the reason I remember that place so fondly is that it’s the first place where I ever ordered red beans and rice, a dish, I would later learn, that’s a staple of the city’s traditional cuisine. A dish that, years later, would make me weep when I tasted it at a Katrina fundraiser in New York just weeks after the storm had passed. The beans at that restaurant were undercooked, and the rice was overcooked, and there were specks of spicy andouille sausage that I will never forget because they were the first specks of spicy andouille sausage I ever tasted. Yes, the restaurant was a solid C+ at best. One star. Maybe one and a half. I remember looking out the window at a crumbling French Quarter building across the street. I remember that it rained. I fell in love with New Orleans over that crap-ass meal. And I wanted my friend to fall in love with New Orleans over a crap-ass meal, too. I just wanted him to discover that meal on his own.

  These days, whether I’m traveling for work or for pleasure, I try to make a point of spending at least a day or two doing cold visits to places I know absolutely nothing about. Sometimes it’s a bust. Other times, it’s just fine. But sometimes, I get my mind blown. Take, for instance, the gumbo fries I wolfed down late one night in Memphis a few years back. I had just arrived with a fellow food-writing friend of mine, and we were dashing around the city, frantically looking for good places to eat. We were Googling and texting people. We were searching the websites of the very publications we worked for, hoping for guidance. At some point, we gave up and settled on what looked like a touristy nightmare on Beale Street, called Blues City Cafe. Sitting in the booth, I glanced at the menu, smirking at one of the items. “They have gumbo cheese fries,” I said, laughing. “And yes, I’m getting them.”

  Who the hell would ever think to pour seafood gumbo over cheese fries? Well, the folks at Blues City Cafe (which I later found out was once a branch of the famous Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville, Mississippi), that’s who. And, holy shit, were they good. The steak fries were golden brown and slightly crunchy, just thick-skinned enough not to disintegrate beneath the heavy weight of the gumbo ladled over them. There was ranch dressing on the side! Digging into the dish, I lifted up what I now consider the Holy Trinity of late-night dining—a forkful of French fries, gumbo, and gobs of stretchy melted cheese. My friend snapped a photo of me, looking perplexed as I dug in, a picture that remains on my Twitter profile to this day, because that dish signified everything I love about being a food writer. It signified the discovery of absolute perfection in the places where you least expect it.

  Those gumbo fries reminded me that it pays to take a chance now and then. If not, we’ll all just end up writing about the same dishes everyone else does—the same places. The same chefs. Sometimes I fear that’s already happened.

  Traveling without a map has also made me realize that there is really nothing wrong with a mediocre meal every once in a while. In fact, once the expectations of a great meal are lifted, it’s possible to enjoy that meal even more. Recently I visited Los Angeles for a culinary awards ceremony, along with some of my favorite writers in the business. All of them had strict itineraries to visit every buzzy, of-the-moment restaurant they could. On a shared cab ride from LAX to our hotels, I listened as two of those writers ran through a laundry list of restaurants they needed to visit.

  “Are you going to Gjelina? You definitely need to go to Gjelina.”

  “I’m meeting so-and-so at Petit Trois for breakfast tomorrow. Are you in?”

  “Are you coming to Osteria Mozza tonight?”

  “What about Night + Market Song Saturday? Will you be there?”

  I was overwhelmed. Still, I went to almost all of these places, and while they were spectacular, I will save my praise and superlatives for another time. (Note: A solo breakfast over a crusty baguette and a café au lait at Petit Trois is among the most subtly beautiful experiences on earth.) What I want to talk about right now, though, is what was no doubt my favorite meal in Los Angeles. Yes, it was at a place I’d never heard of before; a place that didn’t look the least bit promising, a place where the food was, like the children of Lake Wobegon, simply “above average.” The most surprising part? It was at a Best Western.

