Other than discovering at the last second that we were out of garlic and doubling the recipe, I made this without modification. Delicious– especially with bread and butter.
Category: Cooking
#Nashville: Final food post
So we decided to go to Jack’s Bar-B-Q last night. Me and four of my colleagues, packed into my rental car which, as it turns out, does not have a middle seatbelt in the back seat. Whoops. Nashville in general is a horrifying tangle of highways, right? It’s confusing as hell. And downtown Nashville at first did not appear to have much going for it. Until we hit the neighborhood where the restaurant was:
Oh. So this is where Nashville’s nightlife is. And there was some sort of major concert going on tonight, so there were millions of people out– look at the upper left of the picture to see the size of the crowds on the street.
Eventually we found a spot in a parking garage and left. Then my boss pointed out the door we’d walked through:
This door has no external handle. Once it’s closed, you can’t get back through it. Because it’s secret, you see. So we were gonna have to figure out another way to get back to the car on the way home.
Finding Jack’s wasn’t hard, and the live music blaring from literally every door on the block made waiting in the holy-shit-people-are-you-kidding line worthwhile. The reason finding Jack’s wasn’t that hard is that the line extended out the door and halfway down the block.
(Not pictured: a hundred people behind us.)
Once we got inside I saw this sign, which I post here, and also on Facebook, without comment:
Right before we got our food, I turned around and took a picture of the line behind us, which hadn’t exactly gotten smaller. Remember, this gets outside, turns right, and goes on for another couple hundred feet:
Now, a genuinely weird, if oddly convenient, thing about this place: their service was slow as hell, which partially accounts for the length of the line– but also meant that finding a table wasn’t terribly difficult, because people were tending to eat and go.
I got a combo platter again. Brisket, sausage, and pork shoulder, plus a piece of something called “chess pie” at the recommendation of my assistant principal, who grew up in Tennessee:(*)
Apparently something happened to my eyes when I had my first bite of chess pie. I want to marry chess pie. The barbecue was goddamned delicious as well. Even the cornbread in the corner, which doesn’t look like much, was pretty good. The food made the endless wait well worth it.
And then we went to the Parthenon. Which doesn’t seem like a sentence that I should be ending an article about barbecue with. Did you know that Nashville has a full-size replica of the Goddamn Parthenon? Because it does:
The food made the trip worth it.
The end.
(*) True thing: spellcheck just tried to tell me that “Tennessee” was incorrect, the little wiggly line not going away until I removed an S. I double-checked, feeling that perhaps I’d lost my mind, and fixed the spelling back to how I’d had it to begin with. Weird.
In which #Nashville redeems itself
It is known: if you cast a net and ask “Where shall I eat?” and then you see the same place mentioned by more than one person, and those people cannot reasonably be suspected to have colluded, you should probably try and eat at that place.
To wit: Nashville’s Loveless Cafe. Which is, as it turns out, really far away from my hotel, meaning that if I hadn’t rented a car there’d be no way for me to have gotten there, which justifies renting the car all by itself.
Worth.
It.
I am moving, children. I’m going to move into the parking lot of this restaurant and just live in a tent and eat there every day. The conference has been a bust so far, and I do not suspect that tomorrow will be better than today was. Dinner has redeemed the entire trip.
That is what they call the Southern Sampler Platter, which meant that I didn’t really have to choose what I wanted to eat; I could just say “Bring me everything!”
Ham. Fried chicken. Fried catfish. Hush puppies. Turnip greens in potlikker. Caramel sweet potatoes– oh, my Lord God, the sweet potatoes. Not pictured: some melt-in-your-mouth motherfucking biscuits. And sweet tea, of course.
Seriously, people, I could live off the sweet potatoes– and, oddly, the ham, which I was not expecting to be the star of the meal. “Ham’s ham” is something I might have said before eating that ham. Ham is no longer ham.
Tomorrow we are going for barbecue. I haven’t picked a place yet– I’m leaning toward Martins— but definitely barbecue.
(The conference has been crowded and hot and over way too big of an area and the conference center sorta sucks and the sessions I want to go to keep getting filled up before I get there or there are physical space issues that make me unwilling to stay. I’m not happy with the conference, at all. But oh man, did dinner make up for it. So happy.)
(Despite two straight “oddities” posts, I have no gripes about the hotel. It entertains me in places, but it’s fine.)
(Parentheses!)
Oh, almost forgot– our waiter’s name was Owen. Well, is Owen, as I’m pretty sure he’s still alive. Owen was an awesome guy, the type of server who makes a meal better. Hooray for Owen!
One more try
I’ve tried this move several times on Twitter, to no effect, and figure I may as well post this here before I live: any Nashville folks reading this? Anywhere I should make sure to go while I’m in town? In particular, I want to eat things I can’t eat here.
In which I am ambivalent
I had fried for dinner. It doesn’t even matter what the hell was fried; the point is it was fried.
And now, half an hour later, in full accordance with prophecy, I’m contemplating vegetarianism again. I’ve done a veggie week or two at a couple of points, and every so often I catch myself toying with the idea of trying it on a more long-term basis. The problem is that I like meat, and that– and I recognize that the answer to this is “cook at home more”– acquiring lunch near where I work that does not include meat is virtually impossible. But you know what plant-based meals have never done to me? Made me feel horrifying and gross and I’m going to die soon and like it, and my fourteen pounds of fried that I just ate are doing just that.
Ugh. I’ve ben fatter and I’ve been thinner at various points in my life, especially over the last eight years or so where I’ve gone through at least two complete cycles of it, but right now I’m at the fatter end of the scale. Time to start slimming down again one way or another because I am sick of this shit right now and the older I get the harder it’s going to be to reverse this on even a temporary couple-of-years level.
But goddammit, meat tastes good. Fried tastes good.
Until the part where it makes you want to throw up.
Ecch.
In other news, I appear to have survived two days of Running the Building, and tomorrow is a teacher record day and there will be no kids around. I’m only expecting to be at work for a half day but it’s possible that my boss will disabuse me of that notion later this evening. I rather hope that he sensibly declares that he doesn’t care so long as Shit Gets Done, which is his usual MO, because I sort of have people coming over tomorrow to put in a new garage door opener. I probably ought to actually be in the house for that.
Yesterday was startlingly easy, if tiring. We paid for it today. It’s not quite worth two-hours-of-ranting-and-six-thousand-words paying for it, but it was bad enough. I’m tired as hell right now. Time to watch TV and kill orcs.
Mushroom & chickpea curry!
OM NOM NOM
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