Rich Mintz  

I’ve always liked Nashville, a city big enough to be interesting and livable but still small enough to be easily managed. Like Atlanta, it’s historically been a crossroads, crisscrossed by intersecting road and rail lines; like Atlanta, it’s culturally significant beyond its geographic size. But it doesn’t have the sense of boomtown self-importance that Atlanta has, and perhaps as a result, it never grew quite as big or as traffic-choked. Nice place.

The last time I was in Nashville was in 2004, stumping for Wes Clark on the day of the Tennessee primary. At the left edge of the photo at right you see a highway overpass I stood on with a gigantic “Clark04″ sign, near the White Castle (also visible) where I had the first (and, I hope, only) White Castle burger of my life. On that visit, I remember eating at Noshville and at Jack’s Bar-B-Que, and so on this short visit, I looked forward to a good meal or two.

For dinner I went back to Jack’s and had, basically, one of everything (see photo below), This is the kind of barbecue I really like — not perfect and precious and artisanal like Hill Country, not industrial like Corky’s or Sticky Fingers or Red Hot & Blue, not “is that a piece of snout?” like the South Carolina Lowcountry places I’ve tried, but just authentic and well-smoked and falling apart in pieces, not necessarily pretty but absolutely delicious. Even the chocolate pie was good. I’d venture to say this meal was as good as anything I ever had at Whole Hog, which is high praise. And of course I had about a thousand calories’ worth of sweet tea to go along with it.

The only place I know well that’s comparable is Williamson Bros in unincorporated Cobb just outside Marietta, Georgia (fun fact: Newt Gingrich used to have them cater his parties in Washington), which like Jack’s is family-run, smokes on the premises, and has looked just about the same for going on a century. Williamson is one of the few things that ever brought me to Cobb County voluntarily while I was living in Atlanta. (Looking for it? Head up 41, then take a right at the Big Chicken.)

This morning I got up early so I could make another stop, at the Pancake Pantry at the edge of the Vanderbilt campus, for what everyone promised me would be a solidly good breakfast. It was. When you have a really good soft buttermilk pancake, the kind that fills your mouth like peanut butter, you wonder why you ever bother eating the other kind. (Also, why do pancake houses make better bacon than anywhere else? I remember having perfect chewy slices like these from the Original Pancake House on Cheshire Bridge Road in Atlanta, and almost nowhere else.) By the time I left the Pantry, there were 30 people in line.

Now on the plane home, I’m having a diet Dr. Pepper, and I guess I’ll have another one for lunch, and another one for dinner.

More Nashville photos below.

Tonight was (and is) one of those nights with a steady rain that lasts for hours — not particularly forceful, but steady steady steady without a break. So I set out to bike home in the rain, for the first time (I thought), with my briefcase bundled on the rack tightly against the rain and a Yale Bulldogs slicker on that I borrowed from the office.

By the time I hit Second Avenue, I realized that I’d seen this movie before: back in 1988, when I bike-commuted from Belmont to East Cambridge along the Charles riverfront, I rode in moderate rain like this all the time and I liked it. And I remember that time, too, being surprised that it wasn’t as bad as I expected it would be. In the first five minutes, you get about as wet as you’re going to get, and by about the eighth minute, you’re used to it and you don’t particularly mind.

Tonight I did take a break, though. I took the Second Avenue separated bike lane because I figured it would be safer in the rain than lower Broadway, and on the spur of the moment I detoured one block in the East Village to Veniero’s to dry off with a macchiato and some pignioli cookies, which were delicious. Then I got back on the bike and rode home the rest of the way in steady rain.

Woke up a little early, so I biked the long way around (up the bikeway on Allen Street and 1st Avenue). There’s a bagel place up there at 21st and 1st that I’ve been meaning to try, given that it looks authentic (read “a bit tattered and grungy, but not necessarily in a bad way”). SERIOUSLY A GOOD IDEA. The bagel boiler and oven are in plain view right behind the counter, and they’re selling ‘em almost as fast as they can make ‘em.

As bagel snobs go, I’m not a particularly virulent one (as you know, I grew up in Los Angeles in the 1970s, where good bagels were not unheard of but where the bar was pretty low). But I can tell the difference between a good bagel and a meh one, and between a meh one and one that came out of an industrial extruder. I know about the yeasty aroma, I know about the steam coming off the dough when you crack it open, I know about the slick and crunchy outside and the chewy inside.

So imagine my joy to discover that just by asking, I could bike away with a dozen steamy-hot specimens that were still steamy-hot when I got to the office, where I just ate two of them in rapid succession with a thin layer of cream cheese. You mean this has been on my way to work all this time and I’ve never stopped?

