Dallas is well known for being inundated by that delicious abomination – the Tex Mex Restaurant. So, if you want to open a Mexican sit down eating place not dedicated to Velveeta Cheese Sauce or plates of tiny tacos you have to distinguish your cuisine in some way.
Candy and I have been eating our way through the restaurants in the Bishop Arts District (there are more than you would suspect). So we decided to cross one off of the list and stopped by the Veracruz Cafe.
They seperate their style of cooking from the regular pedestrian Tex-Mex by advertising themselves as: Mesoamerican, Mayan, Huasteco & Aztec Cuisine. I’m not sure about all that, but I can say that it is delicious.
The restaurant sits on a corner on an edge of the Bishop Arts district. A group was coming out the door carrying to-go boxes, Candy asked, “Is it any good?” They all said it was great and offered their leftovers – tempting, but we decided to go in and pay for our meal anyway.
Inside is attractive – dark with a unique purple color scheme. It’s cool and relaxing. The service was excellent – I was a bit dehydrated and they were able to keep my water glass going, which was no small feat. I had the special, Pescado Tajin, a Tilapia filet covered with shrimp and scallops, with a tomato sauce and vegetables. Tajin is a Mayan archeological site near Veracruz. Unique and very good.
Cafe Veracruz has a tough job competing with a number of very well known restaurants in the area. It more than holds it own, though, and seems to me to be a popular place with the locals that live in the area. I deserves a close look from visitors too.
One restaurant that everyone in Dallas has to eat at is Smoke in the Belmont Hotel. It has been the vanguard of the revitalization of Oak Cliff – about to come to fruition with the impending opening of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge (unfortunately I will be out of town for the grand opening festivities). The Bar at the Belmont is one of my favorite places and the restaurant next door is not far behind.
Smoke is an upscale Bar-B-Que sort of place – a very non-traditional Texas Bar-B-Que – no serving line where greasy slabs of meat are slopped onto your foam plate and you choose the green beans on the side (not that there is anything wrong with that). You do get the seductive smell from the smokehouse out back and the piles of wood are carefully displayed to make sure you know where the goodness is coming from.
Smoke works hard to serve selections of local, handmade, and artisanal ingredients. It is a popular and crowded restaurant. Usually I don’t like to wait very long for a table (I don’t do well with the packed, chatty crowd), but they enter your phone into an iPad and you can sneak next door to the Bar Belmont to enjoy the skyline while you wait. They’ll send you a text when your spot is ready.
The brunch menu was up when we ordered. It was all good. I had the eggs florentine – with smoked salmon and collard greens (instead of spinach). I know this sounds odd – but it was the greens that made the dish. The slightly wild and bitter flavor of the collard greens added a bit of texture.
I appreciate the effort and thought that the chefs at Smoke put into their menu and the risk they took a few years ago to move into an area that seemed to be forever moribund. Luckily, it looks like their foresight, courage, and hard work is paying off and will continue into the future.
The view of the Belmont from the porch at Smoke - Dallas skyline in the background.
As I was thinking about leaving work to go home (I tend to work until I’ll too tired to do anything reliably well) I texted Candy if she needed anything from Target. She texted back that she wanted some reduced-fat graham crackers. Everything is so exciting in this – the best of all possible worlds.
I was going to stop at Target because today is when Lana Del Rey’s album dropped. I’ve been a fan for a while now and have written too much about her before. Still, I wanted the CD. I could have downloaded it from iTunes or Amazon, but… maybe I’m a bit of an old fart – but I still like to have something in my hands for my hard-earned money.
Plus, a little surfing at lunch told me that Target was selling the real, live, and solid Compact Disk for eight bucks – plus two bonus tracks. A pretty good deal. There were only two left when I got there.
So, do you want a review? How can you review music? Like always – Lana Del Rey is the kind of thing you will like if you like this kind of thing.
She is criticized for being fake – and she is. Her music is a lush laconic illusion. There isn’t much there, but there is a vision, however manufactured, and the vision is unique, entertaining and fun to listen to. In this age of the music “industry” what more can you expect? The title song starts with the words, “feet don’t fail me now.” I like that.
Christ, who knows what’s good and what isn’t in these days? I have a stack of albums that once meant a lot to me; I thought that the sounds from them were genius. I turned to these for solace during difficult times and now I can’t even listen to them anymore because they take me back to those times and I can feel the panic rising. I wish I was young and listening to Lana Del Rey – she is better if you don’t have to worry about anything. Shit, why waste time writing about something you don’t like? Life is way too short.
