Best Food Writing 2013 (3 page)

To get a handle on the Big American Food Picture, feature writer and essayist Brett Martin travels coast-to-coast, a roving cultural investigator for publications such as
GQ, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Bon Appétit,
and
Food & Wine.
His diagnosis? It's all good.

A
nd so here we are, under the arc lights, under the Southern California stars, on a picture-perfect summer evening in America. The kids are arriving, headlights swinging slowly down La Brea, down Beverly. They're cruising, looking for parking, checking out the scene at the car wash and gas station on the corner.

I myself am driving a brand-new, bright-red Ford F-150 pickup truck. This feels important. If you've never been in one of these monsters, it's hard to describe how mighty and right it makes you feel. You understand why men who drive trucks drive like assholes:
(a)
There's a good chance that, despite mirrors the size of a normal human car's hubcaps, they simply don't see other vehicles.
(b)
In some larger, existential sense, all other vehicles have ceased to exist. Driving an F-150 makes you want to run over smaller, lesser cars. It makes you want to invade smaller, lesser countries.

So, with all this fine American muscle rumbling underneath me, I roll up to The Truck Stop. Except, for all its
American Graffiti
trappings, this is no temple to car culture. The pumps are covered. A handwritten sign reads “no gas.” The shiny, souped-up vehicles everybody's lining up to see aren't here for a drag race. And those beautiful
kids may have youthful hunger in their eyes, but not, it would seem, for young love. A couple, he in black-on-black Yankees cap, she in Snooki sweats and flip-flops, wander arm in arm between the idling trucks. “Ohmigod,” she squeals as they approach one. “Those homemade pierogies are uh-mazing.” They kiss.

Elsewhere, they're lining up for lobster rolls at the Lobsta Truck; for artisanal Pittsburgh-style “Sammies” at Steel City Sandwich; for salad, of all things, at the Flatiron Truck: butter lettuce and heirloom carrots sliced mandoline thin, tossed with mustard vinaigrette, and topped with pieces of steak marinated in star anise, cooked
sous vide,
finished on the grill, and sent off with a puff of shiitake-mushroom dust. If there's a muse here, an avatar presiding over all this transmutation of energy to young America's stomach from organs slightly farther south, it's the mud-flap girl emblazoned on the most popular truck in the lot. She's a classic: in recline, chest thrust forward, dewy lips lifted and parted to receive—yes, ah yes—a Gruyère and double-cream-Brie grilled cheese sandwich.

But you know this. You've been there, or some version of there. Food trucks have become to food scenes what porcupines are said to be to a forest: a sign that you've got a healthy, vibrant ecosystem at work. And by the time I stood before The Grilled Cheese Truck, midway through a monthlong journey from sea to shining sea, I could already state without equivocation that the nation's food ecosystem was thriving. I'd had magnificent meals in an airport and in a hospital. My coastal urban bigotry had been undermined by amazing eating in small out-of-the-way cities. Just that morning, on a seedy stretch of the Venice Beach boardwalk, where the air hangs heavy with the smell of medical marijuana and white-man's dreads, I had breakfasted on artisanal bread pudding and Blue Bottle coffee from a closet-sized counter squirreled amid the henna-tattoo and cheap-sunglass shops.

It had long since become clear that the fortuitous collision of political, philosophical, health, and fashion movements that together form the Food Revolution had, over the past decade, penetrated nearly every corner of American life. We are now a nation with so many farmers' markets that
The New York Times
has reported that
farmers
are getting a little worried. A nation in which phrases like
“Kosher in Fargo?” or “Filipino in Detroit?”—which once would have been failed pitches for fish-out-of-water sitcoms—are now perfectly reasonable queries on foodie boards. We the people have come to rely on, indeed feel entitled to, good food
everywhere.

Given the generally blah economic climate, what, it's fair to ask, exactly the hell is going on? How to square the seemingly unstoppable upward trajectory of our eating lives with the supposed downward trajectory of nearly everything else?

The first and most obvious answer is that this is another reflection of the enormous gap between rich and poor. After all, at the same time some of us engage in quests for the perfect
taco al pastor,
obesity and hunger stalk the land—often, in a perverse histori-nutritional anomaly, side by side. Where I live, in New Orleans, is a so-called “food desert” where locals are hard-pressed to buy a fresh lemon, much less a Meyer lemon.