  After two days of palate-pleasing, gut-busting meals at God knows how many of the city’s finest eateries, I decided to have a quiet supper at the diner located on the first floor of the Best Western where I was staying. Socially anxious by nature, I was in the mood to be alone. And I wanted to eat at a place where I wouldn’t feel the pressure to be wowed by a plate of wilted water spinach or sour fermented pork sausage. I didn’t have the mental energy to tweet about my croque monsieur, or Instagram a plate of oysters. I know what you’re thinking. Tough life, right? I get it. Still, travel can be tough for the medicated.

  While I expected little more than a hotel lobby–style restaurant, with bad carpeting and equally bad food, the diner was surprisingly cool-looking for a hotel chain. It had stone walls; schoolhouse lights; a long, Edward Hopper–style counter; and plush, 1960s-era leather booths. Sitting down in one of those booths with a pile of magazines, I ordered a chicken po’ boy with trepidation, since, to me, a po’ boy isn’t a po’ boy unless it’s made with Leidenheimer’s French bread from New Orleans. Probably more of a chicken sandwich, I thought to myself. But I was wrong.

  When it arrived at my table, the po’ boy was piled high with blackened chicken, crisp lettuce, and some damn fine-looking tomatoes. Biting into it, I recognized something familiar. Really familiar. That crunch. That pull. It was Leidenheimer’s bread! It turns out that the chef had grown up in New Orleans. It turns out that the restaurant was pretty well known, too, having been featured in the final scene of the movie Swingers. So good was the po’ boy that I almost—almost—Instagrammed it. But, while scrolling through filters, trying to decide between Juno and Amaro, I decided against it.

  Instead, I chatted up the waiter. We talked about po’ boys and New Orleans, why Los Angeles is a wonderful city, and why I should pack up my wife and kid and move there lickety-split. She said she thought she knew me, even though I was sure we’d never met before. Once I was finished, I stayed for a while, reading some magazines and drinking some coffee. I kept getting texts from my friends. They were headed to Venice for dinner at Gjelina, and asked if I wanted to join, but I told them I’d already eaten. If I’d told them I’d already had dinner at the Best Western, I’m sure they would have laughed, wondering why I’d wasted a meal. But nothing was wasted at all. I was content eating at a place no one had told me about. I was happy to be discovering something on my own. Because, when it comes to dining experiences these days, that’s a pretty rare thing.

  The Curious Appeal of “Bad” Food

  BY IRINA DUMITRESCU

  From The Atlantic

  In today’s Instagrammed, Yelped, blogged-to-exhaustion foodie world, perfection seems to rule. Or does it? Canadian ess
ayist Irina Dumitrescu (a professor of medieval literature at the University of Bonn) homes in on the defiant online rise of junk food and ugly food photos.

  We live in a time of food perfectionism. Experts shout culinary commandments from every direction: Daily meals, they say, must be ethically sourced, organic, raw, gluten-free, meat-free, dairy-free, protein-rich, low-fat, low in sodium, carbon neutral, dirt-encrusted, pre-soaked, and fair trade. It can be hard to keep track of all these contradictory gastronomic rules. On the one hand, cooking should be simple and traditional, something our great-grandparents could recognize. On the other, food should be chef-inspired, executed with masterful knife skills in a professional-grade kitchen. One should eat with family, clinking wine glasses over a long table in a Tuscan garden. One should eat alone, undistracted, carefully controlling for portion size. We ought to eat like cavemen: nuts, roots, and seeds. We ought to eat like spacemen: foams and sous-vide. And by no means should anyone eat sugar, because sugar is poison and grandma is trying to kill us with those cookies.

  At the same time, there appears to be growing interest in food that breaks rules. On blogs, in Facebook groups, in listicles and Tumblrs, people are celebrating “bad” food—dishes that are disastrous, unattractive, or just unhealthy. Some poke fun at the mishaps of chefs, bakers, and cookbook authors, like the website Cake Wrecks, with its pictures of tragically ambitious professional cakes. Other online collections, like the Gallery of Regrettable Food and Vintage Food Disasters, are filled with scans of disgusting-looking concoctions from old cookbooks. Websites like Someone Ate This celebrate the failures of home cooking in triumphantly unappetizing photos. Even Martha Stewart, who made a generation of homemakers feel inadequate, has been tweeting revolting photos of her meals, to general delight and horror.