Here, I’ll list just a few of the WordPress blogs from the last few hours with a Lana Del Rey tag. Read ’em and make up your own mind, please, while I try to get some short story scenes pounded out, ride my exercise bike for a while, and listen to Born to Die on repeat.
Don’t listen to me, I couldn’t even find the reduced-fat graham crackers.
Oh, I do have one legitimate complaint… one of my favorite Del Rey works, Kinda Outta Luck, isn’t on the CD. Well, at any rate, here it is. For your pleasure.
A few weeks ago I read a book that I ordinarily would not have read. This isn’t surprising, I’m not the target audience for this genre of fiction. I volunteered to read and review the new book by the teacher of a fiction class I took a few years ago, Patricia (Pooks) Burroughs. It’s a historical romance novel called La Desperada.
I didn’t want to put this up until the book was available – you can buy the ebook here. Go ahead, get it… you know you want to. I guarantee that this is the sort of thing you will like if you like this sort of thing.
This is the second romance novel I’ve read. The first was a random thin paperback Harlequin I picked up maybe thirty years ago and read out of sheer curiosity. Don’t ask the title, it’s long lost in my memory, along with the plot, characters, theme… or anything at all about the book except my visceral reaction to it. I remember that I read it in a couple of hours, although I’m not a particularly fast reader. I was able to crank through it so quickly because, First – I had the feeling I knew what the next sentence, paragraph, scene, chapter, all of it – was going to be. And I was always right. Second, I could read it fast because there was nothing there.
I did not become a fan of the genre after that first taste.
So now I am faced with La Desperada and writing a review of a book in a genre that I simply don’t read. Luckily, La Desperada is a much, much better book that that old Harlequin. It is a Romance, but there is much more going on between the pages, and it is written with a lot more ambition, excitement, and skill.
I went to school in Lawrence, Kansas. On days when the weather was nice, I used to walk from my dorm across Iowa Street into an ancient cemetery for a nice quiet place to sit outside and study. Sometimes I would even lean against an old tombstone with a textbook in my lap. Over time, I read most of the stones – they were all victims of Quantrill’s raid – where in a prelude to the civil war a band of Missouri based outlaws came across and burned Lawrence, slaughtering a good many of the residents.
I’m familiar with the history and passion of those days of violence and banditry and was glad to read that the prologue of La Desperada was set in Clay County, Missouri and that the heart of the conflict was born from the evil that spread across the land in those days.
Then the real story begins in West Texas – the town of Cavendish in 1881. Civilization had a tenuous hold on that wild land. There was still a place for men like Clayton Dougherty – men representing the law though they were at best barely on the right side of it – and too often, on the wrong. The uneasy, unstable, and ultimately cataclysmic triangle of Clayton, his intelligent and virtuous but scarred brother Joel, and Joel’s wife Elizabeth is thrown into violence and death when an outlaw, Boone Coulter shows up.
Once the story gets going, Boone and Elizabeth are on the run together, trying to escape their doom fleeing through the rugged desert and mountains of far West Texas and the untamed frontier towns of New Mexico.
I’ve driven North from Van Horn, Texas, along the valley east of the Sierra Diablo and felt the silent menace of those ragged cliffs and heat blasted salt flats. It looks wild and dangerous, and is so, even from a minivan. I’ve hiked up McKittrick Canyon in the Guadalupe Mountains (which must be the location of Boone’s hidden cabin hideout) and seen the magical beauty that a little water and shade can create in the high desert. My favorite aspect of La Desperada is the effort, imagination, and attention to detail that Patricia injects into the romance to pay homage to the setting and the landscape. West Texas, for good and bad, becomes another character in the story, and that is a very good thing.
That is the skill and effort that elevates the story above the run-of-the-mill romance. There is a real story here, real danger, real complexity. The romantic storyline is intact and moves as expected, but beyond that there is plenty of meat to sink your teeth into.
My only complaint with the book was the sex scenes. They arrive periodically and predictably and I found myself simply skipping these sections. This is not due to any prudishness on my part – I’m up for a little titillation without any qualms. I simply found the sex scenes in La Desperada clichéd and, I’m afraid, simply unexciting. I don’t know if that is a requirement of the genre (Bodice Ripping in the Old West) or not. At any rate, jumping over a page now and then didn’t damage the story at all – so it was all good.
