Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

  Rumors that something special might be percolating spread weeks before Moxie opened. “When Andy came to town,” says Randy Evans, 65, who can be found at Moxie almost every day around 8 a.m., yakking with the staff and sipping a cortado, “I tasted his bread and I said, ‘This is what I’ve been waiting for. Nobody’s doing this.’” Evans, now a freelance copy writer, previously ran food operations for Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts in California and raced Formula Ford cars in the ’70s. For years, otherwise happy with life in Louisville, he’d been mourning the quality of local food.

  The town quickly realized it had a new morning hearth serving pastries and bread that were something special. From the start, Clark showed a knack for hiring staff adept at the chatty-cafe greeting, essential when lines are long and the wait for a proper latte stretches to several minutes. Customers, even the shy ones, started to talk back. A few formed a spontaneous, informal board of advisers. These are the super-users for whom Moxie’s success, not a sure thing in the food business, became important. Evans is a super-user. Matthew Coghill, 36, is another.

  Coghill admits to three Moxie visits most days to catch up with staff and the regulars, yielding “serious overcaffeination.” He’s a bicycle nerd, CrossFit geek, and coffee connoisseur who’s the president of a small, techy Boulder company. For him, the acuity of Clark’s baking is matched by a mise-en-scène intuition and hiring acumen he compares to that of Noah Price, co-founder of Crema, the Populist, and Finn’s Manor, three exemplars of neighborhood cheer in Denver. It wasn’t just the food that turned Moxie into a hangout; it was the congenial way it was sold, finely tuned to the local temperament, which Coghill says gave him “a view into all the people that I live with in this town but I had no other mechanism to know prior to this.”

  Guys like Coghill are the ones with commuter palates. If something is lacking in an establishment, they tend to either stay away or stick their noses in. Early on, in Coghill’s opinion, the quality of Moxie’s coffee lagged woefully behind that of the bread. Longing for a local fix to match all the coffee action in Denver and Boulder, Coghill asked Clark to do something “meaningful” at the espresso station. Clark, remarkably, listened, another key to his canny nature.

  “I gave him a list of a lot of equipment to buy,” Coghill says, “and then I scouted Sullivan [formerly of Boxcar Coffee Roasters] and introduced him to Andy. He just slowly implemented what is standard best practice from there. I’d say the coffee is now in the top tier of what’s available in Colorado.”

  Coghill also proved a fount of food insight. This summer, when Clark went on a reconnaissance trip to LA, Coghill suggested coffeehouses to visit. Clark was wowed by “fizzy hopped teas” and turmeric-infused nut milks, returning eager to try such things at Moxie. He also says he was a bit put off by the expensively curated aesthetic of many of those urban food temples. “It’s a contradiction of mine that I love that and hate it at the same time,” Clark says.

  Which explains, presumably, why there isn’t a damned thing even vaguely hip about Moxie’s decor. There are two rooms for lingering, filled with tables, musical instruments, and bric-a-brac of such flea-market eclecticism that it’s almost comic. Out front, a few chairs crowd a small porch overlooking Main Street. Out back, there’s a shambolic space that on summer Wednesday nights hosts a bring-your-banjo, roots-music hootenanny with pizza. It adds up to what Clark describes as “a really homespun, pragmatic-farmer, middle-America, old-fashioned, your-grandmother’s-house kind of vibe.”

  As regulars soon came to learn, Louisville was now home to a national-quality baker who had a knack for playing the local heartstrings: Not much more than a year after it opened, Moxie was named one of the five best new bakeries in America by Bon Appétit.

  Moxie’s succinct breakfast and lunch menu includes croissants and a few varieties of Leddy’s now-famous kouign-amann (seasonally flavored with black plum or peach in summer, pear or apple in the fall, and dark chocolate and grapefruit in winter), along with something called the King Egg, a diabolically buttery turban-shaped creation with croissant pastry wrapped around a warm egg and cheese. There are a few well-made sandwiches and lunchtime pizza. There’s a salad or two and some cookies and muffins (not all of which equal the quality of the best items, and the music-night pizza can be uneven).

