Review-Happy Hour At Morel

I live in Milwaukee so extreme cold should never surprise me with it's awfulness, but last week truly challenged my grit. How fortuitous then that Chef Jonathan Manyo would welcome me to his warm and welcoming restaurant, Morel, to have a chat and try his new happy hour menu.

photos by Laurelyn Savannah - www.laurelynsavannahphotography.com

Joining me to help document the occasion was the very talented Laurelyn Taglienti of Laurelyn Savannah Photography.  We popped in around four o'clock, about an hour before service was set to begin.  I noticed something immediately; the very rarely seen happy and relaxed restaurant staff. I mean everyone has their good and bad days, but this was literally the entire scheduled staff of a restaurant laughing and joking and singing along to B-52's songs that were playing on Morel's speaker system. This might not seem like a huge deal, but like with any job, chemistry goes a long way in a kitchen. You want someone who loves their job making your food.

From left to right: Deviled beet pickled eggs, pheasant pistachio terrine, lamb poutine with Clock Shadow cheese curds. 

photos by Laurelyn Savannah - www.laurelynsavannahphotography.com

Despite the bustling activity of the restaurant and the deadline of service hot on his heels, Chef Manyo graciously sat down with me to talk a little bit about the incarnation of Morel and his plan going forward.  A former vegan, Manyo found a lot of his initial inspiration in rivaling the ambitiously bland flavors that health food in the late nineties associated itself with.  After working in a few vegan and vegetarian restaurants in San Francisco, a chef he was working under encouraged him to go out in to the world of French cuisine to learn technique. As he learned and fell in love with the art that is French cooking, his vision for food evolved. No longer satisfied with the limitations of cooking exclusively vegan cooking, Manyo bounced around Europe and the United States for a while before settling back in his hometown of Milwaukee to open up Morel.

Morel itself feels executed purposefully.  The omnipresent woodwork, the casual but still elegant vibe, the amount of things manifestly constructed specifically for Morel by the employees themselves; most impressively for me was the dividing wall made entirely out of pallets that had been used to ship things to the restaurant prior to opening. Even the bathrooms had an intentional and well-executed aesthetic, complete with sinks looked like they were carved out of salvaged driftwood. A restaurant's ambiance speaks volumes for the quality of their food.  Few and far between have been the times where I've walked in to a dingy, decrepit restaurant and been served anything the opposite of those adjectives. That sentiment is doubly true for a restaurant owned by it's chef.

photos by Laurelyn Savannah - www.laurelynsavannahphotography.com

We came in to try out the new happy hour menu, which came out in rapid succession. We didn't ask for anything specific, but were suddenly awash in a tantalizing array of Morel style bar food classics. I was happy to see that everything was a version of something familiar, wheels only being improved upon and not reinvented. Chicken wings, burgers and poutine are dishes that can oftentimes accurately be assumed are easy ways to achieve deliciousness without putting in a ton of effort or money. The challenge is making something that familiar and ubiquitous (to the point of being wrongly stigmatized as cheap or trashy) stand out, and that is where Morel shined for me. A chicken wing with hours of care put in to it is an entirely different beast than chicken wings thawed and thrown in to some factory made mix and flavor enhancing toxins then murdered in a deep fryer and doused in some sauce, also made in a factory and also containing toxins. Things that might seem like minor differences, smoking the wings and making sriracha in-house, actually make a tremendous difference; a difference that makes taking a trip to Morel worth it.

From left to right: Honey sriracha smoked chicken wings, the Morel burger, the ham biscuit with honey butter and fermented honey

photos by Laurelyn Savannah - www.laurelynsavannahphotography.com

The burger and wings were both great, but I want to quickly give a strong endorsement to two other standouts.  First, the pheasant terrine. I especially like this dish because it doesn't exactly scream "happy hour" food.  The texture of a terrine isn't something most American diners would typically associate with the crunchy, chewy, saucy experiences one usually associates with gorging themselves bar side.  That being said, pheasant and pistachio chopped together in all of their delicate glory and spread on a bread still hits an indulgent note that goes wonderfully with the cozy, homelike setting Morel puts forth.  

The other dish, and holy shit is this one just the tops, is the ham biscuit with honey butter and fermented honey. Before we got a chance to taste this little morsel from heaven Chef Manyo informed us that people have gotten it as both an appetizer and a dessert in the same meal.  I was skeptical as to how something could be both that versatile and that delicious, as to be ordered twice on both ends of a dinner. Truth be told I'm skeptical of ham in general and more oftentimes than not find it to be a totally lame and uninspired protein... but then I tasted it.  I really do try to avoid superlative-laden culinary freak outs on this blog, I swear to god, but this was just so damn good. The bite itself was ethereally light, which was then completely contrasted by intensity of the married flavor of honey and ham.  Seriously go and get this and tell me you don't love it. I dare you.

photos by Laurelyn Savannah - www.laurelynsavannahphotography.com

It didn't hurt that we were emerging from one of the more bitter days of the year, but if I had to describe Morel in a word, it would be "warm".  The jubilance of the staff, Chef Manyo's welcoming and unpretentious disposition, the enthusiasm and care put in to the food, just kind of all of it. And look, I'm not going to call the food I had revolutionary. First off, this wasn't even Morel's standard menu; but secondly and more importantly, "revolutionary" doesn't seem at all like something Manyo is striving for. Good food, thoughtful food, and food that simply feels like a good experience.  I could prattle on with a bunch of platitudes about how a fine dining restaurant gave me food, but that's boring and if I haven't made my case yet then you probably don't know how to read. What I can say is that the experience was good enough that, boldly and without the permission of my wife, I made reservations for this weekend to dine there again.  I recommend that you do the same sometime, I bet you'll enjoy it.