But while the Food Revolution may have started as an indulgence of the boom years, it was just as finely tuned to the crash and sluggish present. It is, first of all, a movement built on entrepreneurs—a generation of countercultural capitalists created, at least in part, by the lack of more traditional, stable work. You start cooking in trucks, don't forget, when you can't afford brick-and-mortar rent. The foods of the movement, meanwhile, though not cheap, tend to be those that soothe: fatty, melty, salty, sweet. Comfort foods. It's no surprise that the flavors ascendant over the past ten years are so often rooted in the cuisines of Italy, Asia, and the American South—places that have long made a virtue of elevating the simple foods of poverty. And the ethics espoused—local, community-based, anti-corporate, anti-industrial—are those of an uneasy population reaching for an idealized past. It just happens to be one of the moment's many dozen paradoxes that the path there is paved with $20 plates of truffled mac and cheese and an endless series of better and better pizzas.

Not long ago, a nice 85-year-old lady from Grand Forks, North Dakota, wrote an earnest review of a new branch of the Olive Garden in the
Grand Forks Herald.
Marilyn Hagerty had been filing reviews for the paper for decades without incident, but this one was picked up and ridiculed by food bloggers. It quickly went viral,
becoming another weird semiotic data point in the cyclone of lash and backlash that makes up the electronic food conversation.

In truth, the to-do was less about the provincialism of food than it was about the provincialism of newspapers. But it was notable mostly for how anachronistic it felt. Years ago, Calvin Trillin coined “La Maison de la Casa House” to identify the interchangeable “good restaurant” in any given town. Today's version of that eatery will feature warm, modern design employing lots of wood and recessed lighting. There will be a large bar and a TV, just to hedge its bets with more conservative locals. It will have a blackboard on which are listed the various sources of its ingredients. The menu, too, will read like a 4-H register, so loaded will it be with the names of various farms. It will offer dishes that vacillate between ambition and comfort and probably err on the side of piling too many ingredients on one plate. It will be called something like Market Table Tasting Market, or perhaps Loin, and it will stand a decent chance of actually being good.

That is to say that the coasts and big cities long ago gave up their monopoly on good food scenes. I saw that while eating simple roasted carrots painted with honey at the Red Feather Lounge in Boise, Idaho, and a deep-fried fish head at Jolie in Lafayette, Louisiana. I tasted it in a smoky barrel-aged Manhattan at Frog Hollow Tavern in Augusta, Georgia, and in the Imperial Slam Dunk—a triple shot of Earl Grey tea, brewed with maple syrup and quince paste and topped with a shot of espresso—at MadCap Coffee in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a town once commonly referred to as “Bland Rapids,” as if the official nickname, “the Furniture City,” didn't convey a sufficient sense of white-breaditude. I could see it in the glistening smoked brisket covered in hickory-hoisin sauce and served on focaccia from the Bone-In Artisan BBQ truck, parked at the farmers' market in Columbia, South Carolina, where one could also buy small-batch artisanal sea salts with a food-pairing guide—surely some decadent edge of food worship.

It's a fair bet that the average supermarket in North Dakota is better today—offering healthier, fresher, and more varied choices—than the same store was in New York City twenty years ago. The idea that there was a fine restaurant to be found in Grand Forks would be less surprising than the notion that all there was to review there was an Olive Garden. We've become a country without a Peoria.

At the Boise, Idaho, airport, a sign welcomed me to the “City of Trees.” Out the window I could see nothing but dusty, camel-colored hills with a few straggly specimens sticking up like broken toothbrush bristles. Feeling very small and truckless in my Ford Fusion, I headed downtown.

I had come to Boise because I had heard you could get a great cocktail there. Indeed, considering that there is nothing for 350 miles in any direction and that one of those directions is Utah, it's shocking to report that there's actually something of a cocktail war in effect between two businesses there: the aforementioned Red Feather and The Modern Hotel and Bar, a onetime Travelodge that's been transformed into a boutique hotel. In addition to the
de rigueur
high-thread-count sheets, flat-screen TVs, and an exterior that looks like it's been beamed in from East Hampton, that now means sophisticated food and drink programs.