  The place runs all out, seven days a week, which is why Clark tends to limit his holiday-season offerings to wintry kouign-amann and croissant variations, though last year Leddy produced a persimmon pudding with a spiked hard sauce. A walnut bread will likely make another appearance, and Clark yearns to produce a complex, chewy European gingerbread whose formula has eluded him despite years of trying.

  For a guy who is a bread man in his soul, however, there’s pain in the truth that it’s these treats—and not the beer-inspired malthouse loaf or the mighty-crusted Algerian—that keep his little ship afloat. “It’s tragically, comically sorrowful how little bread we sell,” he says. Maybe 80 or 90 loaves a day. Another baker had warned him: You’ll basically be a sandwich shop.

  Yet he persists in not selling the one thing that would up his tally: white baguettes. Clark does not disdain baguettes and may eventually cave, but for now he persists with sour starters, long rises, and mostly multigrain blends. These breads are his passion. He’s like a musician who plays beautifully from an old songbook and waits for the audience to catch on. There is a cheerful spirit in Moxie’s front room and the prep rooms, but it’s in the bread that local converts find Clark’s true gospel. Someday, he believes, his adopted town will fully understand.

  Updating the Classics

  Burritos, Remixed

  BY ANNA ROTH

  From the San Francisco Chronicle

  While John Birdsall (see here) celebrates the classic Mission burrito, Anna Roth—former SF Weekly restaurant critic and a contributor to everything from Lucky Peach to Civil Eats to Modern Farmer—dissects how a new wave of cooks have put their own spin on that iconic San Francisco treat.

  It certainly looks like a Mission burrito: a tight cylinder with heft encased in foil that would be folly to unpeel all the way. It tastes like a burrito, each bite a perfect medley of ingredients, with flecks of grilled meat mingling with pinto beans, rice and pico de gallo inside a stretchy flour tortilla. It’s good at lunch; it would be better at 1 a.m. as a savory line of defense from the coming morning.

  But the meat in question is sisig, a citrusy Filipino pork, and the rice is garlic, not Spanish. So here’s a question: Can this creation from Filipino fusion truck Señor Sisig rightfully call itself a burrito? And for that matter, do the dozen other non-Mexican burritos in the city deserve the title, or should we be calling them wraps, or slabs or some other euphemism?

  Is this the natural evolution of the Mission burrito, or is it an invasive species?

  As far as burrito-related identity crises go, this one’s not quite as trivial as it seems. The California-Mexican Mission burrito is still as essential to San Francisco identity as Karl the Fog, in spite of its co-option by chains like Chipotle and Qdoba. The taquerias that provide them are important democratic spaces in the Bay Area, and though they don’t seem in any immediate danger of gentrification, many feel that if the taquerias go, so goes the city.

  Fusion wraps had their moment in the ’90s, but the recent non-Mexican burrito creep started in the late-aughts, when would-be food truck entrepreneurs took inspiration from the Korean tacos of Kogi in Los Angeles and began making their own Mexican-fusion creations. Bay Area trucks like Señor Sisig and Curry Up Now, with its chicken tikka masala version, both come from that school. A few years later, Sushirrito’s sushi burrito, a concoction of raw fish, creamy sauce and other bits wrapped tightly in nori, was born; the poke burrito, lately washed up on our shores, is its sibling.

  At Papalote in the Mission, brothers Victor and Miguel Escobedo were pushing the boundaries of the form as well, turning out everything from chicken adobo and soul food burritos to the Triple Threat, bursting with
carne asada, chicken and shrimp.

  The hybrid burrito movement fully reached the mainstream last fall, when Danny Bowien created a “Chinese burrito” made with mapo tofu and salt cod fried rice at his New York Mexican restaurant, Mission Cantina. Like everything Bowien and the Mission Chinese crew does, the Chinese burrito received plenty of media attention, even a segment with Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show.” It was soon on the menu at Mission Chinese Food in San Francisco, along with a brother made with the restaurant’s signature kung pao pastrami.

  Bowien isn’t especially concerned about the Chinese burrito’s implications. Authenticity, whatever that means, has never been a huge concern of the restaurants, and he sees this as just a novel way to eat Chinese food quickly.

  “It’s repackaging. You’re just putting something in a piece of bread,” Bowien says. “It’s just a vessel to get the components inside into your mouth a little easier.”