Morel's happy hour hours Tuesday through Friday 5pm to 6:30pm.

Best of Ten-Pho-Round One: Hue

Last week Friday on one of the most frigid days of the year the haggard husks of myself and my friend Lisa sauntered in to Bayview's popular Vietnamese restaurant Hue in search of some pho.

Hue's Bowl of Beef Pho

I was on four hours of sleep after quite an aggressive shift the night before.  Lisa, having just gotten off of her overnight shift, was on zero. You may notice that none of the pictures on this post will feature either Lisa or myself.  Our egos aren't quite deluded enough to think that we need to do this Best Of Ten project with a degree of anonymity to keep it from being corrupted. We do however have just enough pride to not want willfully appear to be deranged sociopaths on the internet; and our circumstances yielded just that look. Between the exhaustion and the glacial conditions Milwaukee was experiencing, we were in dire need of some edible solace. Mercifully, the good people at Hue let us in.

Note: Our two experiences were written separately with no knowledge of what the other was going to say. Anything oddly similar should be chalked up to coincidence

Tommy's Experience

The restaurant itself was a little more chilled out than I expected given that it was lunchtime on a cold Friday afternoon.  Maybe ten other diners were in attendance during the hour or so we were eating, which is totally fine given Hue's cozy vibe. We had picked Hue because we felt it made a good baseline to draw from moving forward. There isn't something overtly "authentic" feeling about Hue, but it doesn't stray too far from it's roots that it treads in to novelty territory. Also, the restaurant's popularity will give previous diners who are reading this a good comparative grasp moving forward.

Anyhow we were greeted, seated and given waters pretty much immediately.  We were sat at a two-top parallel to the bar. This is cool except for the fact that they had a TV with ESPN on and I had Skip Bayless's hideous face scowling for most of my lunch; but this isn't Hue's fault so whatever. The service was appropriately casual and efficient, nothing too over-the-top and not in any way incompetent or lazy.  While Lisa and I looked over the menu, pretending we might be getting something other than dueling bowls of beef pho, the server took our drink order.  Fresh off of a shift, Lisa ordered the Hue lager.  The Hue beer is made in Vietnam and has no connection to the restaurant outside of it's name.  I ordered a Vietnamese coffee, which I had never had before.  The coffee was rich and delicious and came with a side of sweetened condensed milk that you dabbled in to the coffee with a spoon. The coffee was good beyond expectation, so defying my anxiety and common sense I pounded a couple of these back over the course of my meal.

Then came the focal piece of our lunch, a giant bowl of beef pho. The pho itself was the pleasantly basic combination of beef, noodles and an herbaceous broth. I'm pretty sure the noodles aren't made in-house (because that would be insane) so let's focus on the dynamics of the other two components. The brisket and steak were cooked well done but maintained a degree of tenderness. I'm not familiar enough with the traditions of pho to know whether or not that the beef is traditionally prepared that way, but it worked well enough for the occasion. If I were attempting to make pho at home I would probably use raw beef and let the broth cook it, but that's just me.  Then there was the broth. I don't like aggressive criticism of someone else's cooking, but the broth is just not for me.  Something about Hue's broth just reminds me of a very mild beef flavored tea.  I think it speaks for itself that we were both murdering our bowls with sriracha and hoison sauce.

Another tiny gripe I have about my experience was the totally meager portion of accouterments given to tweak our pho with. In my limited experience with pho, I've gotten pretty heaping portions of different things to season or add texture to customize my pho experience.  Between the two of us we got two twigs of thai basil, about half of a jalapeño cut in to coins and probably no more than twenty sprouts.  This want to seem like a kvetch about silly and minor things, but part of pho's appeal is the gargantuan portion it comes in, and a dinky little garnish plate just doesn't fit with that. This really isn't a huge deal for me, it just feels like a weird little cost management thing that gets under my skin.

The Verdict: Not bad but not especially memorable.  I would totally go to Hue and eat pho again but not because i'm in the mood for some exponentially thoughtful or memorable meal. Picking up a friend from the airport who you haven't seen in a while and want to catch up? Take them to Hue. Do you have an older relative who wants to try something new without traveling too far from their comfort zone? Hue it up. It certainly doesn't boggle the mind, but it's a decent $20.00 lunch.

