Steal the Menu (23 page)

I was, by then, sixty-five years old, but far from senile, just too foolish not to have recorded this exchange, which would have given me a case to sue Harvard for age discrimination.

I did teach one semester at Columbia, which taught me once and for all that I had no aptitude or inclination for teaching. And, anyway, by then I was too busy traveling around the country trying out new restaurants for, yes, the
Wall Street Journal
.

Once again, I had been unexpectedly lured back into food journalism.

The enticing Mephistopheles who did the luring was Tom Weber. I remembered him as a young
Journal
reporter I’d met just after he’d gotten the go-ahead to do a piece on interactive porn websites, which meant he could tell models to do kinky things to themselves from the comfort of his
Journal
workstation. This would normally have been a firing offense, but Tom had obtained
a license to ogle from his editor and he couldn’t stop telling anyone who’d listen about his new assignment.

He’d advanced beyond that kind of thing by the time he called me. Tom was the editor in charge of the
Journal
’s new Saturday Pursuits section, a love child of the Friday Weekend section with a major commitment to covering food.

Would I like to try reviewing restaurants for Pursuits? I said I would. And that was that. For almost four years, during which time Tom lost his job to a much less talented careerist, I continued to be the
Journal
’s designated diner, until the Murdochniks finally got around to thinking they might as well put their stamp on food, now that they had brought the rest of the paper up to their antipodean standard of excellence.

Their decision to eliminate full-dress restaurant criticism from the paper made a kind of sense. Very few readers could actually dine in the places I’d been writing about, even though I’d scattered my visits around the nation. And I’d been spending plenty of money, almost $100,000 a year, on travel and restaurants. But I had apparently managed to swim beneath the notice of the managing editor, Robert Thomson. When I’d run the
Journal
’s arts page, I used to joke that it was a bit like being the medical editor of the
Christian Science Monitor
. I had been able to enjoy something like the same freedom of ignominy as Thomson’s restaurant guy. The one time we met, at the insistence of one of his secretaries, he couldn’t seem to think of anything to say to me.

His apparently complete indifference probably kept him from noticing what a well-kept, globe-trotting servitor I was, and delayed his drawing the conclusion that someone jetting off to Vegas, Reykjavik and London in the same month, and earning the paper’s top freelance fee every other week, was someone whose work might be worth serious scrutiny. Eventually he figured it out, or somebody else told him my gravy train wasn’t the right vehicle
for food in the weekend
Journal
, which he was revamping in the image of London’s Saturday
Financial Times
.

Even the best, most sympathetic editorial supervision isn’t often much better, from the writer or reporter’s point of view, than having a KGB minder with strong ideas about how his agents should do their jobs. But until Thomson’s predecessor had sent Tom Weber packing, I’d been reporting to a smart journalist who had a great many acute things to say about how my coverage of American dining should be shaped.

Weber pressed me into doing cover pieces for the section on the country’s best hot dog joints, its best burgers and its best barbecue. Weber also had inherited the old
Journal
’s passion for the “nut graf,” a paragraph high up in the story that summed up the point of the exercise and justified it. To me, this was a clunky interruption of the actual story, and I did my best never to force one into my columns, which meant that the editor I reported to directly had to make me write one or put one in herself. But I came to miss these bearable and sometimes genuinely helpful interferences after Weber left and was replaced with a regime that virtually never paid any attention to what I was doing, unless a reader made them think I’d committed an error worth correcting. After Weber, I never wrote a cover story, not even the projected takeout on America’s greatest pizzas, a plan that was swept aside after the Thomson regime decided to lead the section each Saturday with a topical essay of great length and deathless wisdom penned by a writer of renown.

In truth, I had begun to enjoy my pop-food odysseys. Going to Decatur, Alabama, to check out Big Bob Gibson’s barbecue was not that different from the trips I’d once taken so proudly in search of American folk food traditions for
Natural History
. And the very best purveyors of burgers and ’cue really did deserve the acclaim I could give them, and this, in a world of nauseatingly bad national
chains and commercial rip-offs like Big Bob’s, was an honest blow for the stubborn practitioners of quality, tradition and, sometimes, worthwhile innovation, a blow I was happy to strike.

