Therapy

It's too easy for me to forget that this blog exists. I'll get on a roll for a few months, build up some momentum, then "reward" myself with a "break" and subsequently disappear for half a year or more. I can't say for sure why I drop off like that. I enjoy writing. I see putting my thoughts down and sharing them as a healing act, and when the going inevitably gets tough, this is the logic that I'll use as a prod to jab me back in to the game; but said logic means nothing to whatever sick entity was put in charge of scripting 2016. This year has been nothing but one devastating vicissitude bleeding with an almost competitive malevolence in to another. The reflexive result is my subconscious defensively extricating itself from any true participation in the world.

This is heartbreaking for me. Going out in to the world is what I love. Going to desperate and impractical means to enjoy life's most premium experiences is what I do. I use my insistence on participation, on not being bored ever, as the only real blueprint for escaping my blistering depression. It feels damn near impossible, however, to run tantivy in to the nurturing and inspired arms of cuisine and revelry when the hurdles I have to leap are the bodies of legends and friends maimed or killed off by illness at an age where most of us are entering our prime, my dead dog, and a formidable and growing golem of small personal defeats. The idea of spritzing in a few curative instances of luxury just feels wrong.

Defying the mandates set forth by this shitty year to stay miserable, myself and a sizable group of friends who, for their own reasons are mutually eager to bid adieu to 2016, recently set out to Madison for a midweek trip. The plan was simple enough: dinner at Forequarter followed by Car Seat Headrest playing at the Majestic. As it turns out, simple wouldn't do. The alchemized effect of this specific group of people, our commensurate measures of frustration and irrepressibility culminated in a full-scale takedown of Forequarter's menu (which it just so happens was otherworldly in it's deliciousness) and enough wine to provide the foundation for at least one near black out. After filling up on puffed beef tendon, seared scallops, steak, chicken, lamb... literally the entire damn menu with several items doubled up on plus desserts, we made our way to the show. I walked out in to perfect weather, ethereally drunk and full enough to be stoned; and if you can empathize with the latter of those two states of intoxication, we can almost definitely be friends.

The rest of the night hovers in a flickering ether for me. Fleeting moments of don't-give-a-fuck fun leading up to sloppily passing out on a friends air mattress. I closed my eyes with the spirit of a 19 year old, waking up very much in my thirties with horrible pain in my joints and head and GERD intense enough to produce a panic attack. Ultimately, I emerged from this self-induced chrysalis/iron maiden hybrid refreshed. As grey as life had been leading up to that night, was immediately hellish after, and lame as it has been ever since-it was proven to me over the course of those several hours that escape is possible.

Obviously this isn't meant to be a review of a restaurant or even a narrative of my evening. This is a reminder to me and whoever else it might resonate with that dread doesn't have to win. Fight like hell to keep the jaws of circumstance from snapping down on you; but if you start to feel consumed, it might be better to blast your way out with dynamite than negotiate with nightmares you don't always have control over.  Since I started writing this another one of my friends passed away, and another person who I didn't know personally but was close to many of my other friends also died. It's more a reminder than anything for me to continue to get out and actually enjoy life instead of letting the downsides (not matter how drastic they may be) beat me in to submission. More to come. 

Writing About Writing About Food

I've been writing this blog, with varying degrees of prolificness, for almost exactly half a year now.  My love of all things gastronomic hasn't burnt out in the least, but I keep hitting very serious walls that make writing about my objective experiences with food very difficult.  In an attempt to grease the wheels I'm going to go stream of conscious a little bit and try and unlock some of the reasons why.

To me, the process of eating food can be a sacred thing. I don't mean to come off as desperate or lachrymose when I use the word "sacred", but there is an inherent romance attached to good food.  It can be something I've eaten a hundred times in my life, but if it's a good product that took consideration to make, I owe it my consideration as it's being consumed.  Let's use the very basic example of fresh cheese curds. Any self-respecting Wisconsinite has experienced the majesty that is opening the twist-tied bag of cheese curds and popping a fresh chunk of squeaky cheddar in their mouths and just slipping cozily in to bliss. For me, the sensory experience given to be by cheese curds immediately brings me to my grandparent's farm, where I have a distinct memory of my late grandmother and I sharing a bowl of cheese curds on the front porch while Amish buggies clopped by. The fresh air, my grandma's voice, Uecker on the radio all hum back to my by proxy of a taste I can connect through memories over time. That is what is sacred.

