From the Office and Backyard to the Road, Boat, or Plane–Backstories and
Side Stories While on Assignment. Updates on Personal Projects, Too.

Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

Sloshed far down Canal Street in the torrents on Thursday. Cold and wet, feet soaked through, umbrellas blown backwards, we met for the deep bowl of soba noodles in a smoky fish flake broth, the cleaver-chopped roast duck with crisped caramel skin, the hot fried flatbread torn into pieces to dip in curry sauce, the bright green mound of shrimp paste-coated okra.

While the rain poured on slanting sidewalks and streamed on plate glass storefronts, we breathed coconut, lemongrass and curry. We talked and ate through our table’s line-up of steaming plates, filled our tiny cups with tea.

lady finger belacan, Overseas Taste

In NYC last week, I had the chance to eat twice at Overseas Taste (also known as “Oversea Asian”) at 49 Canal St., first with art director Tim Sutton and editor/writer Dave Bry. Tim and Dave knew exactly what to order.

PFE’s photo is of the tender okra dish ordered on both visits, Lady Finger Belacan.

– Sandy Lang, June 2009

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Food, Travel

barbecue road trip Garden & Gun

The open-spoke steering wheel is as wide as a bicycle wheel in my hands, and I’m cruising – floating almost – on two-lane asphalt in a tar-black Chevrolet, passing pine tree rows, tobacco barns, railroad crossings. Pulling up in a bare-ground parking lot, I see the woodpiles, the smoke rising, and I walk inside, smelling the fire…

Photographer Peter Frank Edwards and I set out this spring to find old-school barbecue parlors in eastern North Carolina. He shot film and Polaroids along the way, and somewhere east of Greenville, we found the great old Chevy. The story is in the latest Garden & Gun issue, which is just off the press and set to be mailed out this month.

There are more images in print and the entire piece is online at Garden & Gun.

Garden & Gun June 2009 cover

– Sandy Lang, June 2009

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Food, In print/published, Travel

05.30

2009

Guerrilla Bite

Back on the covert dining beat, I wrote this Quick Bite feature for the May 2009 Charleston Magazine, the arts issue with the Shepard Fairey cover. I’m a fan of street art and underground supper clubs, so it was a great fit.

Shepard Fairey cover, Guerrilla Cuisine

A year ago this month, the e-mail arrived on a Saturday night with details about where to be the next evening, at 6:00 sharp. Directions were a bit cryptic, mentioning a street address “a few doors down from a favorite local meeting spot… the Wild Wild Joker. Bring yourself, a sense of adventure, and don’t forget to BYOB.“

The message was sent only to the 40 or so people going to another sold-out Guerilla Cuisine dinner, part food exploration, part art show. Begun in the fall of 2007, the underground dining group’s founder is a local 30-something known as “jimihatt” who’s worked in kitchens from Med Deli (the 1990s version) to McCrady’s. He and fellow chefs, mostly from Charleston restaurants, do the cooking for the clandestine, monthly dinner. And like a party or a rave, each meal is different, some better than others.

Walking up on the steamy May night to the Heriot Street address, guests could see crawfish being skewered onto sticks, prep cooks firing up grills on a line of tables outside. That dinner was held in a warehouse of glowing light and long tables, with art lining the walls… most of it by local artists, and for sale. There was a deejay playing house mixes, wait-staff in black-and-white costumes and face paint, and a drummer from Ghana. Guests chose their places at the snaking tables, and course-by-course the meal was served… mako shark and venison chops, roasted quail with a quail egg cooked inside, buffalo carpaccio with onion, and the fire-grilled crawfish. The 20-something to early 40-something crowd tasted, talked, and shared their wine.

A few months later, at another Guerrilla Cuisine dinner, guests sat on the floor of an otherwise empty, mid-century house off of Highway 17 South in West Ashley. Boxy, foot-high “tables” held the place settings that night, when every meal course featured hot peppers. It was all part of Guerrilla Cuisine’s nod to cooking what’s local and in-season.

The mystery and momentum of changing chefs, locations and art continues. Potential guests can sign up anytime for e-mail updates, www.guerrillacuisine.com.

Guerrilla logo

– Sandy Lang, May 2009

River Road, P.M. King’s Gro.

Down on Wadmalaw Island where the road splits to go either to Rockville or Cherry Point, Simon Black had the BBQ drum cooker going hot with some split oak – he adds pecan or hickory wood when he has it. On the grill were a couple of nice-sized pork ribs and shoulders, a line of whole chickens.