  Thinking along these lines, all of the other items in the stuff-in-bread genre—the sandwich, the pizza, the bao—have been co-opted by multiple cultures. The real question may not be whether the burrito concept has spread throughout the world, but rather, why it’s taken so long.

  It’s difficult to define the burrito for a number of reasons, not in the least because everyone has a different idea of the ideal one. People have “feelings” about rice, lettuce, salsa, vegetables and the inclusion of french fries (if you’re from San Diego). And most have a complicated taqueria hierarchy in their head that shifts based on craving, hour and mood.

  One thing all enthusiasts can agree on is that a great burrito has an intangibility about it, a magic that is greater than the sum of its parts. Charles Hodgkins, who spent nearly a decade sampling and rating a thousand San Francisco burritos for his now-defunct blog, Burrito Eater, likes to compare it to a musical ensemble.

  “Everything has to play together well for the entire burrito to work,” he says. “You have the rice playing with the meat, offsetting the cheese and vegetables, and the construction and the sauciness and the spiciness—all of it kind of comes together.”

  This is the beauty of the Mission burrito, which was born in 1960s San Francisco taquerias, probably at El Faro as a salve for hungry firefighters, although La Cumbre also claims ownership. But the burrito was not especially Mexican to begin with. The thing started in the borderlands, a food of laborers, just leftovers encased in a tortilla. (It has this in common with the Cornish pasty, both highly transportable delivery systems of protein and carbohydrates borne out of poverty and necessity.)

  Does this Cal-Mex food deserve the same reverence that we place on more traditional forms of Mexican food? Probably, says Gustavo Arellano, author of “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America” and the man behind the OC Weekly’s popular “Ask a Mexican” column. He points out that there is an entire generation of Mexican Americans who grew up with dishes like burritos and hard-shell tacos, but old-school Cal-Mex is becoming endangered as new waves of immigrants come and American interest in Mexican food moves on.

  This doesn’t necessarily mean we need to put a wall around Cal-Mex food to preserve it. “Mexican food is always evolving. Mexican food that was considered authentic in the 1960s is not the same thing we consider authentic to this day,” Arellano says. “If people say, well a burrito of orange chicken is not authentic because orange chicken is not Mexican, my response is that flour tortillas aren’t authentic, either. The only reason they exist is because Spaniards brought wheat into the New World.

  “The authenticity debate is bull—.”

  Authentic or not, there is still the question of whether the Mission burrito, as a Cal-Mex entity, needs to be somehow preserved before it gets diluted any more. There is a school of people who believe in the Mission burrito as a stand-alone category. Hodgkins, the burrito blogger, is one of them (“all burritos are wraps, not all wraps are burritos” is his stance). Another such believer is the enigmatic, anonymous Burrito Justice, who told me via Twitter, his medium of choice, “Not all cylinders are burritos. Some of these fauxrritos may even be delicious, but not burritos. We’ve gotta hold the line.”

  In the abstract, I agree with them; the Mission burrito has been here for a half-century, long enough to inspire respect. But in practice, it’s probably too late to stop the creep. These new burritos are popular. They are, by far, the most popular item on these trucks. (“In the end, it’s the tikka masala burrito that pays my mortgage,” Akash Kapoor from Curry Up Now told me.) Wes Rowe, of WesBurger ‘N’ More, says that customers order his Southern fried chicken burrito as much as the fried chicken plate.

  Then there’s the issue of finding alternative nomenclature when “burrito” is such an easy, well-recognized concept. “Wrap” is an imperfect term, polluted not only by memories of ’90s Peking duck and Caesar salad concoctions but also by those horribly dry pinwheel sandwiches on lavash or flavored tortillas. Both “slab” and “cylinder” sound stupid (“I’ll have the fried chicken cylinder, please”). It seems to me that if there’s a qualifier—breakfast burrito, Indian burrito, mapo tofu burrito—no one is threatening the dominance of carnitas or carne asada.

  Finally, there’s the evolving nature of cuisine itself, which, like language, is always in flux as people migrate throughout the world and take their ingredients and dishes with them. There had to be some eye-rolling at the Oxford English Dictionary when “awesomesauce” and “bitch face” were added last year, but its editors’ job is to record language, not judge it. Cuisine should have that same inclusiveness.