So why is this difficult to write about? It's hard to say. Maybe I'm protective of memories like that, or perhaps I'm nervous I won't do them justice. Maybe it's difficult for me to communicate deeply personal moments that leave me feeling slightly vulnerable. Being that I am, to a fault, pretty open with how I feel about things, I think the difficulty is more in trying to relate personal experiences than anything else.

To draw a comparison, the experience of eating food for me is like being in love. I have proud, precise feelings when it comes to the love I have for my wife and my family and friends, but it's an unquantifiable and amorphous experience that is individual to me. Everyone loves differently, even my wife loves me in different way than I do her, so really how accurately can I describe the experience of our relationship and it's depth to someone who I haven't even met? The same goes with my own personal attachment to food and dining. Given the insatiable ardor I have in my heart for gastronomy, I'm probably something of an authority, but really how much of one? My experience as a diner is pretty deep but certainly not in comparison to others food writers out there. My experience as someone who's worked in restaurants is a decade long but that's mostly front of house and odd job work that doesn't actually pertain to making food, the parts that do pertain to making food are fucking laughable. I cook at home but I'm a bronze medal finalist behind my wife and roommate.

Everything I listed up there are all things that make me question myself in to the role of "hesitant authority". It sounds cocky to consider oneself an authority at all but if I didn't then why the hell write about anything at all?  I know my love for food is genuine. Literally almost everything about the experience of "food" is exciting to me. Where the food comes from, who is making it, how it's meant to be eaten, what it's meant to be paired with, the kitchen it came out of, etc. The trick comes in capturing that thought and holding it in my brain long enough to transcribe it in to words, and then convincing myself that I'm making it good and real enough to click the bright orange "Publish" button that's mocking me from it's perch in the upper right corner of the site.

Wow, this is all sounding a whole lot less confident than I am as someone who writes about food. The point I'm trying to make is that accurately describing a personal experience and trying to relate it to people in a very general way can be very difficult. This truth is magnified when it involves a topic so dear to me that I consider it as much a cornerstone of my existence as the people I love. The implicit challenge is equal parts exciting and intimidating, a combination that serves as an adequate enough inspiration fuel for me to keep writing and hoping that I never come off as trite or mawkish.

If you've read this far I guess it's safe to say that you vibe with Rough Chop, and for that I sincerely thank you. I always thought it was a bit of a lame platitude to readers when other bloggers have described their work as a journey shared with the writer, but in a way I understand where that feeling comes from. I hope you want cheese curds as much as I do now.

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.

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.

First Things First

I'd like to begin our journey together with a touch of elegance.

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Not too long ago I asked my friend Dan Jacobs, executive chef at Odd Duck here in the beautiful city of Milwaukee, if he knew anywhere that was hiring.  I was desperate. I was desperate enough to, to the complete horror of my own eyes, type the word "dishwasher" in to the text box that contained my maudlin inquiry.  For those of you who are lucky enough to have never worked as a dishwasher in a busy restaurant,  allow me to give you some perspective.  Dishwashing is the sole job that exists in the kitchen that you can't possibly source any inspiration from.  Unlike other cripplingly dull jobs, you can't use your imagination to get out of it because it requires a rigid, mechanical and relatively focused mind. Things happen when you are washing dishes that knock you out of your escapist stupor. A clog, a sudden rush, a broken glass, some clunky cumbersome object that breaks the flow you've developed over the course of your shift.  Trust me, a Hobart claw amidst the homogenized ocean of silverware and plates can fuck your whole day up.

Washing dishes is not dirty, it's completely filthy.  It's not hard, it's agonizing.  It dulls the mind and crushes the body all at once.  This in no way meant to delegitimize dishwashing as good honest work.  If anything, a good dishwasher ranks high on the hard workers list. However, to the overprivileged, lily white, suburban bred porcelain doll that was 17 year old Tommy Ciaccio, it felt utterly Sisyphean.  In short, I think dishwashers shouldn't be employed; I think they should be drafted out of a pool of distracted high school students who are given six months stints in the dish pit, so as to give them some perspective on what life is like when you don't go to college.  But that's not the case.  They are employed, and the requisite years one spends in the dish pit before moving up in the kitchen make peeling potatoes and grinding meat seem like some kind of sweet heaven.