Lisa's Experience
(In which Lisa valiantly attempts to avoid making infinite pho puns so Tom doesn’t kill her.)
Hello, dear readers. This is Lisa, Tom’s partner in gluttony and the pursuit of food obsession. Tom and I finally got our acts together and met up for some pho last week, and now that my work week is over I actually have time/mental energy to immerse myself in the resultant indulgent pho musings. Let me set the scene: it’s Friday morning, and it’s cold. Like numb fingers, I-can’t-bear-to-peel-myself-out-of-my-flannel-sheets cold, even by the truly depraved standards of the average Wisconsinite (although to be fair, I did see a husky white guy wearing shorts, which I suppose means it’s still within the realm of normal Midwestern frigidity). 

As Tom mentioned in his previous post, I’m a nurse, which pretty reliably translates to “I have a weird schedule” (among other things, i.e. I have a slightly deranged sense of humor, am almost impossible to gross out, etc), and I’m no exception. I work ten-hour night shifts for seven days in a row, then have off for a week. So, on the freezing morning in question I was 40 hours deep into my work week, had left work three hours before, and had allowed myself a 45 minute nap before meeting Tom. What I’m trying to say is that I was exhausted, freezing, and mildly delirious. In my experience, that’s the perfect time to eat pho. Granted, given that I am in the throes of a fairly overwhelming pho obsession (really holding back a pun here), I tend to be of the opinion that any time is the perfect time to eat pho. Do other people wake up thinking about pho, and how they can work it into their schedule that day? So far, I’ve found that isn’t typically the case, so this project is pretty much a dream come true (thanks for feeding my addiction, Tom).

Anyway, back to our frigid morning. Tom agreed to my request that we start at Hue, so together we hurtled through the increasingly forceful snow toward Bayview. Hue was the natural starting place for me, since at a mere ½ mile’s distance from my apartment, it’s currently my go-to pho place. It also, while not the first place I tried pho, was definitely where my obsession defiantly declared itself to me one hungover afternoon, and has continued to declare itself on each of my near weekly strolls for takeout. Tom and I arrived at about noon and were seated by the friendly server who always seems to be working and probably thinks I have a problem. We both got the basic beef pho, and I, feeling slightly deranged and emboldened by going out to eat when I should have been sleeping, also got a beer, while Tom stuck to Vietnamese coffee and its condensed milk decadence. 

The place was pretty deserted, given the cold and the fact that it was a weekday and most of the normally-scheduled world was probably working and not traipsing around eating Vietnamese noodles. We sat at our little table and sipped our respective beverages, while the Talking Heads or something else sort of blandly agreeable played quietly in the background. Blandly agreeable is actually a fairly accurate description of Hue’s ambience overall: a little too bright, modern but not offensively so, and clientele that as far as I can tell is pretty consistently 100% white. Now, as an extremely white Midwestern girl myself, I don’t feel that I have the right to gauge the “authenticity” of a Vietnamese noodle joint, but if I had to hazard a guess I would say this place is pretty Americanized. There aren’t “icky” things like tripe or tendon or weirdly gelatinous little buns or things you can’t even identify while looking at a picture menu or, you know, Vietnamese people. There are crab Rangoon and the Talking Heads and a girl with face tattoos. To put it another way, if you want the sort of dingy-hole-in-the-wall-but-authentic-hidden-treasure feel, this is not your place.

The food came after only a few minutes, and all conversation effectively stopped and was predictably replaced with slurping, chopstick clinking, etc. The broth at Hue is lighter in color and sweeter than many places, with a strong anise and cinnamon flavor and just enough fat to it to make it sort of shimmer, while not being at all thick or heavy. I think that the broth could stand to have a more assertive feel to it, more spice or meat flavor or something, but I just compensated by adding all the available fixings (basil, sprouts, jalapeño, lime, white onion I demanded the server bring me because I need it to be as stinky as possible) along with serious amounts of sriracha and hoisin sauce. Without any of that, I think the broth would be too sweet and mild for me, but with everything added it was a pleasant combination of heat and sweetness. 

The steak and brisket were tender and plentiful (although I’d love to see them served a little more rare, I’ve yet to encounter that in Milwaukee), there were appropriate proportions of noodle to broth to meat, and even after talking shit to Tom about how I was so hungry I was going to eat my entire giant bowl, I still had enough to take home another meal’s worth. The price of $11 seemed a bit steep for pho, but given the huge servings, clean atmosphere, and the prices of the surrounding restaurants, it didn’t seem appalling or anything to me. 

Verdict: a good basic pho, I would probably come back here even if it wasn’t an 8 minute walk from my apartment.

Tommy and Lisa's Best of Ten-Pho

It Begins!

This blog hasn't had much of a focus in the way of actual criticism; and up until now I haven't had really anything resembling a restaurant review, spare the cloying panegyrics I wrote out to give unabashed praise to a couple of places I ate.  I believe that the lesser meals should be documented as well.  This isn't to say that this project is about purposefully seeking out "lesser" meals, because it's not.  It is about trying different variations of essentially the same dish and discussing them whether or not the meal itself is an absolute home run.