  Why has bad food become so popular? Didn’t Julia and Alice and Jim and Marcella teach modern home cooks to draw on the best that continental cuisine had to offer, to buy fresh, local ingredients and treat them with respect? Which part of the culinary revolution was it that led to deep fried lasagna rolls or Mac n’ Cheetos? At a time when blogs, YouTube videos, and specialized cookbooks can help even a novice produce respectable results in the kitchen, why are folks turning to 1960s recipes to make jellied chicken and Busy Lady Beef Bake? Often, the more stomach-turning the dish, the more gleeful the prose about it, as if making terrible food somehow maintained the noble tradition of human ingenuity and experimentation. Once, humanity asked if it could walk on the moon. Now, it aims to re-create the nightmare of Tuna and Jell-O Pie.

  The current Rabelaisian relish for outrageous food is, at least partly, a playful rebellion against the excesses of gastronomic prescriptivism. After decades of being warned against butter, salt, coffee, chocolate, wine, and anything else that makes life on this miserable planet worth enduring, food lovers learn that they are healthful after all. (In fact, it was the foods people replaced them with—margarine, energy drinks, artificially sweetened desserts—that were deadly. Oops.) In the face of rapidly changing scientific recommendations, it feels liberating to throw caution to the wind and deep fry a Big Mac—or to at least fantasize about doing it.

  Then there are aesthetic standards. It’s one thing for magazines and cookbooks to have polished photography and food styling. They are professional productions, and most reasonable people do not expect what they cook in their home kitchen to turn out looking exactly like it did in Bon Appetit. But food blogs, Instagram, and Pinterest are also filled with glossy, sunlit photos of organic mason-jar meals and caramel-drizzled cupcakes. Theirs is a dark beauty. They suggest that home-cooked food could look that luscious, that perfect, given a little care and knowledge.

  In most cases this is impossible. The majority of people who cook do so under limiting conditions: tired after a day’s work, in haste, on a budget, to please a child’s picky palate, using leftovers, with processed ingredients, without the special oil or herb that would have required a trip to a distant supermarket. They serve their meals on actual plates, not on slate slabs or rustic chopping boards. Their food is tinged yellow or blue depending on the light bulb they eat it under. Real homemade food often looks like failure, but it’s not. Feeding yourself or others is a success, an act of love, even when the meal resembles unappetizing brown mush. This is why it’s sometimes necessary to celebrate culinary disasters. They reveal the reality of cooking: tedious but necessary chore, creative outlet, daily ritual.

  There’s also something deeper to the current fascination with bad food, whether it’s unhealthy, inelegant, unpopular, or just plain ugly. Food serves a variety of purposes, only one of which is nutrition. Shared meals strengthen communities, while food restrictions serve to keep groups of people apart. Culinary preferences signal one’s class, ethical stance, or outlook on the world. The foods we eat, and especially the ones we talk about eating, tell others how we understand our bodies: sensitive or resilient, hardworking or overflowing, rebellious or disciplined. In short, food offers ways of telling stories about who we are and where we come from. And bad food does this better than good.

  Jay Rayner, the Observer’s restaurant critic, recognized that terrible food makes for good narrative when he collected his harshest reviews into a slim volume titled My Dining Hell. Excellent restaurants are all alike, he points out in his book, a curse for the critic forced to find fresh ways of describing a yawningly pleasant experience. It is indeed easy for descriptions of good food and happy culinary memories to become cloying, as so many food blogs prove. How many more scrumptious, luscious desserts, or meltingly tender meats can readers stand to hear about? How many more inspirational grandmas, tending to the stove? Badness, on the other hand, is specific and endlessly varied. There are so many culinary catastrophes, each one with its own individual meaning.

