Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

  “I’m tired of making burgers,” he says. “I’m tired of making fried chicken, I’m tired of making corn bread. I’ve been doing that every day for six years and I’m sick of it. I love eating it, but I’m tired of making it. Because I know these other dishes are swimming around in my head, and they’re being wasted.”

  The restaurant he envisioned was a chef’s dream of total control: 36 prepaid covers per night, a set menu. It would move quickly, send diners out the door stimulated instead of staggering. “I want you to leave like you just went to a spa. I want you to feel like you just had a massage, like you just meditated, like you did yoga. I want you to feel like you’re nude,” he says.

  For a model, Brock looked to Japan, both in the kitchen—where he adopted ingredients like miso, kombu, and koji—and spiritually. He’s hardly the only chef for whom Japanese culture presents a seductive fantasy of simultaneous intense control and Zen serenity. Never mind that the evidence suggests such intensity has its own price: a Japanese suicide rate one and a half times that of the U.S., for starters.

  Never mind that there’s a price for everything.

  In late August, still reeling from the grueling process of opening the Tavern and beginning work on the new McCrady’s, Brock and Noe were driving on the Ravenel Bridge, between Charleston and Mount Pleasant. Brock was behind the wheel. Suddenly, the road split and lurched into two. For the first time since he started treatment, Brock’s double vision was back.

  “I just punched the steering wheel as hard as I could,” he says. “I thought, ‘I can’t. I can’t be back here again.’”

  In the passenger seat, Noe felt her heart drop. It was true that as the novelty and relief of Brock’s treatment had subsided, he had grown less careful about his health. They had both allowed themselves to believe that the sickness might be in the past. But in the coming weeks, as the symptoms started appearing at night, and then earlier and earlier each day, the cruel irony became clear: The very thing that the miracle treatment was allowing Brock to do was the thing that would inevitably bring the disease roaring back.

  Is there another way?

  That is the question that lurks in the margins of Brock’s story. Chefs’ health—mental and physical—has become much discussed lately. As cooking has made the transition from blue-collar work to professional, it’s only natural that chefs would begin to challenge the often brutal conditions previous generations took for granted. On the face of it, the need for change is self-evident, but the knotty problem is that those same conditions mimic the kitchen culture’s agreed-upon virtues: perfectionism, intensity, stamina, toughness, drive. And it is often these very things—not, say, love of food or cooking; those come later—that made the kitchen attractive in the first place.

  He grew up in deep rural Virginia. His father, the owner of a fleet of coal trucks, was a generous and successful man who died when Brock was 11, plunging the family into poverty. Such is the stuff that chefs are made of: Dead fathers, cruel fathers, physically or emotionally absent fathers—all are so common behind the stove as to be axiomatic. One of the reasons professional kitchens have remained so stubbornly resistant to gender equality is that their bonds are so deeply patrilineal, so downright Freudian.

  Brock’s first kitchens were a twisted hybrid of boot camp and surrogate family, and he loved it. To be 16 years old, on the line for the first time, Metallica blaring from the boom box, surrounded by rough men bragging about their overnight binges and conquests… Who cared if half the steaks you sent out to the dining room got sent back? “It was the greatest feeling I’d ever had,” he says.

  Later, he thrived in the hotbox of kitchens run on screaming. Like many young chefs, when he took over his own kitchen, he assumed it was the only way: “I was just yelling and screaming all day. I was the most miserable, angry person you can imagine.” After one early bad review at the Hermitage, he pledged to his staff that he wouldn’t take a day off until they were reviewed again. It took ten months, during which Brock slept at the restaurant most nights.

  “We’re insane. We shouldn’t be doing this to our bodies and to our brains. That’s sick. That’s an illness,” he says, though not without a touch of pride. “But, look, somebody’s gotta feed everybody.”

  So is there another way?

  There’s no way of knowing whether the chef’s lifestyle caused Brock’s myasthenia gravis. What is clear is that it does exacerbate it. It is a one-to-one equation: When Brock gets upset, his eyesight blurs. When he loses sleep or drinks a little bit, he pays in the days after. It falls to Noe to remind him of these things. “She’s the only one who can keep me in line,” he says.