His wife, Rachel, had finished wrapping up a dozen or so sandwiches – pimento cheese and shrimp salad – and lined them up in the cold case inside, next to the sausage links and bacon. She gets the shrimp from the boats right down the road at Cherry Point then boils, shells, chops, and makes the salad on soft bread with big gobs of shrimp. (Rachel’s great-grandfather built this island grocery, opened in the late 1940s.) By 11 or so, when the meat was smoked and ready, Simon wrote the day’s specials on a board – $10 plates of ribs with homemade slaw, baked beans and french fries or potato salad; or $8 for the BBQ chicken plate. Pulled pork sandwiches would be $5.

Cars started to pull in. A couple guys got a bag of single beers to go, two Ice House and two Ballentine. A woman with a toddler in a pink t-shirt ordered four hot dogs. And a boat captain came in for “his usual” to take out on the water – a ham and cheese sandwich, bottled water, and a pack of sweet cigars. “I’ll try the grape ones today,” he said, pointing to the boxes behind the register. By then, the first rib plates were ready…

P.M. King’s Gro.

– Sandy Lang, April 2009 (images by PFE)

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Food, Lowcountry S.C./Charleston

barbecue road trip

Just back tonight from a three-day road trip in eastern North Carolina… have some mementos. The color shot is one I took with my old Polaroid camera while the wind was making the whirligigs at Vollis Simpson’s place whir and clang into quite a racket up in the pine trees. It’s like watching an open-air kaleidoscope. I had the honor of meeting Mr. Stephen and Ms. Gerrie Grady at Grady’s Bar-B-Q and taste the most tender and delicious black-eyed peas on earth.  Peter Frank Edwards shot the 4X5 black and white Polaroid of me with the old Chevrolet we came across on Highway 264. I kept peeking in the cracked driver’s window at the soft leather bench seats, the open-spoked steering wheel that was wide as bicycle wheel. That’s the one I wished we were driving.

One more whirligig…

whirligig

– Sandy Lang, April 2009

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Food, Travel

G&G cover, April 2009, Supper Clubs

The rabbit – from the ranch of a Frenchman-turned-Texan named Sebastian – was fried in just-rendered pork fat. “That’s better than any vegetable oil,” said Jesse Griffiths, who’d rounded up ingredients and was doing most of the cooking that night.  His plates of creamed kale and of fried rabbit were going fast – passed from person to person down one long table set in a Texan pecan grove.

It was a sultry evening on a four-acre urban farm in Austin, Texas where 43 people sat at mismatched chairs for a family-style dinner of eight courses in the lamplight. An old door turned over on sawhorses was the prep table, and Griffiths cooked mostly at a table-height iron grill with a bottom tray that – by consensus of several supper guests – was once a feed trough.  (“Probably was,” said Griffiths, who recalled paying $50 for it, and claims it’s the best grill he’s ever had.)  The fryer – a large cooking pot over a portable propane flame – was behind him. And the whole set-up was under the porch roof of a farm shed. He’d been cooking like that for hours, handing plates as soon as they were ready to his small crew, including his wife, Tamara, who wore an embroidered summer dress, her brown hair in pigtails. A few yards from the long table, he cooked up pan-fried red peppers as big and sweet as strawberries, home-made jalapeno sausages, and smoky Gulf shrimp wrapped in grilled allspice leaves – all of Texas ingredients.

This was a food-loving crowd, and they were eating it up…

That’s the opening couple of paragraphs of my story in the new issue of Garden & Gun. (Actually, the print version is slightly edited… check out a PDF of the G&G layout by clicking below.) The feature is about one hell of a delicious night in Austin, and other stories of new supper clubs in the South, some public and some semi-secret… including Dai Due and Supper Underground in Austin, the Four Coursemen in Athens, and Guerrilla Cuisine in Charleston. Thank you to everyone for the great interviews… would love to cook and eat with any of you, anytime.

SupperClubsGarden&GunApril-May2009

– Sandy Lang, April 2009

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Food, In print/published

grill dinner

Along one of the coral dust and gravel lanes of a campground that’s just a few miles past the seven-mile bridge to the Lower Florida Keys, we pitched our tent. A few feet away was the site’s (number 57) wooden picnic table, and our neighbors’ RVs and “cabana” trailers surrounded us… their canopies strung with party lights shaped of globes, fish and alligators. The mid-March mornings and evenings were still sweater-cool at the Sunshine Key RV Resort & Marina, but in mid-day everyone looked for shade, water or air conditioning.

We were lucky enough to join fishing parties on two of the three long Florida days of our visit… riding out with Captain Bookie Burns in his 23-foot Aquasport. The first day’s trip was to the jostling Atlantic side for a couple hours over a 20-foot bottom where we reeled in mostly Lane Snapper and Yellow Tail while the boat bucked against its anchor and the chum bag made its long line for us to cast into. Besides the catch (which was slow at the start, but just enough to keep things interesting), the floating chum also attracted a steady school of silvery ballyhoo, and then at one point, a cruising 4-5 foot shark. Further out, a hefty sea turtle bobbed up and looked around. When our bait of shrimp ran out, we motored nearer to shore to drop anchor in a calm bay about four-feet deep. The captain wanted to do some snorkeling, see if he could back some spiny lobsters into his mesh sea bag. Soon we’d added a couple of the claw-lacking lobsters to the cooler, and back at the campground that night, Peter Frank sliced a tail for grilling, alongside a whole grunt, with lime.