  In the kitchen, it’s easy to founder in telling ways, with ingrained habits leading to strange fusions and awkward flavors. When I was growing up in Toronto, my mother would occasionally try her hand at a Chinese stir fry. Despite the Food Network’s best efforts at instruction of the masses, her stir fries always tasted suspiciously like the Romanian food we usually cooked. No amount of soy sauce could take them out of the Balkans. One day I visited a friend whose Indian-born mother announced she would make us—what else?—a stir fry. I laughed when I tried the result, a sauté that ever so slightly resembled a curry. In their enthusiasm for the new, our mothers drew on the old: the familiar spices and techniques that gave their cooking an accent.

  Even more revealing are the intentional monstrosities: those dishes eaten alone, late at night, generally in front of a screen. Or perhaps with a relative or friend who shares the same predilection. I recently asked my friends about the meals they eat when nobody’s looking, their secret gastronomic loves. The answers came fast and thick—people like to confess to odd proclivities—and I began to notice a few patterns.

  Many of my friends’ guilty cravings are for wallops of predictably intense flavor: Nutella or peanut butter eaten straight from the jar, ketchup on everything, endless applications of Vegemite. They admit to loving processed food: Cheez Balls, Fun Dip, Froot Loops, Little Debbie Tree Cakes, instant mashed potatoes with bacon and cheese eaten dry from the packet. They like the intensity of burnt toast, popcorn, even chocolate, and the kick of weird combinations, like Doritos dipped in soft-boiled eggs. These are foods that speak of abandon, of a sensibility beyond diets and refined taste. One woman wrote that she loved drunk food—cheap, greasy pizzas, street meat—because it reminded her of eating what she wanted without guilt.

  The vast majority of responses were also connected to childhood memories, usually carb-rich: macaroni and cheese (processed, not home-made), ramen (preferably the cheap kind), Wonder bread sandwiches filled with potato chips, sugar, or nonpareils. Men, in particular, seemed to have a talent for pleasing kids and grandkids with strange improvisations when women are out of the house. Respondents told me about the toast with cinnamon and sugar dad made for breakfast, or
the mashed potato sandwiches with mint sauce that were a grandfather’s specialty.

  Most interesting, and most varied, were foods that people associated with the places they came from. I do not know if fried bologna and ketchup sandwiches are really “a Buffalo NY thing,” as one woman insisted, or if Hormel Vienna Sausages on white bread with mustard are typical to Mississippi. What struck me was that people held on to the memory of these simple sandwiches as a marker of home. A German friend recalled pressing a Mars bar into a hot bread roll bought from the local bakery, and inhaling the gooey treat in seconds. A friend from Russia thought back to the raw onion salad, dressed only with mayonnaise, she made for herself when there was nothing else to snack on.

  By now it should be clear that there is, in fact, no such thing as “bad” food. There’s only food someone else considers bad. People craft identities and relationships through such differences in taste: In college, two friends and I took advantage of a local store’s six-topping special to develop a pizza we considered divine. It featured chicken, roasted red pepper, hot peppers, feta, pineapple, and extra cheese, and when other students came to our dorm room to bum a slice, they left after one look at the pie. Naturally, “The Pizza” became a great source of bonding, a meal only we three could love.

  What’s more, so-called bad food is often intensely good. Martha Stewart defended her hideous food tweets by saying the meals were delicious, and she was right: Ugly pictures are a reminder that food can taste wonderful and be deeply nourishing even when it’s not styled for a photo shoot. How a dish looks tells us little about how it tastes, especially since the long cooking that produces complex flavors often also results in uncomely brown mush. On the other hand, food that’s bad because it breaks rules can offer an unexpected thrill. In The Language of Food, the linguist Dan Jurafsky explains the fad for bacon ice cream as a pleasurable violation of American food conventions—pork should be in the main course, and dessert ought to be sweet, so combining them feels rebellious and fun. This kind of playful fusion is trendy, but it’s also, as Jurafsky points out, how culinary innovation happens.