  Still, there are limits to what even love can do. “Look, this feeling in my chest is temporary,” Brock says on the eve of the McCrady’s opening. “In two or three weeks, I’ll be standing at that counter enjoying myself eating, and then I’ll go back to Nashville, get some nice furniture, build a fence for my dog, and chill out.”

  It is, of course, the Junkie’s Creed: “Tomorrow everything’s going to be different. Tomorrow I’m going to be fine. I’m just waiting for everything to line up perfectly and then it’s all going to be smooth sailing.…” Meanwhile, plans are moving forward for a Husk in Greenville, South Carolina, to open this coming spring, and Husk: Savannah after that. His dog, one starts to fear, may have to learn to live without a fence a little longer.

  But is there another way?

  Brock sighs, slightly lubricated now, at The Griffon, a dive bar nestled among the hotels and manicured facades of downtown Charleston. He’s allowing himself a drink, or several, tonight, in part because Noe won’t be back from Nashville until later; in part, one fears, guiltily, because he feels that doing so is part of the Official Sean Brock Experience for visitors; and in part because the McCrady’s team has just completed its final dress rehearsal before its official opening tomorrow night. This, too, is a part of the chef’s birthright that’s hard to let go of: “You work your ass off, you take care of complete strangers, and at the end you give yourself a treat,” he says.

  The bartender brings over his usual order: a bottle of Budweiser and a shot of Jägermeister. Brock refuses to drink bourbon in most bars because he refuses to drink any bourbon made after 1992, this for arcane reasons that seem like a good warning about the perils of knowing too much.

  Earlier in the day, in the midst of a meltdown over the Tavern’s much Instagrammed béarnaise-filled burger (the problem being that a small but significant portion of those Instagrams showed hot béarnaise spurted onto diners’ clothes), he had sat down in a quiet corner of the restaurant and wondered whether it was all worth it. Then came service.

  “It happened to me tonight: The same thing that happens every time I’m doing something I worked really hard toward. I’m in the kitchen, and I just start getting waves of highs. I feel this amazing rush. My arms break out in goose bumps. I imagine it’s what heroin is like. I’m so happy. This is me at my happiest: cooking this food in this place. I feel like I just won the football game. Like I won the heavyweight championship of the world. It’s the greatest thing you can imagine.”

  But is there another way?

  “Dammit, I don’t know that I want to do it any other way.”

  If Brock’s myasthenia gravis begins to progress, the first sign will likely be difficulty swallowing, as the disease moves into his throat. In a worst-case scenario, it could then move to the rest of his body, eventually to his lungs. Noe has found herself watching for signs, catching her breath every time Brock clears his throat. She knows that after the five-year mark of living with the disease with no progression the odds that it will develop into a full-body condition plummet dramatically. What’s unclear is exactly how much of the outcome is predetermined and how much is the result of how you behave for those five years.

  “I could live like a nun and the disease could still take off,” Brock says.

  One prominent neurologist who has not treated Brock but has studi
ed MG for decades points out that there are more and more effective treatments available for the disease than ever before. And he adds, “Nobody has ever shown that the best course of action for this disease is to not do what you want in life.”

  Opening night, McCrady’s is filled for the first time with 18 strangers. The front two-thirds of the rectangular space are bathed in a warm, amber glow that reflects off the black-walnut counter. The kitchen seems to be caught in the flash of a silver strobe light, framing Brock and his chefs as they bend over plates, tweezers at the ready, as though playing a game of Operation. Things move fast and light: There’s an oyster secreted in a fog of seawater and dry ice; a square of uni-and-pawpaw ice cream that unfolds in the mouth like a perverse gobstopper; and, of course, the cobia and matsutake, which in its 24th or 25th iteration has emerged as a space-age diorama: equal-size chunks of fish and mushroom arranged, Stonehenge-like, around a green-and-white psychedelic pool. It looks like a Yes album cover, and it tastes of sea and forest and also somehow like an after-school snack of peanut butter spread on celery. Brock seems relaxed, loose. At one point, he peers at the dining room through the tree line of bonsai like a twinkle-eyed giant. Who knows? Maybe he’s right. Maybe everything will soon go back to normal. When the last dessert, a tiny lozenge that explodes in the mouth with an invigorating menthol blast, is dropped, the kitchen lights snap off, as though a curtain has fallen, and the chefs silently march out the door. The guests applaud.

