The best meal I’ve ever had was a breakfast burrito at the Royal Blue Grocery on Congress Avenue in downtown Austin this spring.
I was in Texas working on a harrowing story that involved a maximum-security prison and a mountain of court documents that detailed a litany of horrors. The spicy-creamy delicacy I had sitting on a bench outside the Royal Blue in a drizzling rain was the very essence of comfort food.
Wait.
Actually, the best meal I’ve ever had was at Husk in Nashville last year.
My husband, Charles Gay, and I were in town for our friend Kathryn Mayfield’s birthday extravaganza and wanted to check out chef Sean Brock’s Tennessee operation, having been dazzled at the mother ship in Charleston. As a bonus, we ran into Wendell Brock, in Nashville for a magazine story, and he let us help him graze his way through the menu.
That divine duck egg with English peas in soured buttermilk with spring herbs, the Gulf snapper and Gullah fish head stew with okra and Carolina Gold rice, the Southern vegetables that we decided mitigated the larded honey butter served with the parkerhouse rolls … mercy. Celebrating one friend and then chancing into another at supper made the world feel like a smaller, happier place.
What am I saying?
Truly, the best meal I’ve ever had was a spread of barbecue, fried catfish, beans and slaw from the Little Dooey in Starkville, Miss., in the fall of 2010, when we were in town for the UGA-Mississippi State game.
Any time your plate seemed even half empty, Charlie’s gracious cousin, Donna Stark, pleaded for you to take more. His dear aunt, Betsy Stark, told us about how, during the Great Depression, her father, a professor at what was then Mississippi A&M, went for years without a salary. With a garden, well and livestock on their property, Stark Hill, Betsy and her brothers never realized they were poor. Cousin Donna has since gone to be with Jesus and Aunt Betsy cannot remember that night, or anything else, these days.
What I treasure from those meals isn’t just what was on the menu, of course, but what, in a broader sense, was on the table. Weariness in Austin. Happiness in Nashville. Love in Starkville.
On a trip to Cleveland this summer, Charlie and I dined with friends who weren’t actually there. We made a beeline for the Greenhouse Tavern, not because of chef Jonathon Sawyer’s recent James Beard Award, but because our friend Sarah Bullington and our cherished former colleague John Kessler both suggested it. It was fun comparing notes afterward.
This holiday season, there’s going to be one fewer chair at the table when we get together with relatives in Raleigh, N.C., due to a divorce in the family. It might be sad, it might be weird, or it might be neither. Little kids and their blinking, bleating toys have a way of taking center stage. I suspect it will be like some of our other memorable bites on the road, though. We won’t just be eating. We’ll be breaking bread.
I bet it’ll be the best meal I’ve ever had.
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