#Nashville: Final food post

On November 8, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, Stories5 Comments

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

On November 6, 2014November 6, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking5 Comments

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!

The more you know: Essential addendum

On September 17, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews1 Comment

Maybe an hour after eating the Arby’s Smokehouse Brisket Sandwich, you start sweating Arby’s Smokehouse Brisket Sandwich Sweat out of the pores of your nose, which is not a terribly pleasant experience. Note that the Arby’s Smokehouse Brisket Sandwich is not actually terribly oily (I’m blaming the gouda, for no damn good reason) so the Brisket Sweats I’ve been experiencing for the last couple of hours are both confusing and somewhat inexplicable.

Perhaps this is one of those rare “wash your face after eating” types of sandwiches.

Oh: fingers, also. My fingers smell like brisket. I swear I’m generally clean. It’s the sandwich.

Still tasty, though.

The more you know

On September 17, 2013September 17, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reviews, Teaching1 Comment

memphis-bbq-beautiful-ladies-closer

First, a brief public service announcement: the Arby’s Smokehouse Brisket Sandwich is… how do you say it? “Mad tasty, yo?” Is that right? I think that’s how the kids talk nowadays. What I mean to say is that I enjoyed eating it.

People who respond to this by suggesting that I should buy a smoker and make my own brisket and stop eating brisket from Arby’s are going to be alternately mocked, ignored, or set on fire, depending on my mood, just so you know. 🙂

(The young ladies in the picture to the right are not eating an Arby’s Smokehouse Brisket Sandwich; that appears to be some sort of cheeseburger. Hey, it’s what Google gave me. Blame Google. Not me.)

Public service announcement ends.

Apparently we have hit the point where all of the students who understand that I break up fights immediately and prejudicially have left the building, because I’ve broken up three in the gym so far this year, after going an entire school year without having to do it once. The one yesterday was particularly bad since the rest of the seventh and eighth grade girls behaved as if they were at a goddamned WWE match, causing me to hold every last one of their asses in the gym after dismissing everyone else and read them the riot act, including the phrase “I am sick of your shit.” While it might surprise you given my vocabulary in other situations, I don’t often swear (by which I mean, I almost never swear) in front of my kids, and when I do do it, it’s fully calculated and for effect one hundred percent of the time. “I am sick of this,” they wouldn’t have heard. I am sick of your shit made it into every teenage skull in the room. I dispelled another situation this morning before it escalated to the level of a fight, and I think I was able to do that mostly because of the tongue-lashing from yesterday.

Hopefully, tomorrow will slide by with little to no drama.

He said.

(An aside: I’ve been listening to Gnarls Barkley while writing this– I’m not a huge fan and don’t listen to the CD often, but it popped into my head the other day so it’s still up on iTunes. One of their songs begins with someone chanting “wake up wake up,” which reminded me that I really like Bone Thugz-n-Harmony, and now I’m listening to 1st of tha Month. Which kind of entertains me. Also: Your rent’s due, motherfucker.)

(A second aside: One of the tags on this post was suggested by WordPress, and I’m predicting this post gets twice as many views as normal because of it. See if you can guess which one!)

I think that’s about it so I’m going to close with a picture of Seth Greene and his wife, because HOW THE HELL IS THAT HIS WIFE.