Sunshine Key 2009

The second fishing day was on the calmer Gulf of Mexico over a grassy, 14-foot bottom where the Jack Crevalle, mackerel, Mangrove Snapper and Lane Snapper kept us busy. We were only at Sunshine four nights/three days, but we got in a Keys groove… after fishing we’d swim from the campground dock in a mud and sand-bottomed wash between the Gulf and the Atlantic. Then we’d shower in the cinder block bath houses and head back to our campsite or someone else’s for cocktails or beer, and plates of hors d’oeuvres… hard boiled eggs, peanuts, crab dip, cocktail weiners on toothpicks, spears of asparagus. And then in the breezy night with coconut trees leaning, we’d sleep well and long on the air mattress with all screens open in the tent… once after a particularly good round of picnic table dominoes.

 – Sandy Lang, March 2009

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Food, Travel, Wild animals and places

Local 188, Portland, Maine

Last night we double-hopped dinner around Longfellow Square in Portland, Maine. At Local 188, it was a round of Estrella and Unibroue with a long plate of spicy meatballs to share. We’d been to Local before, when it was in the shotgun space around the corner and you could drink $2 Schlitz tall-boys and watch the chef at the fiery cookstove, making that big bowl of paella you ordered. Now in a space 3-4 times the size on Congress Street (formerly a Goodwill shop), there’s still Schlitz on the menu, but also an open kitchen with several busy line cooks, an L-shaped bar, and just about every other manner of seating…. booths, tables, barstools, easy chairs, pews, and couches set around coffee tables. Everyone finds their place.

Fat wet snowflakes started while at Local, and we cut across Congress Street to Evangeline in a hurry, in the flurry.  It’s the one at 190 State Street with the outline of a pig in profile painted on the window… reminded me of the The Spotted Pig in New York. There, at the long bar we shared a litre bottle of Allagash Curieux (pricey but delicious Portland brew… aged in whiskey barrels).  And to eat, I had the best wilted spinach salad, with mini croutons, carmelized, balsamic red onion, and slivers of thick-cut bacon. Then on top, a perfect cloud of a poached egg… a delicious warm-up before walking back out into the white night.

Evangeline, Portland, Maine

Peter Frank Edwards has more images of Evangeline on his blog, including shots of Chef Erik Desjarlais cooking it up in the kitchen.

– Sandy Lang, February 2009

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Food, Maine days, Travel

02.17

2009

Spoonbread Savannah

On a rainy night with a tornado warning, you don’t want the winter storm come. But if it does, you want to see the drops pour on tall windows, Spanish moss tousling in the trees… and you, snug in a leather-backed banquette with some of the greatest possible comfort food in front of you, pan-seared quail on hot spoonbread.

It was a late dinner at the restaurant Local 11 Ten, in a renovated 1950s bank near Forsyth Park in Savannah. And the next day we went back and met the chef, Jeff Rodgers, one of those humble kitchen masters who simply loves to cook. We talked of Mississippi, his cooking influences from there… French, Creole, Southern. He grows fresh herbs on the kitchen patio, cooks with lots of root vegetables in winter. In his chef whites, he stood for a portrait in the restaurant’s mix of organic and sleek – dark woods and crème-painted brick walls. Then we went back to talk of the cooking life. Turns out, Chef Rogers is a big fan of comfort food, too.

Savannah stairs, Chef Jeff Rodgers

There were more bread comforts in Savannah. Out 20 or so blocks along Bull Street is Back in the Day Bakery, another good re-use of a corner building… this one with its taffy paint colors, cake stands and Formica tables, easy mid-century furnishings and feel. Early on a Saturday, I ordered a huge slab of the Bourbon bread pudding with my coffee, and then happily spent much of an hour watching the morning hum of customers come and go in the warm bakery… sugar glaze on my fingers, cinnamon scents in the air.

Back in the Day Bakery

The photographs are by Peter Frank Edwards. The image of the staircase is from our four-story wander through Alex Raskin Antiques on Bull Street.

– By Sandy Lang, February 2009

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Food, Travel

Murrells Inlet, Russell’s signs

Back in September I posted a preview of my food-travel feature about Murrells Inlet… it’s now in print, in the February issue of Charleston Magazine, earned a mention on the cover.  To read a version online, click here.

 – Sandy Lang, January 2009

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