My partner in this project is my good friend Lisa Elliot. Lisa is actually the one who should be given credit for the Best Of Ten jumping off at all, as she approached me with the idea to try and eat every bowl of pho Milwaukee has to offer and then review it.  After a bit of discussing and tweaking we decided that instead of delving in to a near-infinite ocean of pho, let's apply the same logic to several different types of food around the city, ten at a time, then rank them.  Lisa agreed to the plan on the basis that at the very least start with pho. Given that we are in the midst of the shittiest and grossest part of winter,  I had absolutely zero objection to that plan.

Lisa and I have two very different attitudes when it comes to pho.  I'll be honest, all the mania surrounding a hot bowl of noodles has always felt a little forced to me.  Don't get me wrong, I understand the appeal of the kind of comfort it brings.  Chicken noodle soup, pho, ramen.. whatever else, all of these things have provided me great joy. This is especially true during the long months when city of Milwaukee takes on the barren hellscape of Winter, which is at it's worst just before spring meekly peeks it's head and slowly-but-surely thaws us out.  What I have always failed to grasp is the feeling that these foods are somehow beauty and complexity epitomized and transfigured in to a bowl of holy excellence. I'm not saying people are wrong for feeling how they feel, but I've just never been moved close to tears by these kinds of pho. Recently one of my very best friends told me that he would rather have a big bowl of ramen than pizza almost 100% of the time. Hearing that made me violently angry.

One thing specific to pho really aggravates me.  The ruthless onslaught of puns that the word provokes really gets under my skin. Obviously I know I'm poking the bear to reveal such a silly pet peeve, but I can tell you right now that if you're tempted to tell me to "pho-ck off" or "go pho-ck myself" that you're number 30,000 in line. It's one thing for a bunch jerks to pick the low hanging fruit that is the sound that the monosyllabic soup makes, but restaurants are actually jumping on this idiotic bandwagon too.  If you name your restaurant "What The Pho" or "Absolutely Pho-bulous" or *shudder* "Pho-Shizzle" you're basically screaming at me that your food sucks and that you don't take it seriously; it also honestly feels disrespectful to me.

That all being said, I truly do enjoy pho. I may not swoon over it, but knowing what I know about it's components, it should always be objectively desirable. With that in mind, and in the interest of fairness, I'm going to attempt to enter in to this with a sense of amnesia. Everything I know about pho is gone and the stigma has been erased.

My far less cynical counterpart is a much different person than me when it comes to many things, including opinions surrounding pho. Lisa doesn't work in restaurants at all, meaning her gluttony is 100% naturally occurring and is in no way spurred by her career. Lisa works as a nurse in an ICU unit in Milwaukee, meaning that everything I have to say that sounds like a complaint (especially when it comes to my job) should pretty much be disregarded with extreme prejudice. On top of that, she's a fanatic (pun deflected) when it comes to pho. I would go as far as to say that Lisa's enthusiasm toward the dish borders on delirium.

We hope that our combined perspectives will reduce in to something resembling a healthy perspective towards pho.  I will archive our meals on this page and update it continuously as our journey in to the world of Milwaukeean pho develops.  Join us!

Hipsters: Gastronomy's Make Believe Pincushion

The culinary world is undeniably and inextricably associated with competition.  From farm to table, cook to writer, kitchen to keyboard it seems like every element of dining has to have some heir of megalomania attached to it.   This isn't always a bad thing, of course.  Assuming it's escorted through the proper channels, rigid competition plus self-inflation can equal excellence; however as with any industry, you don't have to dig too deep to find the service industry's stupid.  It's easy to pick apart undeserved egos and call out backbiting harbingers of gossip that pepper the world of gastronomy, but, that is not unique to gastronomy alone.  I want to talk about something symptomatic of deluded and painfully basic, non-dimensional thinking. This thing is truly alarming, given it' permeation in an arena built on creativity and culture.  That thing... is hipsters.

I know, I know, I know... I just said that I wanted to write about something unique, and that the word "hipster" is about as ubiquitous as the word "chef" when discussing food, but that's exactly my point. That very ubiquity has disintegrated whatever a "hipster" is in to complete ambiguity; and yet, as if it means anything, that stupid word keeps popping up.  "Hipster" has become nothing but an amalgamate of what people consider quirky and different.  Fact: I had to re-write that sentence like fifteen times because I couldn't find a satisfying enough description for a label as vague and general as what I'm talking about.  Essentially think of anything younger than 60 (I mean, Bourdain is a hipster, right?) then give them literally any amount of intellect and/or individuality and there you have it, your hipster.
So why does this bug me so much?  Why do I find it harmful?  That's a good question, and if one wanted to simplify, they could probably deduce that my generally irritable nature is at the heart of this entry.  Beyond that and more specifically though is that my sour mood is easily provoked by boring and unnecessary hatefulness; and let's face it, the word hipster doesn't conjure anything particularly positive in your mind.   If you closed your eyes and were told to imagine a hipster, you would probably imagine a person reduced to a mascot used to represent everything you think is wrong with young people these days.  That's because "hipster" has become the official brand for pretentiousness and pseudo-intellectualism.  The complication is that everything and everyone that is not painfully normal is effectively a hipster, and therefore a pretentious pseudo-intellectual.

Hipster making the most pretentious pizza of all time.

