Best Food Writing 2014

by Holly Hughes

  I leave before dinner at Noma (the restaurant books up months in advance), but the conversation during my day at NFL alone will keep me going for quite a while. Sometimes ideas are nourishment enough.

  * I lost to David George Gordon’s delicious orthopteran stir-fry.

  SEVEN BALD MEN AND A KUMQUAT TREE

  By Amy Gentry

  From Gastronomica

  Austin Chronicle columnist Amy Gentry is plugged into the creative life in Austin, whether it’s her fiction writing, her sketch comedy, her dance group, or her blog (TheOeditrix.com). Profiling chef Rob Connoley, she’s interested not just in his self-taught technique but in the astounding creative leaps he takes.

  I have never seen a restaurant kitchen quite like this. The Kenmore oven/stove combo with its electric range is the same make and model as mine at home, but of an older vintage. Something that looks like a thirty-year-old camping grill sits on the counter next to the stove. Mason jars filled with rust-red hackberries, bumpy green cholla fruit, and twigs with the leaves still attached litter the shelves and countertops. On top of one sits a piece of spongy grayish-green moss.

  “What’s that?” I ask. Rob Connoley, skinny and tall, with a shaven head and lashless blue eyes that blink red in the smoky kitchen, picks it up.

  “Oh, just something I found in the woods. I’m going to take it to Naava.” That’s Naava Konigsberg, local herbalist, whom Rob consults for information about the various plants he forages, before taking them to the biology lab at Western New Mexico University for further analysis. “I’ll ask them, is it edible? Sustainable? Are there toxic levels of pollutants?” He puts the moss back down. “Don’t worry, I also try it myself first. If I die, I won’t serve it.”

  Rob keeps up the steady stream of chatter while he drops a squiggle of pale green watercress purée on four plates, tosses it with a bright saffron-yellow streak, and plants a white ball on one end that looks like fresh mozzarella (it is actually a curd made from sweet corn shoots). At the other end of the plate, trapezoidal hunks of acorn bread lean drunkenly against one another like the ruins of a small city. He plops a couple of elderflower boba—glistening, translucent balls resembling oversized golden whitefish caviar—onto a small heap of greens and moves to the next plate.

  In December of 2012, Rob’s restaurant, the Curious Kumquat, was named #39 in Saveur Magazine’s Top 100 destination restaurants. To understand how truly unlikely this ranking is, you should know that he has a PhD in sports psychology but no culinary degree and no restaurant experience at all outside of the one he opened in 2008; that he works almost completely alone, prepping, firing, and plating all the courses and washing his own dishes by hand at the end of the night; and that the Curious Kumquat is located in a mountain town with a population of 10,000 four hours from the closest commercial airport.

  Despite all this, the restaurant regularly draws a crowd increasingly made up of food tourists from New York, Chicago, and LA. Between Mardi Gras and Valentine’s Day, it’s been a stressful week. “We served seventy tables for dinner last night,” he says. “That’s the biggest dinner we’ve ever done, and it’s not even tourist season yet.” He pauses and rubs his head. “I’m exhausted, and I still haven’t done the courses for tomorrow night.” Tomorrow, the restaurant is closed for one of the experimental tasting dinners Rob throws every few months. This time he’s planning ten savory courses based around chocolate, presumably in honor of Valentine’s Day. With forty reservations, the dinner is sold out.

  “You mean you haven’t prepped them?”

  “I mean I haven’t invented them.”

  Leah, the single server working the floor, pokes her head in to tell Rob that the five-top she just seated wants to be out in an hour. “They’re watching the game.”

  “The game?” Rob says incredulously.

  She nods. “And they want the tasting menu.”

  Rob shakes his head. “Seven courses in one hour, so they can watch the game,” he says. “Unbelievable.”

  Although a server works the front of the house tonight, Rob still leaves the kitchen frequently to talk to the tables, which means he has to prep and fire and plate the courses with lightning speed. Just watching Rob buzz around the awkwardly laid-out kitchen makes me tired, not to mention activating long-dormant waitress neurons that make me feel like I should be grabbing a plate and running it out to table six, or at least refilling water glasses. Since I haven’t had dinner yet, it also makes me hungry, which gives me the hiccups. Rob notices.