Despite all that, that's where I was.  If I didn't have a wife and mouths to feed (dog mouths, specifically), I probably would have chosen an easier route, like driving my car in one direction until it ran out of gas, and then just living in the woods forever.  But I have shackled myself to responsibility and thusly found myself in a pathetic plea for a dishwashing position.  I was sure somewhere had a vacancy that would allow me to fulfill my manic and admittedly baseless need for a change of scenery.

Dan knew better than to be deceived by my cunning wiles.  For a brief, humiliating period of my life, Dan had been my boss at Wolf Peach.  My arrival at Wolf Peach, appropriately enough, was too a product of desperation.  The restaurant I was working at had to suddenly shut down leaving both me and my then-fiancee-now-wife out of work.  Wolf Peach was close to opening and was hurriedly filling in it's last few opening positions. Determined not to be impoverished, I decided to snap one up. With an illegitimate amount of confidence, and opportunistic deceitfulness raging harmoniously together in my heart, I bluffed my way in to a cooking position at Wolf Peach. Bad move.

Twelve combined hours and five or six threats of physical violence later, Dan quickly and deservedly dispatched me to the dish pit.  It was only by virtue of his true benevolence that my frustrated boss didn't just straight up fire (or murder) me.  It didn't take long for me to break.  I just couldn't do it. Eight to ten hours of sweating through dirty, physically challenging work was just too much for me to handle. I was 26 years old and on the verge of getting married. I was fast approaching (and have since surpassed) one decade in the service industry and I wasn't even treading water, I was flailing and abjectly plummeting headlong back in to the goddamned dish pit.  Crestfallen, I quit, with a personal vow to never return to the service industry.

I decided to take a stab at normalcy, which manifested itself in working in retail at a major electronics chain in the wealthy suburb of Fox Point. After six months I felt it was time to move on.  And by "felt it was time to move on" I mean I could either quit working retail or experience what it's like when your soul bleeds out through your nose and ears and dies in a puddle on the floor in front of your eyes.  And there, as ever, was the service industry, ready to break my fall.  While I have returned to the kitchen, I do so with a forcibly ambition-less shroud cast over me.  Clumsiness and anxiety aside, I never want to be a chef, and while I love the place I work, a sense of permanence feels defeating when my face is already smashed against the ceiling of the potential it has as it pertains to me.

What makes the decision so heartbreaking for me was the fact that I passionately and truly love food.  Generally speaking I'm wildly intrigued by cuisine and spend hours poring over cookbooks and wistfully watching Anthony Bourdain live out every sane human being's fantasy.  I adore the vibe of a bustling restaurant kitchen, even to the point where I love the stereotypically sociopathic behaviors of the chefs I've worked for.  I've also had the privilege of being raised by two parents who cooked home cooked meals for us almost every single night of the week.  Food is as central as anything to my happiness. So what's the problem? Behind all the platitudinous gastronomic fantasizing that lives in my heart lies a clumsy and befuddled guy with comically imprecise motor skills and an anxiety disorder.  These traits are not conducive to a hot, fast and hostile environment that requires you to be fast on your toes and has zero room for error.

Which leads me to here, the birth of Rough Chop.  I felt the name appropriate as these are perspectives written by an unbridled epicurean who also happens to be an inept cook in a restaurant kitchen. Incidentally, this blog's existence should be at least partially credited to the same chef who verbally eviscerated me and sent me to the dish dungeon.  The reply I got in response to my counterintuitive plea for additional kitchen work was not a job, but a push in a more appropriate direction. Disparate from the unfortunate soul that is "Kitchen Tommy" is the (hopefully) more capable and confident "Blogging Tommy".  Frankly I have no idea where this little project will lead or how it will evolve.  At the very least I hope to illustrate to you, the reader, why the world of food and everything it entails is so absolutely important and powerful to me. I mean, if I can't cook food I might as well blather on incessantly about it.