This insipid/insidious thought process annoys me to my core when it pertains to restaurants.  Reading Yelp reviews can become a practice in masochism if you dare venture in to anything that's been independently opened in the past decade.  Seriously, no matter what city you're in, type the "H" word in to the search bar and watch the paranoid accusations fly.  Milwaukee alone has TWENTY TWO pages worth of results and few-and-far-between are the entries where "hipster" affiliated with anything positive.  The shit of it is, is that these accusations are often being hurled at restaurants my friends work at, eat at, and even own.  Those "pretentious bearded hipsters" are quite often parents who don't care about anything besides giving you food or getting you drunk.

It seems like nothing is safe from the branding iron of the insecure and out-of-touch.  Ramen, sushi, pizza and hot dogs are all served in places in Milwaukee that I've seen described as alienating in their hipness. If you think that slice of pizza you're eating is going to somehow taste worse because some punk rock kid made it for you, it isn't because that kid's fault, it's because you're either insecure, an idiot or both.

This probably sounds as insecure and accusatory as the people I'm bashing, but it's difficult to broach this subject in a non-hostile manner when I'm marginalized right off the bat based on glasses or a t-shirt or whatever.  This isn't a blanket defense of every young person who has an offbeat aesthetic.  Some people are pretentious assholes, some of them own crappy restaurants who make lousy food and have horrible service.  What this is a defense of is someone's right to be different without having that difference be the sole identifier for who they are.  That thinking stunts progress and discourages true innovation.  This is also a proclamation that doling out extremely general judgements on anyone by applying blanket titles to them is a really lame way to go through life. If you can't criticize in a specific and constructive way, you should probably consider whether or not you are capable of that criticism in the first place.

I should mention that I realize I'm not actually marginalized. I revel like a fat hog in the most privileged sector of society probably on the planet.  Besides, factually speaking, as a heavily domesticated 29 year old Wisconsinite/unabashed Taylor Swift fan with very little discretionary income I've dipped far out of the orbit of anything anyone could consider hip.

Oh and one last thing. You know that painfully hip couple up there? That's my mom and dad, holding my brother who is now 33 years old.  If the body of water that is hipsterdom is three decades deep, whatever "hip" is probably needs to be redefined.

Tommy And Lisa's Best Of Ten

A Brief Introduction to Tommy and Lisa's Best of Ten

I'm Tommy and I write Rough Chop.  My good friend Lisa is a pretty solid match in terms of gluttony, so we thought it would be a good idea to team up on a project that could facilitate our relative grossness.

After some discussing, we figured let's try ten different restaurants with a focus on one item.  On her request we are going to start with pho, but it could go in any direction after that.  Wings, hot dogs, pizza, whatever.  I love elegance and high end dining but it's important to recognize the linchpins of intemperance.  We are here to do the recognizing and to rank it while we're at it.  Here's how it will work.

We will dine at place one and then pit it against place two. We will rank the results as they develop, maintaining our own separate opinions as they form.  We think this is beneficial for a number of reasons.  The most important reason is that we are both as cynical as we are enthusiastic when it comes to the world of food.  If there's one thing I've noticed in the realm of the food blog, it's the overabundance of enthusiasm.  Everything tastes totally fucking awesome all the time, and is always the best version of whatever it is that's ever existed.  Even Rough Chop is guilty of that tawdry ebullience here and there.  By having dueling reviews we will give you, the reader, something deeper to consider.  If something is great or awful, the gradient of our enthusiasm or disdain will deliver an averaged-out answer that will hopefully give better insight into how our overall experience went.  I will archive past experiences on this link as they occur.

Family Dinner: Cheese And Wine Valentine's

The spread

Last night's family dinner theme was Cheese and Wine Valentine's.  Family dinners pretty much always occur on Sundays so missed Valentine's Day by one day.  This is actually a beneficially fortuitous circumstance given the amount of regular attendees (myself included) are embedded in the service industry.  Successfully taking off Valentine's Day, especially one that lands one a weekend, is pretty unlikely.  On actual Valentine's Day my lovely wife and I went and had a very nice romantic pizza lunch and then I went and had my ass kicked at work for nine straight hours.

Ass kicking foreseen, I decided to schedule a less labor intensive dinner for the following day.  Still wanting a romantic vibe, we hosted a cheese and wine themed "dinner".  This was less of a dinner and more of an array of snacks, as pictured above.  Apples, crackers, fresh vegetables, breads, spreads, figs, desserts and of course a vast selection of delicious cheeses festooned our dining room table.  Accompanying these ambrosial assemblage of treats was enough wine to fill the bottles that in turn fill two large bags which are now sitting cozily in the recycling bin outside of my house.

The night transitioned as it usually does.  First mingling, then drinking (this goes on until the night ends), then consuming way too much food, then gratuitous immaturity in one form or another.  Last nights ridiculousness apexed in the form of a Mad Libs session which really everyone in the room should be simultaneously ashamed and proud of.  After a few more hours and a few more glasses of wine I hit the bed hard and woke up to a pretty merciful stack of dishes to do. Mission accomplished.