  “Picture seven bald men,” he recommends, opening the oven to check on a pan full of braised lamb acquired from the local 4H. “Tyler swears by it.”

  Tyler is Rob’s husband. According to him, the hiccup cure works by engaging both sides of your brain: there are the images of the bald men themselves—and they have to be seven different bald men—and then there’s the number seven, which is more difficult to picture than one through six. While your mind is working on the problem, you’re not thinking about your body, and when you stop thinking about your body, it can let go and relax.

  When I look at Bear Creek I see a bunch of leafless trees clumped around a stream about four feet wide at its widest points, rocks half-immersed in sludgy, algae-clogged water, and dead leaves curling thick on the forest floor. When Rob looks, he sees food.

  The morning that I go foraging with him, the only acorns and hackberries are lying on the ground, and Rob won’t touch them. “If the animals haven’t eaten them by now, they’re bad,” he explains. It’s mid-February, and although minuscule buds on the gray branches hint at an early spring, our 6:00 a.m. hike down the trail to Bear Creek Ranch, an abandoned piece of heavily forested property in the Gila Mountains, is a chilly one.

  Rob points out an animal track here, a pile of dead, curled-up grape leaves there. “You can eat those,” he says of the leaves. “I’m trying to figure out something to do with the dry ones. I have some rotting in a jar right now, to see how they taste.” Decomposing leaves sound more like mulch than a meal to me, but later I will put one in my mouth and chew the papery, tasteless thing until zing, right at the end, I taste the sweet-sour tang of grape hiding in the pulped leaf. “Just don’t say ‘fermenting,’” he continues. “Everyone is fermenting everything right now.”

  We trek down to the water, where floating clumps of tiny ear-shaped leaves form the only green patches in a sea of brown. “Watercress is my favorite,” he says. “It’s delicious, it grows year round, and it’s abundant.” He doesn’t take from this batch, though; there’s a better place upstream. “Here,” Rob says, pointing at it. “The mother-lode.” A huge shoulder of rock blocks the stream, forming a little pool where the watercress leaves have taken over. They lie on the surface of the water in patchy, sun-dappled blankets, Monet-style.

  Rob is not excited about putting his hands in the freezing cold water, so I offer to help. “You want to get your hands all the way under there, pull them up by the roots,” he says. “I’ll put them in water when I get back to the restaurant.” I push up my sleeve and dip my hand into the icy water, wiggling my fingers down in the muck underneath a promising clump of green leaves, dredging up black, sodden roots, pine needles, and mud along with the handful of watercress. I’ve only pulled two or three clumps before he says, “Okay, that’s enough for today,” and we dump our handfuls in the plastic grocery bag he brought for his purpose. “No more than ten, fifteen percent at most. It’s in my best interest to let this pool regenerate, so I can come back here.”

  That’s all we get for the morning’s hike—less than a pound of watercress. If Rob had more time this morning, we might head another mile upstream. But tonight is the tasting dinner, and Rob is nervous. He still hasn’t planned all of the courses, and there’s the bustling lunch crowd to prep for, the sandwiches and soups that help pay the bills. When he picked me up that morning, when it was still dark outside, he told me he hadn’t slept a single hour since we parted ways the night before. He lay awake, staring at
the ceiling.

  “I tried picturing bald men. George Costanza, Daddy Warbucks, Lex Luthor. Me.” He smiles. “It didn’t help.”

  Rob got into the locavore movement in the late ’90s, when it was picking up steam around a confluence of worries about the environmental effect of industrial farming, the global dominance of American fast food chains, and the amount of fossil fuel needed to haul food grown at one end of the world to consumers at the other. The principles behind local food are good: grow, sell, buy, and eat close to home.

  That changed for Rob the day he bit into a local hothouse tomato that was as tasteless as anything he’d ever bought at a grocery store. “I was like, why are we even doing this? Is it more nutritional? Does it taste better?”

  Others were coming to similar conclusions. By introducing non-native species to climates and conditions that are less than ideal, gardens and organic farms may produce food that is local in name only. Foraging, the practice of harvesting food from the wild, is a logical extension of the locavore movement—only take what wants to grow.

