Best Food Writing 2014 (54 page)

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 convention 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.

Tom has a theory about most things in Silver City, including the Curious Kumquat, where he and Consuelo are regular customers. “I say Rob's food is a sort of joke,” he says. “Rob hates when I say that, but it's true. He deconstructs the food, and then he reconstructs it. And what you end up with is a pun—what you're eating is not what you're eating.” I think of the mozzarella balls that are actually corn shoot panna cotta, the pomegranate boba that look like caviar. “
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
is his favorite movie. You look at that movie, and you can figure out what he's doing in the kitchen.” (Watching the film later, I am at a loss. I wonder who is being fed pages of his own books, and who is being cooked and eaten.)

Tom's theory about Silver City is oddly similar to his theory about the Kumquat: it's like a giant pun. Picture a copper mining nestled in the Gila Mountains just east of the continental divide. The northernmost city in Grant County, it's not on the way to anywhere, excepting
the Gila National Forest, whose cliff dwellings and hot springs draw light tourism. Founded in 1870, Silver City looks like other small western cities, but unlike most, it was never a railroad town—more of a loading dock for ore. There wasn't so much as a switchback; trains had to back sixty miles into the station.

Speaking to outsiders, citizens of Silver City frequently cite this isolation as a reason why so many diverse populations can live alongside one another peacefully. Conservative Anglo-Protestant ranchers, Catholic Hispanic miners, liberal hippie retirees, gay artists, and spiritual seekers attracted to the Sufi retreat outside of town—they live and work side by side in the tiny town that dead-ends in the Gila Mountains. As Rob says, “It's so small and so isolated that people have to get along. If they don't like gay men, where are they going to eat?”

Where most see isolation from the outside world, however, Tom Hester sees forgotten money trails and political influence that have fueled internal conflicts since the town's inception. Tom has picked apart the town history, deconstructed it down to its basic units of old newspaper clips, correspondence, deeds, and ledgers. And when he reconstructs it again, it is not diversity that he sees, but divisions—lasting, bitter, and often silent. Mexican mineworkers may no longer be relegated to Chihuahua Hill, where running water and paved streets were scarce into the twentieth century, but there is still a stark racial divide between the historic downtown district, where the houses all have wind chimes and colorful pendants and hand-tiled walls, and the outskirts, where Hispanic miners and service workers form a second city marked by the presence of a Walmart and a strip of sagging motels with kitschy signs.

In the late 1940s, Silver City was the site of a famous mining strike, an incident that divided the town: striking Mexican miners and the Catholic church on one side, Anglo-Protestant miners and bosses on the other. The sheriff eventually buckled to pressure from New York investors to crack down on the labor unions, and a court order against the miners took them away from the picket lines. The miners' wives, however, took over the strike, and were eventually arrested and marched to the county jail in a public relations disaster, some with small children in tow. Director Herbert Biberman, one of
the Hollywood Ten and an avowed Communist sympathizer, came to Silver City shortly afterward to film a barely fictionalized movie version of the strike. Biberman cast most of the parts with original participants, including union leader Juan Chacon as the character based on himself. Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas, who played the female lead, was deported during the making of the film; it had to be finished with a body double. The film only screened once in New York in 1954, just long enough for Pauline Kael to hate it and Bosley Crowthers to like it, before it was locked away, the only film to be blacklisted in the U.S.

A few years ago there was a symposium on the film at the Silver City Museum. Aging white labor organizer Clinton Jencks (who played the character based on himself in the movie) gave a moving speech, which was recorded by the museum. Some of the Mexican women who had participated in the strike itself were at the symposium too, but their panel, held in soft-spoken Spanish, was not recorded. Meanwhile, Tyler informs me that a local storytelling project is getting nowhere with the Hispanic population, because those old enough to tell the stories aren't talking. “They know better,” he says. “You don't tell those stories to white people. White people don't want to hear them.”

As for the more recently arrived inhabitants of Silver City—the hippies, the artists, the retirees, the gays—they are an awkward fit with the town's most established residents, the low-income mineworkers and libertarian ranchers who do not appreciate efforts to protect the endangered wolf population, among other things.

It was the Fourth of July when I first discovered the Curious Kumquat. The bed-and-breakfast where I was staying was tricked out with red-white-and-blue ribbons. My friend and I were searching for a restaurant that would be open on the holiday, and the proprietor pressed a few flyers for local restaurants into our hands. One photocopied menu on the side table caught my eye—
venison, foraged greens
—and we asked about it.