Memories in Gustation-Martha Lou's Kitchen (Charleston, SC)

If you read my blog on a consistent enough basis, you'll notice one of my recurring gripes is with dull and uninspired landscapes.  You know what I'm talking about.  Those depressing stretches of road that are nothing but a myriad of strip malls and chain restaurants and for some reason like fifteen auto part stores all clustered next to one another. You can find the same drabness in suburbia in the form of one giant house built 25 times in a row and crammed in to one subdivision, invariably built atop formerly pristine wildlife. I don't know how to say it any other way, but all of that feels very "gray" to me.  It's the kind of setting that makes me want to take a shower just from driving through it.

My wife and I picked Charleston, South Carolina as our place to honeymoon, and I'm so glad we did.  Charleston gave us the exact opposite of that dreary, lethargic feel.  Everything was genuine, preserved and felt purposeful.  All manner of architecture, Georgian to Victorian, Federal to Italianate gave the city an engaging and captivating buzz.  Even the humid ocean air felt built-in, as if commanded to be there by the row houses and centuries old churches.  One particular moment struck me as especially charming; when my new wife and I decided to stroll aimlessly through the streets of Charleston just to see what we could find.  Before we knew it we had unwittingly stumbled in to a three hundred year old Unitarian cemetery; a truly incredible and humbling experience.

In case "places where dead people are stored" isn't exactly your bag, it should also be noted that Charleston is an overwhelmingly impressive city on the gastronomic as well.  The city itself has fewer than 150,000 residents and continues to find itself in consideration as one of the top culinary hotspots in the world. With the ability to boast being home to things like Sean Brock's flagship restaurants Husk and McCrady's; as well as being the host city to 2013's Cook It Raw event, it's hard to say those accolades aren't deserved

Still, behind the glitz and glamor and celebrity that exists in Charleston's food scene, something else truly magical can be found.  Guided by grand exaltation from Yelp! reviewers, my wife and I decided to head to lunch at Martha Lou's.  It should be said at this point that this entry isn't exactly blowing the lid off of any secret to the excellence contained within Martha Lou Gadsden's incredible restaurant.  We had entered at just the right time, which is to say we were sat at a six top with a family of four who we had never met before.  This is something I experienced several times in Charleston.  If a place was packed you didn't wait for a table, you were crammed in to wherever you could be sat.  Moments later the place was slammed to a standing room only capacity.  Most of the people left, but some of the loyalists decided it was worth it to stand and eat.  I am seriously grateful we came when we did, because truthfully I'm not sure I would have assumed it was worth standing in a tiny, sweltering restaurant just to get my hands on some reputable fried chicken.  If I knew then what I know now, I would understand that it would have been worth it to stand on hot tar for what I was about to eat.

Nothing could prepare me for the majesty that awaited me.  For something like $15.00 my wife and I gorged ourselves on literally the best soul food I've ever eaten.  Soul food is something that is very easy to assume will be delicious.  I mean who doesn't love a plate teeming with rice and beans, collards, macaroni and cheese and fried chicken?  I could eat that meal every day for my life and be happy, of course that would be before prematurely expiring from a massive cardiac episode. What isn't easy is making something like baked macaroni and cheese a truly excellent, stand out dish.  But there I was, in a restaurant about the width and length of a semi-truck trailer (maybe smaller) in what had to be over a hundred degree weather, eating pure bliss.

The most impressive thing about the whole experience?  How about the fact that when I got there, 83 year old Martha Lou Gadsden herself was working the fry station, making sure everything came out just right.  Towards the end of the meal when my wife and I (both disgustingly full at this point) had funny picked our plate clean, Martha Lou finally gave herself a break.  Sitting at one of the benches in her restaurant, waving herself with a menu, she yelled for someone to give her some sweet tea. After receiving her tea she noticed our sluggish visages melting away in the corner.  She asked who we were and where we were from.  Upon hearing that we were newlyweds she leaped up and gleefully demanded we sign the bible sized guestbook she had at the front of the restaurant.  We happily signed out names somewhere in the middle of the book, probably about 200 pages in.  I asked her how long the book had been around for.  "Oh that one?" she said "Maybe two weeks!". Patronage well deserved.

I hopefully don't live in a world so joyless that I need to pontificate anyone in to seeking out amazing food, but if a story needs a moral, here one is. We were loaded on newlywed cash on that smoldering July afternoon, we really could have dined anywhere in a city with five star restaurants on literally every corner, but a hunch and fifteen bucks led us in to one of the top ten meals of my life.  Never assume that money and quality stack up equally.  In or around Charleston? Make a stop at Martha Lou's. You will not be disappointed.

Panic At The Dish Pit-Generalized Anxiety Disorder and the Service Industry

Preface:  I work in a restaurant and I am diagnosed as having generalized anxiety disorder with panic attacks.  This is just my story.  I am not an authority on anything psychiatric.  I wrote this because I know I'm not alone in dealing with this frustrating and complicating problem. I also wanted to write something because the instinct anxiety and panic breeds in to a person's brain is to be ashamed enough of their disorder as to internalize it.  That strategy not only ignores the problem, it exacerbates it.  Anyways, here it is.
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It happened again last night.  I felt my stomach twist and noticed my nausea.  I say "noticed" because at that point I'm not sure if I just became nauseous or if I have been for hours, or maybe all day. Either way, that shitty feeling I'm just now noticing has now instantly become an obsession.  The checklist process in my brain kicks in.