  Critics of foraging point out that it can alter the natural environment, sometimes ravaging native plant populations beyond repair. Sensitive to these critiques, Rob set out to learn ethical foraging practices from Doug Simons, a Grant County local who claims to have foraged all of his food for seven years. Born in rural Colorado, Simons went on a spirit quest when he was seventeen, sitting out in the wilderness for three days without food or water, guided by a teacher of his from the Lakota tribe. In addition to being a wildcrafting and foraging expert, he refers to himself as a “plant communication specialist” and carries a little leather pouch of dried tobacco on his belt for making offerings to the “plant people.”

  Rob doesn’t talk to the plant people, and has only tried Doug’s more esoteric methods once, when searching for the perfect yucca plant. (It didn’t work.) Still, he treats them with a healthy dose of respect.

  “There are different plant-specific rules, seasonal rules. If it’s a grove of cattails, I’ll only take pollen from fifteen percent of the plants, and I do only one little flick from each plant.” He demonstrates, squinting as if a cattail head were in front of him and miming a well-aimed flick. “You could get fifteen flicks from each plant, but I need them to pollenate and propagate.” Additionally, he insists the plants be located as far as possible from known sources of toxic chemicals, including not just pesticides, but parking lots, roads, and run-off from roads.

  He has been working on an ethical foraging manifesto. So far, it goes like this:

  1.I will not forage if I can see a road, no matter the size.

  2.I will not forage downhill from a road or within a mile of one, even if I can’t see it.

  3.I will harvest no more than fifteen percent, or whatever percentage is necessary to maintain the thriving and propagating of the plant.

  When you take a look at the manifesto, the problem with foraging-focused restaurants becomes self-evident: how can a restaurant located close enough to the kind of wild land that yields abundant, pollutant-free ingredients charge enough to make the massive investment of time and energy involved in foraging worthwhile? Yet the fashion for foraging has created a slew of modish foraging restaurants in big cities. Rob grumbles that when a chef in a major metropolitan area (he won’t name the restaurant) can boast about gathering dandelion greens from a vacant lot on the next block over, the fad has officially triumphed over the food’s flavor and health value. “Who knows what chemicals are in those greens?” he says. “I wouldn’t eat them. I certainly wouldn’t serve them.”

  Rob is also skeptical of foraging chefs who glean off the edges of commercial or private property. Ultimately, problems similar to those he found in the locavore movement have begun to disillusion him with the foraging trend as well. “I’m no expert, but I know what’s right and wrong. Stealing and serving polluted food is wrong,” he says. “I’m not the foraging Nazi, but people need to think about this stuff.”

  Incidentally, there are no kumquat dishes on the menu. Kumquats are not native to southwest New Mexico.

  Rob admits to having a touch of the “best little boy in the world” syndrome.

  Tyler has it too, he says. Both men came out in their late twenties, having grown up just on the cusp of the generation of gay men who came out earlier, in their teens. “I think a lot of us funneled our energy into being overachievers. When you’re not telling your family or friends, you do all this stuff to make up for that. And when you’re in the closet, you don’t have romantic relationships to worry about either, so all that energy just goes straight into your work.”

  Rob Pauley grew up on the north side of St. Louis—“not the good side”—in a liberal Catholic family, the child of a single mother and the youngest of two. Early on, he set himself the goal of getting into a Catholic college prep high school on the west side of town, and he made it. In high school, he started running fifty-mile “ultra-marathons.” At 6 foot 4 and 170 pounds, he still has a distance runner’s build; back then, he weighed 135. “I was so fragile, you could snap me in half,” he says.

  After an undergraduate career at Loyola University that included a little bit of everything—he started out double majoring in art and education, then moved to a marketing and business major with a focus in nonprofit management—he went on to get a PhD in sports psychology from Purdue, where he researched identity formation in college athletes. Describing their mentality, he shakes his head. “For them, first place is winning, and second place is losing,” he says. (I am reminded of this when he speaks of obsessively checking the restaurant’s online reviews first thing in the morning.)

  When Rob graduated, he was offered a job running a gym in Colorado. He and his girlfriend of the time, an MA in health promotion at Purdue, wanted to move in together, and wound up getting married in order to placate her ultra-conservative family. Rob came out two years later, at the age of twenty-seven. “It was a really good marriage,” he says. “We were best friends. I cooked and cleaned and did all the gay things.”