She shrugged. “Oh, that's that new place.” (At the time, the Kumquat had been in operation for five years.) “It's kind of strange.” She pointed to another menu. “This is where the locals go. You know, that other restaurant isn't even open half the time. You have to call. No, I wouldn't go there.”

•

It's the big night, the night that Rob has been stressing out about so much that he canceled lunch earlier that day—the second time in eight years.

At the Javalina, Tom Hester may have held court, but at the Curious Kumquat, his wife Consuelo reigns supreme, wrapped in a fur with a big sparkling butterfly brooch. I am given the seat of honor right across from her at the long table where many of Tyler and Rob's church friends are sitting. Throughout the meal, Consuelo gets special treatment; Rob brings her an extra bite of her favorite course, spoonfuls of experimental sauce that didn't make it into the dinner. She tells me that when she and Tom first started eating at the Kumquat, she used to play a guessing game, deciphering Rob's puns into their distinct flavors. She describes her first encounter with boba, the translucent balloons of flavor formed by hydrocolloids that look like large caviar. Consuelo put one in her mouth, thought and thought, and finally said, “It tastes like beets.” From that day forward she has been his champion taster.

As courses begin coming to the table, Consuelo concentrates on the task at hand. She holds each bite in her mouth for a moment, chews and swallows it carefully, then methodically eradicates the sauce, using her fingers to clean the dish down to its original Ikea whiteness. Then she pronounces. The chocolate-dipped aloo gobi sitting in a puddle of scented butter is perfect. She adores the beet soup in a pint glass, although she can't taste the cacao smoke. She struggles a bit with the salmon-stuffed cocoa ravioli wreathed with strands of bitter moss in a pool of murky squid ink, then points out that if you eat the moss in the same bite with the salmon they balance nicely. I agree; furthermore, sipping on the malbec pairing brings out a nice smoky flavor in the moss. The chocolate tamale topped with crunchy bits of caramelized black garlic is universally adored.

Then comes the main course: the goat with a rub of cocoa powder, peanuts, and vanilla beans, garnished with a beautiful fuchsia fleurette of beet foam. The taste is delicious, wild and rich, but the texture is sinister. Several are complaining that it's too rare. The atmosphere grows tense as knives and forks make screeching noises on the plates, mingled with the sound of silver clinking to a resting position as, one by one, the more delicate constituents of the United
Church of Christ give up. When the server comes to the table, Consuelo draws herself up to her full height. “The goat did not go.”

“Didn't go?”

“Tough. Inedible.”

Tyler leans forward. “Sometimes with these local goats that's a problem,” he says. There's a brief chuckle over the phrase “local goats,” but it does not distract Consuelo from the matter at hand.

“Someone needs to tell Rob about
cabritos
,” she says. “The young goats.”

By now Rob himself has appeared in the doorway. “It
is
young! Like, four months.”

“No, no, I'm talking about two months. Two or three weeks, even.
Cabrito
.”

“This isn't Mexico,” Rob says impatiently, and disappears to chitchat with the other room, which is filled with strangers and tourists.

Rob always talks to each table, even when the restaurant is packed, and he remembers most of their names. It makes every guest feel special; plus it helps him sell wine, which is where Rob's restaurant makes its money. (At $44 for the standard seven-course tasting dinner and a $5 discount for locals, he certainly isn't making it off the food.) In the kitchen yesterday, Rob boasted about his tableside manner, but a moment later admitted he desperately needs the positive feedback. “If they're not gushing when they leave, I haven't done my job,” he says.

A few minutes later, Rob pokes his head back in and says, “By the way, the other room loves the goat.” Consuelo rolls her eyes.

Near the end of the meal, everyone at the table has had a fair bit of wine and a lot of food, even the ones who skipped the goat. Rob appears every once in a while to sag, exhausted, against the doorframe, and then disappears into the other room to talk up the folks who are visiting from out of town.

Tom Hester, who is sitting on my right side, begins to reminisce about the parties Rob and Tyler used to throw before they opened up the restaurant. “Tell her about the cheese club,” Tom calls across the table to Tyler, who is sitting near the end.

Years ago, when they owned a gourmet grocery store down the street in a space that is now the Yada Yada Yarn Store, Rob and Tyler had a
cheese club. Tyler says they were getting drunk over dinner one night and lamenting the lack of good cheese in town. Tipsy, Rob decided they should start a club. “We could call it the Cut the Cheese Club,” he suggested. “Our motto will be, ‘We Have a Friend in Cheeses.'”