The travel itself was exhilarating in its weird mix of grinding discomfort, discovery of the delicious treasure previously unconsidered by the ballyhoo industry and bright contrasts between the grit of the subject and the corporate cash that subtended my efforts.
Take the Texas leg of the barbecue story. It started in utter expense-account comfort at the Four Seasons in Austin, with a vague plan to drive on to the Hill Country, a collection of small towns settled chiefly by German immigrants, where barbecued beef was the local religion and a lure for gastrotourists of all levels of income and refinement. That plan gained sharper focus over dinner in Austin with Louis Black, the cofounder and editor of the Austin Chronicle as well as the cofounder of the South by Southwest Festival. A native of Teaneck, New Jersey, who had been imbibing local lore and culture since his student days at the University of Texas, Black gave me a list of places, and I went to them all.
Fortunately, we got to Lockhart, the very best of the Hill Country barbecue towns, early in the day, before too many fatty brisket slices dulled our judgment. By then, on outings in Tennessee, Alabama and several other states famous for their brand of ’cue, I’d already stuffed myself with smoky renditions of pulled pork and pork shoulder, ribs and other slow-cooked animal parts, in dozens of self-consciously down-home joints with rolls of paper toweling standing tall on vertical holders, instead of napkins. So by the time I rolled into little, semigentrified Lockhart (pop. 14,237), I was, if not jaded, at least not remotely energized by the prospect of another plate of meat collapsing from its own weight among piles of cole slaw, baked beans or other canonical “sides,” followed by banana pudding bulked out with Nilla wafers.
It was, therefore, thoroughly remarkable that the beef brisket at Kreuz woke me up and changed my perspective on barbecue pretty completely. It was a paradigm shift.
Kreuz, pronounced Krites and referred to in some quarters as the Church of Krites, is, compared to the gaudy, shameless, huckstering, media-fawning baroque of Big Bob Gibson’s or Mike Mills’s 17th Street Bar & Grill in Murphysboro, Illinois, a monastic retreat. Kreuz does not sell sides. It has no special sauces (like the one so fetishized by Mike Mills that he likes to say he’d have to kill anyone who got hold of the recipe). In fact, it has no standalone sauces at all.
Smitty’s Market in Lockhart is even purer and plainer. In my first bite of brisket at Smitty’s, the smokiness was so strong it changed my idea forever of what barbecue could be. This style of heavily smoked beef may take some getting used to, but for me it is the zenith of the ’cue universe. That doesn’t mean I don’t love the pork barbecue other regions excel in. But Smitty’s is a temple of the pristine, a shaded cave of making, with its stark, black steel–doored smokers and taciturn pit men who stand in the heat of the post-oak logs, pull out a piece of brisket and ask you if you want it sliced from the lean or the fatty end. I went for the fatty and didn’t mind that Smitty’s is really not a restaurant but a specialized meat market. Out front, there is a shockingly bright, pathetic excuse for a dining room, which only makes the crepuscular Hades in the sooty pit area, which some genius implanted into an old brick brewery, seem even more wonderfully infernal. When you go through the door from this dusk to the fluorescent glare and the crappy tables of Smitty’s dining room, the transition is something like the shock Plato tells us his cave dwellers experienced when they emerged into the sun.
There are many things you might want to tell other people about Smitty’s, but the smokiness in the meat is the main lesson I learned that morning, and the thin pink line at the edge of each slice, which is the sign of the oaky gauntlet it has run for a dozen hours or more.
We drove on for the rest of the day, from the Hill Country, in central Texas,‡ all the way north into the tornado belt of Oklahoma, taking in that region’s barbecue specialties, hickory-smoked brisket, bologna and pickled mixed vegetables, at black places like Leo’s in Oklahoma City and Wilson’s in Tulsa.
Eventually, in the warm months of 2007, I followed the barbecue trail through twelve states and came away convinced that the bigger the hoopla, the more acute the disappointment. At the huge festival on the banks of the Mississippi called Memphis in May, I got sunburned and burned in general at the insulting scam, in which dozens of “famous” barbecue teams compete with their “famous” sauces and meats from their portable pits, but the thousands of ticket holders rarely get a taste of that “famous” meat, which is not for sale but prepared for the elite palates of the judges alone. We regular folk were invited to look on with our tongues out.