The latter is run by Michael Bowers. He is a serious 27-year-old gay man with thick-rimmed glasses and a tattoo of modern composer Arnold Schoenberg's name on his forearm. In other words, precisely the kind of person who, until recently, would have automatically migrated to one of the coasts to follow his passions. A local boy whose cocktail experience was once limited to drinking mai tais, Bowers had a scales-falling-from-his-eyes moment over a Ward 8 (rye, grenadine, lemon and orange juices) at the bar Milk & Honey in New York. Instead of staying, though, he returned home committed to bringing Boise serious drinks. He researched recipes on cocktail blogs, learned to shake and stir from YouTube. Most important—because the spread of good food is a conspiracy of producer and consumer—he was confident he would find customers.

He has—though not totally without some necessary education. “The first time we did an egg-white drink, Boise wasn't ready,” Bowers says. Both The Modern and Red Feather print drink menus that could double as reference works. Whenever someone orders a boring vodka drink, Bowers politely suggests substituting a Cameron's Kick, a startlingly light and friendly concoction made from scotch, Irish whiskey, lemon juice, and orgeat. Switching scotch for vodka is one decent definition of culinary cojones, but Bowers reports a 99 percent success rate.

Of course, he's not laboring alone in raising the standards of his neighbors. By the time they sit down at The Modern, they've probably already heard the word
mixology
on TV. They've already seen, on
Top Chef,
something like Bowers's technique for drawing the essential oils out of coffee beans by setting them on fire. They've followed blog posts from friends' trips to Portland and Seattle. They're demanding quality even if they've never tasted it before. I recently had a conversation with a discerning eater and drinker who spends a good deal of time on the road. He'd just watched an episode of
Portlandia
for the first time and said, “It's set in Portland, but I see people like that—who are interested in the same things—everywhere I go.” Given that the man was John Flansburgh of the hipster-nerd heroes They Might Be Giants, this was a little like Jennifer Aniston reporting that one out of every two human beings is a paparazzo. But he was onto something: Mere geography, as a determining factor in how we dress, what we watch, what we listen to, and yes, what we eat, has all but lost its sway.
Portlandia
wouldn't be especially funny if, in some way, we all didn't live there.

In Boise, I remember eventually sitting before a skyline of empty glasses, each having contained some spirit or combination of spirits Bowers just had to have me try. I remember eating some ethereal gnocchi from The Modern's kitchen. I remember discussing organic gardening at a table containing an MFA student, a philosophy professor, a farmer, and a belly dancer. And I remember finally plummeting into bed with a final thought that I felt reasonably confident had never been thought before: that I'd had such a good time in Boise, I'd have nothing left for Las Vegas.

Vegas! You didn't think we could avoid Vegas? Vegas is such a ruthless beast of commodification—its hungry tendrils relentlessly probing American culture to see what can be turned into fresh dollars—that it is always important. Eating in Las Vegas was once strictly about signifiers of the good life—prime rib! lobster tail! king-crab legs!—at rock-bottom prices. Then the casinos got hip to the fact that high-end food had become something that gamblers would want to spend money on, another badge like Gucci or Chanel; in came the first generation of celebrity chefs, who were handed blank checks,
glitzy spaces, and little obligation to be present past opening weekend. The food, while more important than the bad old buffet days, was still secondary to the flash.

And now? I headed for The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, branded as the Strip's first hipster casino, which is another way of saying a fifty-two-story memorial to the Death of Hipsterism. I passed by video art of botanical prints in the lobby and rode an elevator playing Devendra Banhart up to the high-end food court area. At Jaleo, José Andrés's tapas and molecular-gastronomy restaurant, I noshed on buttery
jamón ibérico
and wobbly science-fiction-like reverse-spherified olives—the modern answers to prime rib. But across the way, at the dark, quiet bar of a genetically engineered replica of Scott Conant's New York Italian joint, Scarpetta, I ate a tangle of perfectly cooked pasta, topped with a fresh tomato sauce and ribbons of torn basil. Not long ago, nearly anywhere in America, such a dish would have been found on a children's menu, if at all. That it holds pride of place on a menu in the most
au courant
casino on the strip is as revolutionary as finding fine food in one-time gourmet wastelands. It does, though, raise the same question that hovers over the new Korean Steak Tacos to be found at T.G.I. Friday's, or over Domino's Pizza's no-substitution “Artisan” pizzas: Who's winning? Has the Food Revolution really changed the corporate food business, or has it just provided it with new slogans? The cynic in me might assume the latter, but it was the optimist running his finger around the bowl to catch the last bits of sauce at Scarpetta.