  Upstairs, in the Long Room, watched over by an unblinking bust of George Washington, Brock and his team sit at a banquet table. Nobody talks. The room is silent except for the sounds of Sam Jett slowly packing away Brock’s roll of knives, tweezers, and other tools. There is, strangely, an air of deflation. Everything was flawless, and yet… “It’s so weird,” Brock says. “There’s a disconnect.”

  Perhaps this is just the crash that follows getting what you’ve always wanted. Or, Brock has another idea:

  “Maybe it wasn’t hard enough?”

  Becoming Janos

  BY DEBBIE WEINGARTEN

  From Edible Baja Arizona

  Debbie Weingarten doesn’t just write about food, she’s also an activist, working with farmers, chefs, and local leaders to advance food security and justice in Tucson. Her portrait of chef Janos Wilder celebrates his devotion to Arizona regional cuisine–no matter how winding the path that brought him there.

  On a warm March morning, Downtown Kitchen + Cocktails is empty. Chef Janos Wilder sits in a booth facing the windows that look out onto Sixth Avenue, his phone lighting up with messages every few minutes.

  The day will unfold in a series of meetings, interviews, and installations in The Carriage House, Wilder’s new culinary teaching space and dim sum restaurant. The quiet of the morning is quickly broken—a UPS employee raps on the door to deliver a package; a produce truck shows up to unload the day’s vegetables; an accountant brings Wilder a stack of checks to sign. From the kitchen comes the clinking of dishes, the clanging of pots, and the smell of a gas range.

  Before he is Janos, a 4-year-old John Wilder watches his mother prepare a leg of lamb. The leg is whole, nearly down to the hoof, all of the small bones, gristle, and fat still attached. His mother, Joyce, rubs it in mustard, garlic, and soy sauce. She makes a flour paste and then studs the leg with rosemary. As always, she is without a recipe; intuition is her guide.

  It is 1958 in East Palo Alto, California. John’s oldest siblings are at school, and his father, Dave, is at work. The kitchen belongs to John and his mother. From the record player comes the smooth crooning of Frank Sinatra. For a moment, Joyce is lost in the music; Sinatra is her celebrity heartthrob. She smiles at John, her youngest son, and twirls him across the kitchen.

  John equates the kitchen with love, with mother, with the savory-sweet smell of garlic browning in the oven. As he grows older, he sneaks pieces of meat off the bone when his mother isn’t looking. These are memories that John will carry for the next 50 years—as he becomes Janos, moves to Colorado, falls in love and marries; as he works in kitchens in Santa Fe and France and finally lands in Tucson. Just the thought of a leg of lamb floods his senses with nostalgia—he remembers the gamey smell of the lamb, the rosemary, the layers of flavors that permeate the meat as it cooks. For Janos, it is the dish that most expresses the love that can filter through food.

  In the 1960s, Berkeley is alive with the civil rights movement. People spill into the streets, carrying signs and chanting. Throughout elementary school, John goes with his parents to community meetings and rallies where they protest housing discrimination and racial segregation. When Martin Luther King Jr. is murdered in 1968, John and his family march through Stanford holding hands with strangers in the street.

  In his junior year of college in Boulder, Colorado, where he studies political science, John gets a job as a cook at The Hungry Farmer. It is 1975, and there are so many Johns working at the restaurant that it becomes hard to keep them all straight. Nicknames are doled out by the chef, and he begins referring to John Wilder as Janos. When the chef quits six weeks later, the broiler cook, David Ruby, continues the nickname. David and Janos are two young chefs learning the dance of a busy kitchen. Together they cook fast and well. They are understaffed that summer, and the two must cover the entire line. They cook and plate shrimp, ribs, potatoes, steak, and Rocky Mountain oysters for 450 diners every night. For Janos, the choreography of the pace is exhilarating. Here in the busy kitchen at The Hungry Farmer, Janos lets his new name settle around him.