On a tip from a Memphis native—Edward Felsenthal, Tom Weber’s boss at the Journal—we drove to tiny Mason, Tennessee, east of Memphis, to Bozo’s, which is to barbecue pork as Smitty’s is to beef. At Bozo’s, you don’t need to sauce up the perfect quills of pork shoulder. Outside this unassuming family operation, a lonely whistling freight train rumbled by. The bright lights of the high-security prison next door cast an ominous shadow on the humble former farmhouse. Within, all was good cheer restrained by the confident reserve that results from knowing you can pull pork so that each strand comes away long and perfect, like hanks of moist beige yarn.
This was the Memphis style at its apogee, thirty-five miles from Graceland, and all the other sights and sounds of downtown Memphis. Bozo’s does not serve ribs. Don’t ask for brisket, either. In this shrine of the shoulder of the sow, aficionados know that “barbecue” signifies only one cut of meat, from high on the hog.
But you don’t have to stay in the backwaters of the South to find very good barbecue, because the appetite for this food has spawned fine pits all over the land—at Slows, across from Detroit’s derelict rail station; at the East Coast Grill in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and in Manhattan, at a clone of Kreuz called Hill Country.
Only in California did I strike out completely in my search for great barbecue. This was unfortunate (but perhaps an inevitable result of the overwhelming importance of Hispanic and Asian food in California’s vernacular food world) but I didn’t waste much of my time there. I sampled undistinguished ’cue in South Central Los Angeles, boarded a redeye and flew back to New York.
Even before the barbecue piece appeared in the paper, it made a splash. The online edition of the Journal was posted a bit before the newsprint broadsheet arrived at subscribers’ doors and desks. The paper attached an e-mail address to the piece so that readers could “interact.” And they did—many more than had ever written in about one of my articles in the pre-Internet era.
Reader reaction was only part of the Internet’s effect on me. As late as 2002, when I left my editing job at the Journal, the telephone had still been a major tool of research and professional communication. When I returned to the paper in 2006, I did almost everything online. Instead of wasting time on hold with reservationists, I booked online through OpenTable. To get a preliminary idea of where to eat in an unfamiliar town, I consulted sites from Zagat to Yelp. Since many of my early columns were, in effect, about food trends as they emerged on restaurant menus, I would search the cybercosmos for additional examples of a new ingredient or recipe I’d noticed by accident while dining out on assignment.
For example, I was surprised to see snails in a pasta dish at an Italian restaurant in New York. In my previous experience, snails had always been escargots, that cliché of retro French bistros—usually canned, swimming in garlic butter and, often, inserted into shells not originally their own.
Was the humble snail creeping out of this tired presentation? Were diners around the country confronting what might be called free-gliding snails, snails without shells and garlic butter, snails in omelets or snails with lobster?
They were. A quick Web search turned up creative snail dishes on several menus, including one at the innovative new regional Bluestem, in Kansas City. I flew in for dinner and, using the snail “trend” as a pretext, gave national attention to an excellent, quietly locavore outpost of first-rate food in the heart of the heart of the country. The head
line: SLOW FOOD.
The discovery of the Internet as a powerful trend-spotting tool was a dangerous development. It was difficult not to believe that you could prove anything if you surfed diligently enough, even if that evidence was lurking somewhere on the 75,987th page of a Google search.
For the culture of dining and cookery, the Internet changed everything, just as it did in every other corner of life. But for a restaurant critic trying to operate nationally with no research assistant or other backup (and for those four years, I was the only food critic writing regularly and systematically in a major newspaper about the entire country, with frequent forays abroad), the Internet was indispensable, if only because almost every restaurant worth writing about had a website with hours, phone numbers, e-mail access for reservations, street addresses, maps and, most of all, menus. In the pre-Internet world of the early 1970s, I went out to eat without any clear idea of what would be available. The restaurant PR industry rarely sent me a menu, just vapid and information-free press releases. So I was reduced to stealing menus, as Craig Claiborne had advised, just to have a record of the meal. Those menus were also helpful to me as a reporter. When I wanted to interview a chef for a feature article, I could look at his menu and decide what dishes I would ask him to demonstrate for me.
