I take pride in my ability to operate beyond the habit of “point-and-eat” food blogging.
The day Pies n Thighs returned to Williamsburg – opening its doors one block from my front door and mere hours after the Week of Eating In had ended – was no occasion for pride. It was an occasion for nonstop [...]
This unscheduled post is part of the 93 Plates project.
You can read Hagan Blount’s post on this meal here.
At 8:00 p.m. on a January night, the stretch of Utica Ave. between Foster and Clarendon is a bleak row of auto repair shops, huge, rusted banners hanging over shuttered garages and the occasional fading light fixture. [...]
When I tell people I’m going home for the holidays, I mean to say two things:
1. I’ve booked a flight to Los Angeles.
2. Once I’m in Los Angeles, I’ll get the Hell out and make tracks for the East Bay.
3. My appetite is expanding to Homeric proportions.
I’ll be the first to defend the city of [...]
My host father in Moscow, a self-described “independent contractor,” had a lot of business in the South. He’d go on extended trips to the Ukraine and Georgia, often not returning for weeks. When finally he did return, he’d have fruit baskets in hand, and our apartment would be covered in dozens of persimmons, plums or [...]
James Howell has been working as one of the main pit cooks of Pete Jones’ BBQ, AKA The Skylight Inn, in Ayden, North Carolina, for about fifteen years. The day I spent with him and the rest of Pete Jones’ staff in October of 2009 will figure heavily into a proposal I’m writing for a [...]
Last weekend I went to North Carolina with Joon and The Inspector for the 26th annual Lexington BBQ Festival.
Departing from Alexandria, we cruised down I-95 toward the holy land of traditional American barbecue. A detour towards the Skylight Inn promptly resulted in our getting lost for an hour and a half in Eastern [...]
After almost a year away from the Deep South, I’m finally back in North Carolina. I’ll be bouncing around the state for the better part of a week, tearing through the Hold Steady catalogue and conducting small n research for what I hope will be the book proposal that gets me a publisher’s ear in [...]
When you’re as obsessive about food as I am, it’s tempting to eat your way to clarity. Pizza crusts exist in constellations, hamburgers form concluding paragraphs, and frozen yogurt opens a window into economic impulses. Overwriting ensues.
BBQ is far from exempt when it comes to the feedback loop between thought and appetite. After reaching a [...]
I’m fascinated by the correlation between geography and how people eat fries.
McDonald’s is the great equalizer, fries-wise, spreading Heinz ketchup and individual packets of barbecue sauce all over the world, but I’ve run into enough fast food fare to know that the buck doesn’t always stop at McDonald’s, and people often save one or two [...]
Comrades,
I’m in a bit of a transition period right now, wrapping up work at one job, training for new responsibilities at another and suffering from a mysteriously potent and lingering amount of residual stress that has stopped me from tending to my writing duties. I hope to be back up to speed with a weekly [...]