"Could this just be the coffee I drank earlier?  Am I maybe a touch hungover? Oh wait, did I even drink last night... oh my god people often experience nausea right before a heart attack."

Cue full on panic.

"Shit, people always get really panicky right before they have a heart attack too. Is my arm going numb?  Why are my hands shaking so hard?!"

It should also be mentioned that at that exact moment I was driving on a freeway that was limited to one lane thanks to construction.  As always, my anxious mind fixated on possibility, not probability. It seemed, at that moment, completely reasonable that my tire was going to blow out at the exact moment I was going to have a stroke.

I had just delivered a pizza and was rushing back to the restaurant I work at when this all kicked in.  Making matters that much more urgent seeming was my bright orange "low fuel" sign blaring in my face.  Usually this half inch by three quarter inch light isn't a big deal, but with panic tearing through my brain it felt oppressive.  I stopped for gas and pumped something like $6.34 in to the tank because standing in one place for any longer felt literally impossible. Then I sped back to work.

The series of obstacles rearranges itself now that I'm back at my place of work.  The benefits live symbiotically with the negatives.  Yes, I like my coworkers and understand they know who I am and what I deal with and are supportive; which in turn makes me paranoid about alienating people who I care about.  Yes, it's a pizza restaurant and not heart surgery so it's not categorically urgent; but it is implicitly rapid paced and requires a rhythm and degree of proficiency in order to be performed with even a marginal level of competence.  That rhythm, that coordination, can't exist when thanks to some evolutionary misstep, your adrenal gland is misfiring like a goddamn uzi and your heart is palpitating and your eyes are dilated so all of the halogen lights suddenly morph in to white dwarfs and blind your eyes.

Eventually, panic subsides.  My heartbeat returns to relative normality and my hands regain control. A short time after that, after I've regained my breath and stopped hyperventilating, my muscles loosen and I can return to standard operating mode.  Panic seems to strike everyone on different levels and for different amounts of time.  Generally my worst episodes last anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours. Nine times out of ten I can detect it approaching and calmly motivate myself out of it by reminding myself that it's happened tens of times before and nothing truly awful ever happens.  When that doesn't work, all bets are off.  I've had to step outside mid-rush just to prevent myself from blacking out.  Anyone who's ever worked in a restaurant knows that a move like that is borderline sacrilege, something that should only be reserved for someone who thinks they are about to die. Believe me, that's about where I was.

I want this entry to be more than a self-pitying narcissistic rant about how difficult my life is, so I thought I'd write some advice to the young anxious individual who's in love with the idea of the restaurant life.  Truthfully the solution to all things anxiety, be it yours or someone else's, can be found in honesty. As a concept, honesty is something everyone is familiar with.  What people aren't familiar with is the raw, uncomfortable feelings that often accompany it.  Let's take an honest account of what a person with an anxiety disorder has to deal with if they want to work in the service industry.

First, the service industry is intensely competitive.  Whether your back of house, front of house, serving, cooking or whatever, you're always trying to maintain your rank or move up.  Yes, the camaraderie is real and you can find satisfaction like nothing else an ice cold shift beer with your co-workers after a brutal shift, but the operative word in that sentence is still "brutal".  Make sure you step in to life in the kitchen knowing somewhere along the line you will be stepped on.  It's difficult for the catastrophically-minded individual to operate in an industry where the traditional modus operandi for shaping young men and women in to respectable cooks is aggressive and repetitive negative reinforcement. This isn't to say that everyone who serves as a mentor in a kitchen is a heartless bully, but it is to say that you learn quickly that you have to totally bust your ass to be a good cook.

Secondly, the powers that be do not give a shit about you.  This is true in almost any profession, but the level of ambivalence doled out to kitchen workers is extreme.  Don't count on finding yourself in a position that awards you benefits, a 401K or anything else that might serve to protect you should the worst happen.  Think about basically every minor pitfall you could endure and realize that most of that shit won't get treated so long as you are working in kitchens.  Hernias, damaged teeth, broken feet, wildly infected burns, the list of things i've seen go untreated by kitchen workers who simply don't have the means to deal with them goes on and on and on.  This doesn't even begin to touch the gauntlet a young person seeking mental health must go through if they don't have benefits.  Our society basically damns mental illness right out of the gate.  Whether you're a normally functioning individual who happens to have panic attacks like me, or the paranoid schizophrenic who is a legitimate candidate to hurt themselves or someone else, you're essentially thrown in the same boat. Every free clinic i've ever stepped in to, every exhausted and overwhelmed doctor who's ever checked me out, have all concluded almost instantly that I'm seeking drugs and can't be trusted.  It should be noted that I receive that level of suspicion even though I'm a white male with zero prior convictions, far and away the most privileged sector of society. I can't even imagine what it's like for other people.