  Rob met Tyler Connor in the summer of 2000. Rob was freshly back from a hiking trip in Peru, visiting his family in Indianapolis with the intention of leaving for a long mission trip to South America in the fall. Tyler was a seminarian at Earlham School of Religion, where he wrote, for his thesis, a midrash about eunuchs in the Hebrew bible. They met at a church-sponsored movie night. “That night he told me he was planning to come out to the Catholic mission organization,” says Tyler. “I thought to myself, there’s no way he’d going on that trip. So I made sure that we hung out together as much as possible. It took him about two months to decide he couldn’t go. And by then we’d fallen in love.”

  Since Rob had the more marketable degree, they agreed to move wherever he found a job, leaving Tyler to write full-time. Rob applied for a job in nonprofit management in Silver City, and was hired based on a phone interview. Faced with the prospect of moving to a town with a population of 10,000, located at the terminal point of a state highway three hours off I-10, Rob and Tyler spent exactly one weekend thinking it over. “On Monday we quit our jobs. And then we bought plane tickets to come out and look at the place.”

  We are having this conversation at a dinner party hosted by the foster parents of an eleven-year-old Rob and Tyler are hoping to adopt. The boy is bright and energetic and clearly adores both of them. Rob has been sitting across the room tending the kid’s skinned knee—sheepishly, since he was the one who encouraged him to show off on his skateboard—but, hearing Tyler tell this part of the story, he looks our way. “We were crazy.”

  “We were crazy,” Tyler agrees. But, having grown up in a missionary family in South Africa, he felt a strange affinity for the landscape right away, the combination of dry, red cliffs like Rhodesian sandstone covered with scraggly pines. Tyler Connor and Rob Pauley settled down, got married in the liberal United Church of Christ where Tyler is now pastor, and combined their names to “Connoley”—a naming conventio
n Tyler says he was drawn to from the age of nine, before he had an inkling he was gay.

  Tyler’s missionary family was far more conservative than Rob’s liberal Catholic one. His coming-out was accordingly more traumatic, and included having to play along with an “ex-gay” therapy to avoid getting kicked out of his Christian college. A deeply religious man, he struggled through many years of spiritual searching before returning to Christianity via one of the most liberal strands of American Protestantism (the United Church of Christ is unaffiliated with the Church of Christ).

  Rob, by contrast, speaks of his closeted years with a peculiar gratitude. “I went to college in New Orleans. The drinking age was eighteen, and it was 1986 to 1990, the height of the HIV epidemic. If I had come out then, I know I would be dead now.”

  If it seems odd to credit such a choking restriction with saving one’s life, keep in mind that Rob seems to flourish in an atmosphere of restrictions.

  The Javalina isn’t the only coffee shop in Silver City, but it may have the most interesting history. Located at the corner of Bullard and Broadway, the two streets that constitute downtown Silver City, the Javalina’s spacious rooms are filled with mismatched couches, dining room tables, potted plants, and jigsaw puzzles beneath high, white, tin-tiled ceilings. The walls here are hung, as they are everywhere in Silver City, with oil canvasses, including Southwestern landscapes, abstract moderns, and a trio of painted replicas of community theater posters. “This is an artist community,” Tom Hester days drily.

  Tom, a statistician from Washington, D.C., who retired here with his wife Consuelo, works in the archive annex at the Silver City Museum. He modestly deflects the title of “town historian,” but it’s hard to imagine anyone knowing more about the town than Tom. His eyes burn brightly under bushy eyebrows and wire-rimmed glasses, and he leans forward when he talks, a slow, nasal drawl emitting from beneath his mustache. Tom tells me that the Javalina was once a merchandise store owned by H. B. Ailman, who sold a profitable gold mine in Silver City, opened a bank that quickly went bust, and then met up with Edward Doheny in Arizona. The two later drilled the first oil well in Los Angeles. (A thinly veiled version of Doheny was memorably played by Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood.) Ailman also discovered the Gila Cliff Dwellings, eight-hundred-year-old structures built into natural caves halfway up a cliff face in the Gila National Forest. He stumbled across them while avoiding jury duty.