Especially in dealing with Sichuan chefs who spoke no English, it was very useful to be able to point to a dish on the menu. I rapidly got used to arriving unannounced in a restaurant I had reviewed—calling ahead was useless, since the person at the other end could barely understand a simple request for a reservation. I would bring with me a set of measuring spoons and a measuring cup. Then I had to insert myself into the cooking process, so that I could get accurate measurements for the recipe I wanted to publish. Uncle Lou, the Sichuan master chef, was one of many cooks who suffered with friendly bewilderment the intrusions of the young man from the Times thrusting little spoons into his mise-en-place.
But that was the only way I could take home a recipe of his hot spicy shrimp (and all the other dishes from Sichuan I was the first person to publish in English). Then the scribbled notes would get transcribed into proper recipe form, with a list of ingredients at the top, in the order they were used in the numbered directions below, which were always followed by a “yield,” the number of servings you would get from the recipe.
Even in 1971, this recipe format had a whiff of the home-economics test kitchen about it. Julia Child had already evolved a more complex and comprehensible format, but I still prefer its straightforward structure, especially since I worked with it every day at the Times.
I did my own testing then, at home. If I made mistakes, they would be my own. Also, my kitchen was a much more realistic arena for testing recipes for readers who, like me, were cooking with conventional ranges, instead of the professional-style Garland behemoth in the Times test kitchen.
The recipe testing made me a much better cook. And I discovered that I enjoyed the time at the stove. I especially loved baking bread, with its long periods of waiting while the yeast did its magic in the dough. I would read a novel or write a piece. Then I’d have a better loaf than I could easily buy in that era (so hard to imagine now) before artisanal bakers had put crusty sourdough on the shelves of national supermarket chains.
By 2006, anyone who wanted a classic baguette or a ciabatta could just buy one in the neighborhood. I did not mind not needing to bake myself, since I was really too busy traveling for the Journal. And I certainly did not regret not needing to steal menus anymore. The last time I’d wished I had stuck one in my pocket was at dinner at Pierre Gagnaire’s Paris three-star establishment in the mid-1990s, where I’d found it tiresome to be taking notes in the dark during an almost comically intricate multicourse meal. I asked for a menu to keep. The captain refused point-blank and, only after I insisted, very grudgingly agreed to make a photocopy. They had a Xerox machine in the back office. Today, like virtually every restaurant of consequence, Pierre Gagnaire has a website with a menu on it. No one any longer needs to beg or steal a copy, or try to write down a jawbreaker dish name like that recent Gagnaire soup extraordinaire: Consommé de boeuf au Banyuls, salsifis caramélisés, topinambours à la moutarde de Cramone et glace de maïs (beef consommé with Banyuls wine, caramelized salsifys [oyster plants], Jerusalem artichokes with mostarda di Cremona, Italian candied fruit in mustard-oil syrup, and corn ice cream).
As a twenty-first-century food critic, I rarely ate a meal I hadn’t been able to plan in advance at the computer. And when I paid by credit card in the restaurant, the computer-generated receipt came with a separate little printout of every dish I’d ordered. And no waiter ever flinched if I pulled out a small digital camera and took a picture of a dish, which I could e-mail to my editor from the table for later publication.
Of all these brave new efficiencies, e-mail was by far the most important. I could file my stories instantaneously and receive back edited copy wherever I happened to be. Compare that to the way reporters filed to the New York Times from the field in 1971. We would call a number in New York and read our articles to a monitored recording machine, spelling every name and unusual word. And in many cases, the next contact we had with our dispatches was when we read them in the paper. Garbles and mistakes were inevitable.
The computer and e-mail changed all that.