I’ve never really liked flour tortillas much. They not only seem inauthentic but also tend to leave me with a heaviness in the stomach like I’ve eaten a lump of greasy meal. For that reason, the “wraps” craze never really made sense to me. But a warm, fresh aromatic corn tortilla is something else entirely.

I happened to have corn tortillas twice while I was in San Diego, and they were nothing like the chewy bits of dryish leather you buy in the supermarket. They were unusually delicious — a little sweet, substantive, perfectly warmed — and reminded me what a versatile and satisfying basic foodstuff a well-prepared tortilla is. No wonder an entire cuisine is built around it.

Given where I was, it’s unlikely that I was eating tortillas hand-pounded from fresh masa and griddled over artisanal elderwood — they were just tortillas professionally made in an incrementally less industrial environment than the big national brands, served to me relatively soon after manufacture, and properly warmed in a steamer. So when I get back to New York, I’m going in search of better tortillas, starting with these tips from Serious Eats and going on from there.  I’ll also buy some instant masa (as I do every few years) and try my hand at my own.

So if you’ve been following my tweets this week, you know I’ve been in Chicago. This time, rather than parking myself smack in the Loop or right on Michigan Avenue, I’m at a hotel a bit further north, near Chicago and LaSalle.  Surprisingly, this has put me within reach of great restaurants of the highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow variety, and I’ve tried a selection.

People say Chicago’s a great food town, and I have to agree.  In particular, I think you eat quite a bit better at the low end here than in a city like New York; this is a city with working-class roots and it still cooks like one.  Not that you can’t eat well in New York, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad meal in Chicago, and I’ve had plenty in New York.

When I got here I set out to eat a dozen char dogs, each in a different place, but I stopped after two, one from a Gold Coast counter inside a Popeye’s (!) and one from the street-food fantasy palace Portillo’s, which happens to be two blocks from my hotel.  You know what a Chicago char dog is; it’s a hot dog, split and burned on the grill, on a poppy-seed bun with mustard and heaped with what New Yorkers call “that crap,” i.e., tomato, onion, Martian-green pickle relish, etc.  Celery salt on top in your finer establishments.  Note that at all grades of establishment, the poppy seeds are not optional.

I’m a little surprised to report that the Gold Coast dog — the only thing I ever liked that I ate in a Popeye’s — outperformed Portillo’s, although the Portillo’s dog was nothing to be ashamed of. I still believe, though — as I tweeted earlier in the week — that Downtown Dogs at Chicago and Rush (which I didn’t visit on this trip) does a better one, and that Danny Meyer’s Shake Shack in Madison Square Park in New York City does the best.

Portillo’s wins, though, on the “cheap and delicious sweet thing” scale, with its $2.99 chocolate malt, which I am currently drinking my third of in three days.

So, aside from junk, what else did I eat? Well, I had 3 dinners worth reporting on.

The first was at Cafe Iberico, a block and a half from this hotel in a different direction.  For well under $100, a friend and I gorged ourselves on 7 different tapas dishes served in large portions from an endless menu, drank more sangria than we really wanted, and had dessert.  If I lived within reach of that place, I’d eat there once a week; it felt far more accessible than the “concept tapas” places that are proliferating in American restaurant districts. It had the vibe of a bustling Cuban restaurant near the Miami airport, except with spectacular Spanish food.

Then, last night, I went to Gino’s East, after half a dozen people threatened to unfriend me if I didn’t try Chicago-style pizza.  So I tried it. Verdict? Ehh. I mean, it was delicious, certainly, and it sure was different (it was like tomato soup in a bread bowl with a layer of sausage on the bottom).  I’d eat it and enjoy it if I were with a group of people who wanted it.  I might even order it once in a while as a change.  But if I never had it again, you know, I’d survive. So there it is.

Finally, tonight, to Club Lago, an Italian restaurant more Hoboken than Tuscany (ship’s wheel in the front door, American Flag in the back, red checked tablecloths, etc.).  This one also two blocks from this hotel in a different direction. (Everything in Chicago is apparently two blocks from everything else.)  I knew I’d made the right choice when the host came bounding up to me at the door and said “Come on in, we’ll fix you up.”  Riotous, good-natured crowd at the bar; healthy buzz of conversation; friendly, attentive service; good music.  I had the best fried zucchini and mushrooms of my life, a great big pile of pasta with passable meat sauce, and two glasses of wine, all for well under $40.

Here’s 20 seconds of video that I shot to give you a snippet of the background noise:

I wondered how well this technique would work on other slow-braised meats, like beef brisket. Turns out it’s delicious — just as good as with baby back ribs, maybe better — and even easier because you’re dealing with a flatter piece of meat.