The travel itself was exhilarating in its weird mix of grinding discomfort, discovery of the delicious treasure previously unconsidered by the ballyhoo industry and bright contrasts between the grit of the subject and the corporate cash that subtended my efforts.

Take the Texas leg of the barbecue story. It started in utter expense-account comfort at the Four Seasons in Austin, with a vague plan to drive on to the Hill Country, a collection of small towns settled chiefly by German immigrants, where barbecued beef was the local religion and a lure for gastrotourists of all levels of income and refinement. That plan gained sharper focus over dinner in Austin with Louis Black, the cofounder and editor of the
Austin Chronicle
as well as the cofounder of the South by Southwest Festival. A native of Teaneck, New Jersey, who had been imbibing local lore and culture since his student days at the University of Texas, Black gave me a list of places, and I went to them all.

Fortunately, we got to Lockhart, the very best of the Hill Country barbecue towns, early in the day, before too many fatty brisket slices dulled our judgment. By then, on outings in Tennessee, Alabama and several other states famous for their brand of ’cue, I’d already stuffed myself with smoky renditions of pulled pork and pork shoulder, ribs and other slow-cooked animal parts, in dozens of self-consciously down-home joints with rolls of paper toweling standing tall on vertical holders, instead of napkins. So by the time I rolled into little, semigentrified Lockhart (pop. 14,237), I was, if not jaded, at least not remotely energized by the prospect of another plate of meat collapsing from its own weight among piles of cole slaw, baked beans or other canonical “sides,” followed by banana pudding bulked out with Nilla wafers.

It was, therefore, thoroughly remarkable that the beef brisket
at Kreuz woke me up and changed my perspective on barbecue pretty completely. It was a paradigm shift.

Kreuz, pronounced
Krites
and referred to in some quarters as the Church of Krites, is, compared to the gaudy, shameless, huckstering, media-fawning baroque of Big Bob Gibson’s or Mike Mills’s 17th Street Bar & Grill in Murphysboro, Illinois, a monastic retreat. Kreuz does not sell sides. It has no special sauces (like the one so fetishized by Mike Mills that he likes to say he’d have to kill anyone who got hold of the recipe). In fact, it has no standalone sauces at all.

Smitty’s Market in Lockhart is even purer and plainer. In my first bite of brisket at Smitty’s, the smokiness was so strong it changed my idea forever of what barbecue could be. This style of heavily smoked beef may take some getting used to, but for me it is the zenith of the ’cue universe. That doesn’t mean I don’t love the pork barbecue other regions excel in. But Smitty’s is a temple of the pristine, a shaded cave of making, with its stark, black steel–doored smokers and taciturn pit men who stand in the heat of the post-oak logs, pull out a piece of brisket and ask you if you want it sliced from the lean or the fatty end. I went for the fatty and didn’t mind that Smitty’s is really not a restaurant but a specialized meat market. Out front, there is a shockingly bright, pathetic excuse for a dining room, which only makes the crepuscular Hades in the sooty pit area, which some genius implanted into an old brick brewery, seem even more wonderfully infernal. When you go through the door from this dusk to the fluorescent glare and the crappy tables of Smitty’s dining room, the transition is something like the shock Plato tells us his cave dwellers experienced when they emerged into the sun.

There are many things you might want to tell other people about Smitty’s, but the smokiness in the meat is the main lesson I learned that morning, and the thin pink line at the edge of each
slice, which is the sign of the oaky gauntlet it has run for a dozen hours or more.

We drove on for the rest of the day, from the Hill Country, in central Texas,
^‡
all the way north into the tornado belt of Oklahoma, taking in that region’s barbecue specialties, hickory-smoked brisket, bologna and pickled mixed vegetables, at black places like Leo’s in Oklahoma City and Wilson’s in Tulsa.

Eventually, in the warm months of 2007, I followed the barbecue trail through twelve states and came away convinced that the bigger the hoopla, the more acute the disappointment. At the huge festival on the banks of the Mississippi called Memphis in May, I got sunburned and burned in general at the insulting scam, in which dozens of “famous” barbecue teams compete with their “famous” sauces and meats from their portable pits, but the thousands of ticket holders rarely get a taste of that “famous” meat, which is not for sale but prepared for the elite palates of the judges alone. We regular folk were invited to look on with our tongues out.