What had happened, from my perspective as a classicist, was the elimination of scribal error. For the first time since the invention of writing, nothing needed to be copied. The text, once it had been saved as a digital document, could be moved into print or disseminated electronically with no risk of human errors being introduced, as they always had been since antiquity, first by scribes who had hand-copied every book until Gutenberg, after whom the job of copying was shifted to type compositors and their successors at the keyboards of linotype machines.
But with the computer, the blurring chain of transmission came to an end. The author’s version was, in principle, immutable and eternal. It could be revised, but the age-old need for the error-making scribe, the meddling keystroker, the secretary generating mistakes again and again through laboriously retyped versions of a letter or a chapter was finished. And no one would ever need to cut carbons again or risk the loss of years of work when a manuscript got left in a cab or burned.
I loved the computer and I loved e-mail even more. Especially because it brought me mail from readers who told me things I didn’t know. In their passion to set me straight or rant at me, they often broadened my scope and—the best of them, anyway—gave me ideas for new columns. And a columnist is always in need of ideas for the next column.
At Cranbrook School, in the vaulted dining room designed by Eliel Saarinen that we called the carbohydrate cathedral, the standard grace before the meal was “Make us ever mindful of the needs of others.” In the reverberating din of three hundred boys reciting that prayer, some of us would say instead, “Make us needful of the minds of others.” A juvenile quip, sure, but also an essential precept for all intellectual activity, one acutely necessary for a hack with space to fill every day (or in my case at the Journal, every other week).
After the barbecue cover, I received a helpful e-mail from Charles Perry of Birmingham, Alabama, who claimed most persuasively that I had unaccountably neglected the barbecued ribs of his region.
He wrote: “In a small town outside of Birmingham, Cahaba Heights (now part of the suburb of Vestavia), there lies a dark, carbon encrusted pit … surrounded by a quaint brick structure with concrete slab floors and grease stained walls from years of preparing some of the best slow-cooked swine one could ingest. Miss Myra’s BBQ awaits your review …”
Who could resist such a pitch?
Perry and his friend Jordan Brooks took me to three extraordinary shrines of the barbecue art: one in Birmingham and two in Tuscaloosa, an hour away, where they both had graduated from the University of Alabama in the previous century. Of the three ’cue temples we visited, Miss Myra’s Pit Bar-B-Q, in Birmingham
, was easily the furthest from those shacks in the piney woods of Dixie where this most durable and rib-sticking of our regional cuisines was born. For example, it has a sculpture collection, a veritable museum of swine art consisting of hundreds of effigies of the genus Sus in all its pink, piggy majesty. This enthusiasm for porcine imagery didn’t prevent the cheerful staff at Miss Myra’s from subjecting the racks of a multitude of hogs to a moist indirect heat that produced ribs better than any I had eaten anywhere up until that moment. Miss Myra’s also turned out a sublime barbecued chicken and served white sauce (spicy mayo with vinegar).
We pressed on toward Tuscaloosa and the University of Alabama campus, holy ground for my hosts. “Can’t you feel your pulse quicken?” Perry asked me when we were still twenty miles away. Once there, we drove around the campus, stopping at the football stadium. “You’ll want to take your shoes off now,” Brooks announced. He was only half kidding. We paid our respects to full-length life-size statues of all the Alabama football coaches who’d had national championships, notably Paul “Bear” Bryant, in coat, tie and fedora, looking stern.
Then, like thousands of students and alumni, we went to Dreamland for ribs. The restaurant was founded in Tuscaloosa in 1958 by the aptly named John “Big Daddy” Bishop. On football Saturdays, Dreamland loyalists wait two and three hours to be served in this small but densely decorated unofficial adjunct of the university athletic department. The ribs are worth waiting for. Hickory gives them a milder smokiness than the post oak used in Texas, so Dreamland’s pit turns out a subtler taste of fire with peppy seasoning. And there is no white-boning; the ribs pull off the rack without falling off the bone, the classic indication of ideal doneness. Getting ribs to that point requires constant diligence and lots of poking around in a hot pit.
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