  Anyway, we should be reserving our judgment for the real scourge: bad burritos. We should be banding together to fight against lame salsa, cold spots and poor ingredient dispersal, not quibbling over vocabulary. When the basic tenets of the burrito are treated with respect, such as the gloriously saucy and spicy mapo tofu burrito at Mission Chinese, or the sweet-hot jerk chicken burrito at Scotch Bonnet, or that bright, savory sisig burrito at Señor Sisig, it doesn’t matter to me that it’s not Mexican. It’s more than that. It’s San Franciscan.

  “Gil (our chef) and I are both from San Francisco. We grew up eating burritos in San Francisco. It’s really all I’ve ever known,” says Señor Sisig’s Evan Kidera. “I definitely would consider what we do as burritos and nothing else.”

  If that ineffable Mission burrito-ness is somehow in there, I agree that “burrito” is a term not only earned—it’s deserved.

  Pimento Cheese in a Parka

  BY JOHN KESSLER

  From Gravy

  Transplanted from Georgia, where he was for years the esteemed restaurant critic of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, John Kessler was willing to adapt to his new home in Chicago. What he didn’t reckon with was the new Chi-town vogue for Southern restaurants—authentic and otherwise.

  For my first winter in Chicago, I bought a goose-down parka with a hood trimmed in coyote fur. Whenever I came home from walking the dog in the snow at night, the hall mirror reflected me as a dark lump topped by a pair of freezing, bulging eyeballs set in a ring of fur. I looked like Kenny from South Park, if not Death himself in a cowl.

  A Chicago winter can feel like end-times to a Southern transplant. I arrived to join my wife, who had begun a job a year ago at the University of Chicago. Before that, I had worked for nearly two decades as a columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In Atlanta, I ate my way Southern. During that time, I documented a sea change in the city’s food culture, as the regional standard bearers turned from cafeterias and all-you-can-eat buffets to restaurants directed by studious chefs. When I speak of chefs who supported area farmers and researched foodways, it now sounds cliché, but goddamn if Scott Peacock’s fried chicken and vegetable plate at Watershed circa 2005 didn’t change my world. As the city came of age, so did I.

  I expected to miss Southern food in my new hometown. I did not expect to spy a funhouse version of it around every corner. Chicago is in the throes of an energetic (and, honestly, slightly bananas) i
nfatuation with the South. The word “Southern” has become a capacious vessel into which hungry people slop buckets of desire and nostalgia. It is, yes, fried things. And bourbon cocktails and hockey-puck biscuits (go Blackhawks!). It is also more. Random burgers here earn the sobriquet Southern. Chicken tenders are Southern. Pimento cheese Southernizes furls of cavatappi pasta.

  “People here love that whole hillbilly chickenshit attitude,” says Art Smith, the former personal chef to Oprah Winfrey whose Chicago restaurant, Table Fifty-Two, helped pave the way for this current cohort of Bubba Come Latelys. He’s right. I have seen completely nonsensical “North Carolina pulled pork po-boys” and “Nashville hot wings” at restaurants. One menu boasted “Georgia lake prawns.” Really? I’m going to have to look for those trawlers on Lake Lanier next time I go back.

  My family and I settled in the Bucktown neighborhood, on the ground floor of the former Wojciechowski Funeral Home, which served as a major triage center during the 1918 flu pandemic. We liked the old bones and history. The day we toured the building and put in an offer, we ate brunch, on our realtor’s suggestion, at a nearby restaurant called The Southern.

  A dark retreat for the hungover, The Southern stocked bourbon behind the bar and featured a sign lettered in the same font as the Gone with the Wind movie credits. The menu was pure redonkulosity—an eggs Benedict variation made with biscuits and fried boneless chicken, a “Southern Reuben” of braised brisket and pimento remoulade. I dug into a pile of Breakfast Macaroni, tossed with curds of scrambled eggs and slivers of bacon. It didn’t taste too bad for a dish that, posted to Instagram, would have recalled a medical textbook image. Despite its name, The Southern, with its day drinkers, hefty sandwiches, trendy avocado toast, and indifference to seasonal vegetables, seemed so very Chicago to me. Restaurants like these are Southern in the way that The Mikado serves as a meditation on Japanese culture.