Thirdly, that stereotypical fun fast kitchen lifestyle is hard.  This seems like it goes without saying, but honestly so many of those youthful, self destructive things that make working in a restaurant romantic are the things that completely work to inflame anxiety.  Coffee? No good.  Cigarettes? Nope. Alcohol? Bad bad bad.  Basically anything that dehydrates you and/or speeds your heart up is more or less a recipe for disaster if you're prone to panic.  Maybe it sounds silly to consider these things at all, but look at the other two elements I wrote about up there.  Kitchens start to feel like families, of course you'll want to drink or have a smoke with your co-workers.  And if nicotine and alcohol (or other things) don't sound appealing based on that alone, then just wait for the harsh realities of life to catch up.  When I have a lousy paycheck or a hard day at work, I don't want blended wheatgrass to get me through the night.

Again, I'm just one person with one perspective.  Nothing I am saying should be taken as a general truth and nothing I am saying should be given any credit from a psychoanalytical perspective.  I am writing what I would like to have been told when I was 17 and got my first job washing dishes.

None of what I'm saying is meant to discourage anyone from getting involved in working in kitchens. Truth be told, if I could do it all over again, I'm not sure I'd change a whole lot about the trajectory of my life.  Kitchens have an amazing and empowering feel to them.  It's honest work done by honest people.  Furthermore, generally the people who stick around in kitchens do so because they are creative and interesting individuals who have fallen in to the margins of an otherwise uncreative society.  I spent several months wringing my hands and feeling embarrassed before I told my coworkers what I was dealing with, and the result? Assurance and support, through and through.  One fellow employee even empathized and confided a similar struggle with me. Yes, my panic can be frustrating at times, sometimes even crippling, but I can't say assuredly that my reality would be much different if I worked in retail or some sterile office setting.  Go in to everything you do with honest expectations, prepare for the worst but always, always hope for the best.

Family Dinners

The "Family Recipe" spread.

In late November of 2013 I found myself sitting alone and disenchanted outside of the cafeteria of the Milwaukee Area Technical College's Mequon campus.  A combination of things led to that disenchantment.  First, Mequon is equal parts extreme wealth and cultural destitution.  As snobby as that sentence sounds, there are but a few decent restaurants in the entire city to cater to the surrounding elite.  The few saving graces that do exist are integrated in to the indistinguishable and sprawling network of strip malls that line Mequon's eponymous main road.  Credit is due to the actually good chefs working to make Mequon a better and more delicious place, but unless you're Todd Solondz, you're not wrenching anything inspirational out of the blank landscape that is Mequon.

Adding to that was my schedule. Class during the day and work during the night left little time for me to exist as an individual.  The few days that allowed me any free time became a balancing act of sustaining something of a social life, spending time with my wife and simply finding time to complete the general errands and tasks necessary to exist in this world.  A reality that necessitated rigid scheduling and cold pragmatism was fiercely at war with my spontaneous brain and my impractical heart. I'm impatient and spasmodically manic so the foundation of my plan to just put my head down and work for a few years may as well have been built on pudding.

With an impending meltdown afoot, I needed to supplant the static boredom that was my life with something.  It needed be something intimate and galvanizing, something special.  Food, being an obvious obsession in my life, often served as an escape for me.  I would spend hours reading food blogs, or fantasizing as I pored over reviews of the greatest restaurants in the world.  It didn't take for it to add up that this mania could be used as an avenue for something far more fulfilling.

Judah and Neenah getting ready for some comfort food.

In an attempt to hone my enthusiasm in to something solid I took an account of all of the things that make me tick.  Friends (often in a the more-the-merrier context), hosting events, sharing and consuming ridiculous amounts of food. Those ingredients combined to form the foundation of the very first family dinner. On January 6th, 2014, my wife and I hosted some of our closest friends for an enormous Middle Eastern feast.  We opted to start with Middle Eastern cuisine because it's accessible, absolutely delicious and has the feeling of food that is meant to be shared.  Since then we've hosted 25 other dinners, meaning literally hundreds of dishes have graced our rickety old dining room table. Sometimes we pick a region or city like Sicily or Bangkok, sometimes we pick something less structured, like "summer" or "family recipes".  Either way, the end product is always meaningful time spent with people who you love.

One the many victims of family dinner food coma

Marketing and consumerism have turned "tradition" in to a four letter word in our cynical generation. Everything is either shoddy in it's cheapness or gaudy in it's luxuriousness.  On top of that, we have become so connected by way of electronic device that personal face-to-face interaction has found itself in to expendability.  For me, family dinners break that mold.  Every few Sundays I have the extreme pleasure of drinking wine and sharing food with some of my close friends, in person, and that is a tradition worth cherishing. Moreover, it's one I suggest incorporating in to your own lives. Find yourself living wedged in the doldrums? Did five tons of snow fall on to your house, striking you with cabin fever? I recommend trying to cook yourself out of it.  Make something cozy, indulgent, and don't be afraid of simplicity. After you do that, tell your friends to pick up a bottle of cheap wine and invite them over. It may be a cliche, but I think you will find it true that true richness can be found anywhere, and can never be purchased.