I like the pot-roast method of preparing brisket just fine (there’s a recipe I picked up years ago that involves slathering the browned brisket in tomato paste, then laying it on a deep bed of sliced onions in the pot), and an advantage is that you end up with rich broth that you can turn into soup. But this new sweet-and-sour method is so good, and so easy, it’s going into rotation.

I’ve always thought of ribs (whether of the beef, pork, spare, or baby back variety) as something that Other People cooked — you know, people who weren’t cut until the fourth episode of Top Chef, or got a culinary degree like my brother, or had a grandfather with a little store out on US 78 near Bamberg. At the very least, I assumed you needed either a restaurant kitchen, or a pit in the sand, or an oil drum cut in half and a stack of artisanal Long Island willow branches, along with a bunch of knowledge I didn’t have the benefit of.

Obviously in a Mason-Dixon world, I’m a Yankee. But I lived in Atlanta off and on for years, and during that whole time I was dating a Southerner — not the sort of Southerner that lives out in Powder Springs and drives a pickup with a gun rack and listens to this, but the sort whose family is still living out in the rural Lowcountry of South Carolina, near where they’ve been for generations. And during that period I also spent months in Arkansas (which we’ll talk about another time), and driving back and forth via Birmingham and Memphis. And, besides, I came to Atlanta with an open mind (it’s a lot more fun that way), and so broadened my tastes in such close-to-the-heart matters as music, home decor, religion, politics, and food (come to think of it, that last link could have worked for “home decor,” too).

My childhood memories of “barbecue” were mostly of “ribs,” and with few exceptions, those were all of either the “Tony Roma’s” (i.e., charred and sinewy) or what New Yorkers would recognize as the “Dallas BBQ” (i.e., boiled and soused in what is essentially syrupy ketchup) variety. Meh.

I learned better barbecue habits when I came South: the sauce-ingredient loyalties that identify one as a partisan of a particular region, state, or in some cases county; what good ribs taste like, in about 40 incarnations in eight states; and what side dishes are worth bothering with. (Cole slaw, rarely, except at Newt Gingrich’s favorite Williamson Bros. in Marietta; cornbread, never within 10 miles of the Georgia State House except in restaurants established before 1950; collards, everywhere that bothers to offer them.)

However, until this week I never tried cooking ribs at home. By “never” I mean I tried it a few times when I was a young adult; the results were always absolutely awful; and I gave it up for 20 years. Let’s face it, ribs are tricky. You start with a rather intricate hunk of raw animal matter. You may need to do a bit of prep to trim off bits here and there, which is a turnoff for the squeamish (e.g., almost everyone under 70 living within a 10-mile radius of Times Square). You need a long cooking period, at a low heat, that keeps the meat moist enough but not too wet. And then there’s the near-religious question of rubs, seasonings, infusions, and/or sauces. It’s enough to make you throw up your hands and put a box of Trader Joe’s frozen macaroni and cheese in the oven.

But when I saw this story in the Times (for what it’s worth, the print paper) — and, in particular, this recipe — I decided to give it a shot. I’ve always had a weakness for a caramelized exterior on a rib (one reason I’m such a fan of Whole Hog, which fortunately was about a 2-minute drive from my Little Rock apartment, aka “Bates Motel Rock Vegas,” right around the corner from a real-live murder house!… but again I digress), and I wanted to see if I could pull it off.

Guess what? I could! And the recipe was not hard to follow, and is hard to ruin and easy to adapt to your taste and/or the sauce ingredients that happen to be on hand, and is so uncomplicated that once you’ve done it a first time, you can do it again from memory. Photo of part of the fresh-out-of-the-oven results at top (click for larger). Here’s what I learned:

Follow your instincts. I wanted something much spicier than the recipe called for, and because I had them on hand, I added both ajvar and Vietnamese chili-garlic sauce (in place of ketchup, which I don’t bother keeping in the house because I don’t go through a whole bottle of it in 3 years). I worried about the ajvar, since it’s full of eggplant and peppers, but with so much sugar and balsamic vinegar as the base, you could probably mix in half a cup of mucilage and the sauce would come out okay. The caramelized coating was a little lumpy, but who cares? I wasn’t cooking for the Queen. Similarly, I like sauced ends, so I cut the racks in smaller pieces so there would be more of them.

Cook longer, and slower, than you think you have to. The ribs came out delicious, but they would have been even better with another 30 minutes in the oven. Similarly, I had to boost the oven for a while because I had other dishes in there too; that probably inhibited my collagen liquification just a bit.

Caramelizing the surface of a rack of ribs is not brain surgery. It is a matter of “put something sweet and greasy under a hot fire for just a little longer than you normally would, keeping your eye on it.” That’s it! The crappy broiler in my run-of-the-mill gas oven did the job just fine.

Like so many other things you cook, ribs are better 3 days later. Not much to say here, except that they were perfectly fine right out of the oven, but that by the third day the flavors had melded such that I could have eaten them cold out of the fridge.