  In the summer, the Colorado mountains smell like ponderosa pine. Gold Hill, population 125, sits 10 miles outside of Boulder. At an elevation of 8,300 feet, steep roads and winter snows keep Gold Hill largely inaccessible to visitors for much of the year. But in the summer, the town buzzes with tourists.

  In 1978, Janos meets his future wife, Rebecca, while working at the Gold Hill Inn. Janos is the chef and Rebecca—an artist and weaver who works as the K-3 teacher in the town’s two-room schoolhouse—waits tables at the Inn over the summer.

  As a chef in a remote community, Janos faces a major sourcing problem: no one will deliver to Gold Hill. Early each morning, Janos walks down the dirt road to take stock of his ingredients at the Inn. Bleary-eyed from late nights spent in the kitchen and partying with friends, he takes his truck down the mountain to Boulder. In Boulder, he visits supermarkets, the butcher, the fish market. On his way back up to Gold Hill, he writes the day’s menu in his mind. As he rounds the last mountain curve, the expanse of the Continental Divide opens up in front of him.

  Finally, it occurs to him to begin sourcing his ingredients from neighbors in Gold Hill. He notices that someone is growing sorrel and rhubarb; another neighbor has a small garden. Oh my God, he thinks, Maybe I could sleep in. He begins buying vegetables, wild mushrooms, and trout from neighbors, avoiding the early morning trek to Boulder whenever possible. This is the beginning of Janos’ interest in local food, and at first, it’s just practical. It’s sleep-motivated. But the concept sticks, becoming an anchor for his career.

  Every summer for the next 30 years, Janos and Rebecca go back to Gold Hill. They hike through the woods, taking in the columbine flowers and the green of fiddleheads unrolling. Their walk is a meditation, a casual hunt for the red-orange of lobster mushrooms and the bright yellow of chanterelles, which they carry back to the old miner’s cabin that they now own.

  In 1981, newly married, Janos and Rebecca leave Gold Hill for Santa Fe. They are in their mid-20s, and the world seems to shimmer with possibility. Rebecca studies graphic design and Janos finds a job in a restaurant. They rent a 300-square-foot apartment, a converted stable that still resembles a barn. Too broke to afford furniture, they eat their meals on the surface of a yellow foot locker.

  Janos becomes fascinated by French cooking and decides to apprentice under a French chef. He writes letters to the best restaurants in France, offering to intern without pay. One after the other, the restaurant owners say no
—except for one, Roland Flourens, who writes that he will be in the United States and asks if he can visit Janos and Rebecca in Santa Fe. In preparation for Flourens’ visit, they buy a picnic table for the living room. When Flourens arrives, Janos serves an elaborate multicourse dinner on the couple’s wedding china. Flourens, though not entirely sold on Janos’ meal, admires his drive and potential, and invites him to France.

  Janos is captivated by the smells and sounds of France. For four months, Janos apprentices under Chefs Jean-Pierre Bugat and Didier Pétreau, absorbing the flavors, the technique, the philosophy of French cooking. He goes with the chefs to the outdoor market, where farmers sell produce from the back of their trucks. On one visit, a farmer flags down Chef Bugat and hands him a paper bag filled with the season’s first tarragon, saved especially for him. There is a spark to this exchange and Janos is mesmerized. The relationship between producer and chef, he realizes, is the heart and soul of French cooking.

  When Janos returns from France, he and Rebecca leave Santa Fe for Tucson—Rebecca was raised on the border, and they want to stay in the Southwest. In 1983, Janos opens his first Tucson restaurant, Janos, in an old adobe home in Barrio Viejo. Soon, it’s heralded as one of the top regional restaurants in the United States. The experience is like being pulled through a tunnel—on the periphery, the world is happening, the desert is blooming, but Janos is moving too fast to take it all in. He stops only for a month, in July of 1984, when Rebecca gives birth to their son, Ben. That summer, the monsoons come early and water fills the streets. For a month when Ben is born, there is no restaurant. He and Rebecca focus on the baby, exploring the strange new space of parenthood. In August, Janos goes back to work. Days begin at 6:30 in the morning, and end at 10 or 11 at night. He often has the sensation of never actually leaving the restaurant.