On a tip from a Memphis native—Edward Felsenthal, Tom Weber’s boss at the
Journal
—we drove to tiny Mason, Tennessee, east of Memphis, to Bozo’s, which is to barbecue pork as Smitty’s is to beef. At Bozo’s, you don’t need to sauce up the perfect quills of pork shoulder. Outside this unassuming family operation, a lonely whistling freight train rumbled by. The bright lights of the high-security
prison next door cast an ominous shadow on the humble former farmhouse. Within, all was good cheer restrained by the confident reserve that results from knowing you can pull pork so that each strand comes away long and perfect, like hanks of moist beige yarn.

This was the Memphis style at its apogee, thirty-five miles from Graceland, and all the other sights and sounds of downtown Memphis. Bozo’s does not serve ribs. Don’t ask for brisket, either. In this shrine of the shoulder of the sow, aficionados know that “barbecue” signifies only one cut of meat, from high on the hog.

But you don’t have to stay in the backwaters of the South to find very good barbecue, because the appetite for this food has spawned fine pits all over the land—at Slows, across from Detroit’s derelict rail station; at the East Coast Grill in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and in Manhattan, at a clone of Kreuz called Hill Country.

Only in California did I strike out completely in my search for great barbecue. This was unfortunate (but perhaps an inevitable result of the overwhelming importance of Hispanic and Asian food in California’s vernacular food world) but I didn’t waste much of my time there. I sampled undistinguished ’cue in South Central Los Angeles, boarded a redeye and flew back to New York.

Even before the barbecue piece appeared in the paper, it made a splash. The online edition of the
Journal
was posted a bit before the newsprint broadsheet arrived at subscribers’ doors and desks. The paper attached an e-mail address to the piece so that readers could “interact.” And they did—many more than had ever written in about one of my articles in the pre-Internet era.

Reader reaction was only part of the Internet’s effect on me. As late as 2002, when I left my editing job at the
Journal
, the telephone had still been a major tool of research and professional communication. When I returned to the paper in 2006, I did almost everything online. Instead of wasting time on hold with reservationists,
I booked online through OpenTable. To get a preliminary idea of where to eat in an unfamiliar town, I consulted sites from Zagat to Yelp. Since many of my early columns were, in effect, about food trends as they emerged on restaurant menus, I would search the cybercosmos for additional examples of a new ingredient or recipe I’d noticed by accident while dining out on assignment.

For example, I was surprised to see snails in a pasta dish at an Italian restaurant in New York. In my previous experience, snails had always been escargots, that cliché of retro French bistros—usually canned, swimming in garlic butter and, often, inserted into shells not originally their own.

Was the humble snail creeping out of this tired presentation? Were diners around the country confronting what might be called free-gliding snails, snails without shells and garlic butter, snails in omelets or snails with lobster?

They were. A quick Web search turned up creative snail dishes on several menus, including one at the innovative new regional Bluestem, in Kansas City. I flew in for dinner and, using the snail “trend” as a pretext, gave national attention to an excellent, quietly locavore outpost of first-rate food in the heart of the heart of the country. The headline:
SLOW FOOD
.

The discovery of the Internet as a powerful trend-spotting tool was a dangerous development. It was difficult not to believe that you could prove anything if you surfed diligently enough, even if that evidence was lurking somewhere on the 75,987th page of a Google search.

For the culture of dining and cookery, the Internet changed everything, just as it did in every other corner of life. But for a restaurant critic trying to operate nationally with no research assistant or other backup (and for those four years, I was the only food critic writing regularly and systematically in a major newspaper about the entire country, with frequent forays abroad), the Internet was
indispensable, if only because almost every restaurant worth writing about had a website with hours, phone numbers, e-mail access for reservations, street addresses, maps and, most of all, menus. In the pre-Internet world of the early 1970s, I went out to eat without any clear idea of what would be available. The restaurant PR industry rarely sent me a menu, just vapid and information-free press releases. So I was reduced to stealing menus, as Craig Claiborne had advised, just to have a record of the meal. Those menus were also helpful to me as a reporter. When I wanted to interview a chef for a feature article, I could look at his menu and decide what dishes I would ask him to demonstrate for me.