Try a drip pan. The recipe as written kept the ribs tightly sealed in the packet; that essentially braised them in their own juices, which is fine, but it yielded a slightly wetter final product than I like. (The Whole Hog product is dry, which I note is not the same thing as “dried out.”) I think next time I’ll try cutting the underside of the foil for the final 30 minutes and letting the excess liquid fall out the bottom.

Thank God for my heavy saucepan, which I seasoned properly early this year after reading this post from the Clever Cleaver and now use four or five times a week, more than any other item of stoveware that I own. In fact, as you can see at right, it’s sitting on my stove right now. You can make a sauce like this without a heavy saucepan, but you’ll be happier if you use one, and you need one anyway. A good seasoned saucepan is like nature’s Teflon; it can get much hotter and holds heat much better than industrial-coated pans do, which lets you cook more gently and more effectively.

In this incredible video clip, two women who don’t speak Hindi use Google Translate to order Indian food in Hindi over the phone, and it works:

If you need a dose of comfort, try this. It’s nearly foolproof, and the recipe itself is virtually impossible to ruin; it stretches or bends in almost any direction and still hangs together. Adapted from Mark Bittman, but I stopped bothering with the cookbook a year ago.

Start by pouring yourself a glass of a rustic red wine — whatever you keep in the house. (My choice is a Long Island red, Schneider Cabernet Franc.) Have a sip.

Chop and/or grind (I use the grinder attachment that came with my cheap hand mixer) all the following, in any convenient order, and dump them in a big bowl:

• 1 large carrot
• 1 large shallot
• 3 cloves garlic
• About a cup of absorbent grain, using whatever’s within reach: bread crumbs; cooked rice or oatmeal; uncooked Minute Rice, tabouli, or couscous; or, in an emergency, half a cup of cornmeal
• A couple of spoonfuls of savory liquid, not too drippy — I used ajvar tonight because I had some, but anything from Worcestershire sauce to spaghetti sauce to barbecue sauce will do
• If it’s handy, a handful of parsley
• Somewhere between 1/4 cup and 1 cup of grated or ground cheese — the classic recipe calls for parmagiano reggiano, but any hard cheese is fine
• Salt, pepper, and seasonings as you see fit — sometimes I toss in dried chopped jalapenos
• Two raw eggs

Add to the bowl:

• About a pound of ground sirloin and half a pound of ground pork, torn apart into small chunks

Mash with your hands until ingredients are distributed. Form into meatballs. Heat a fairly thick layer of good olive oil in a saucepan (use a heavy, well-seasoned pan for best results). Drop half the meatballs in and cook, turning very frequently, until very dark on all sides. Remove to a plate as they finish and replace with new raw meatballs until all the meatballs are cooked. You’ll end up with 30-40 meatballs, depending on how big you make them.

When half the meatballs are done, turn on a pot of salted boiling water. When boiling, drop in good chewy pasta — I have a taste for Italian gemelli, but use whatever you like, as long as it’s not too cheap. Make twice as much pasta as you think you need; it’ll all get eaten. Cook until done and then drain.

When all the meatballs have been removed to the plate, pour off some of the oil (but not all), return the pan to the fire, and pour in about half a cup of your rustic red wine (or more, if you’re cooking for several people). Deglaze the pan, scraping all the cooked bits into the wine. Pour about two-fifths a jar of high-quality pasta sauce per person into the hot wine (I use Rao’s). Lower the flame, but not too much, and aggressively boil down the sauce-and-wine mixture. When it’s ready, which will be roughly when the pasta is done, it should be a chunky mass (not watery), and very dark due to the wine.

For each person, take a big bowl; dish out a hearty serving of cooked pasta; glop some of the thick sauce-wine mixture on top (leaving some of the pasta unsauced, to offset the strong flavor of the meatballs); drop half a dozen meatballs on top. (Some people think the meatballs should be reheated in the sauce, but I consider this to be bourgeois and unnecessary.) Pour yourself a big glass of red wine, and enjoy.

I’ve got some recipes queued up for this week:

• Mark Bittman’s Braised and Roasted Chicken with Vegetables, a slightly more complex implementation of a standard roast chicken. Seems to me this vegetable mixture will be improved by some finely chopped bacon in the sauteeing phase, so I’m planning to add it.
• Paul LeClerc’s Hot Cakes (adapted from Kathleen Claiborne) and No-Knead Bread (adapted from the Sullivan Street Bakery). I’m partial to hotcakes with cornmeal in the recipe, and I’m interested to see the effect of plumping it up with boiling water before whipping up the batter.

There’s also a low-sugar oatmeal cookie recipe I have lying around somewhere, and if I can find it, that’ll go into the mix. More to follow…