When you are writing about someone else’s work, it is usually a bad idea to opine about what you would like to see done differently. You should write about what the book is, not what it is not. In this case, however, I want to give my opinion; I can’t resist. There is a secondary character that works to move the story forward – he has a doomed relationship with the the outlaw’s sister – his name is Miguél Obregón. I found this flawed, dangerous, evil, yet honorable in his own way character to be the most interesting thing in the book. I would love to read a book written about the love story between him and the sister from his point of view.
I remember the first time I saw Riverdance on television, many years ago. I was channel surfing and stumbled across some random show on PBS. There was this line of people standing stick-straight with their arms stiffly at their sides, hopping up and down in a strange complex way. I knew nothing of Irish Dancing or anything else. My thought at the time was, unfortunately, “Uh-Oh, White People Dancing, this can’t turn out well.” Over time, I did learn better.
This new year has started, as do so many, with me getting sick. My careful resolutions have been thrown out already in a flood of virus induced respiratory difficulties. I actually don’t feel so bad, but I can’t stop coughing and if I can’t stop coughing, I can’t sleep. I missed a half-day of work, only the third time I’ve left work sick in thirty years (and the other two I was blind which I considered a good excuse). This time I was so tired I was scared I was going to make a mistake and somebody would get hurt.
So the other night I crept out from my room to sit up on the couch, swigging from a bottle of vile green liquid, and watching a bit of Teevee until I was exhausted enough to try and go back to bed. There was this movie on, a documentary, a film by Sue Bourne called Jig. It was fascinating enough that I hit the DVR record button so I could watch it the next day, with my head on more or less straight.
Jig is about the world of competitive Irish Dancing. At first, it’s a little disturbing – with the wigs and elaborate costumes on the little girls it has a “Toddlers and Tiaras” vibe going on. But it doesn’t take long to realize that these kids are learning to do something special. Every one of them is driven by the dance itself. They are going all over the world to compete… and they want to win, but what they really want to do is dance. They want to dance as well as they are capable of.
And that is something to enjoy and respect.
One important part of the film that I recognize is the dedication of the parents to the aspirations of their children. I’ve spent a lot of time and money on stuff like that, especially kids’ soccer. Thousands of dollars and tens of thousands of hours on practice, travel, tournaments. It’s easy to ask what do you really get out of something like that. It doesn’t matter. There is no choice… you do what you need to do.
In the documentary one father gives up his lucrative doctor’s practice in the States to move to England so his son can get better instruction in the dance. His son, Joe Bitter talks about his set dance. He says that it is so difficult that if he dances it cleanly it will be the best dance ever done.
The dancers… the kids handle the pressure pretty well, but man, take a look at the mother’s face in this clip while she’s watching her daughter dance. It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do.
Any closed world like that of competitive Irish Dancing seems odd at first sight. But, sitting there on my couch like Jabba the Hut, coughing, I could not help but tip my hat to those kids and all their dedication and hard work. If you look closely and fairly you can see that they are trying to fly and coming a lot closer than any of us.
Christmas evening is always a good time to go out to a movie. Candy, Lee and I went to see a family feel-good film, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
I had not read the book(s), nor seen the 2009 Swedish film (though I have now started the Swedish version on Netflix and have put the books in my queue, after I get some required reading done).
I very seldom go out to see films anymore – which is odd, since that was a big part of my life for so very long. One reason is that the very act of moviegoing has changed. Like so much of modern life it has become a mass phenomenon, an act of the herd instinct. The local mall grandstand seating googleplex is now the standard – thousands run through the entertainment machine – extracting money and delivering a couple of hours of tepid entertainment.
It has been so long this is the first time I noticed that the refreshment stands manned by local teenagers are being replaced by large touchscreens attached to complex vending machines.
Movie going to me has been a solitary, or at most an activity for two. Sitting there in the dark, peering at the screen, lost in the story. Now, the place is always packed for the hot new release and people keep streaming in after the film starts, wandering up and down the steep stairs looking for nonexistent empty seats. Their travels are framed by a constellation of smart phones lit up by audience members getting in some text messaging while the movie begins.
I even miss the endless silly static advertisement cards that used to rotate by during the interminable wait before the film started while cheesy music played over some pitiful portable picnic player. They were blurry slides for local clothing stores, Italian restaurants, or used car dealers. Now, the advertisements that run during the slack times are loud, slick and have better CGI production qualities than the movies themselves.
At any rate, I get over my old-fartedness and the movie starts. And it was good.
The direction, acting, cinematography was all top-notch. As you have been hearing, Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander is a revelation. I think the whole film can be summed up in the split-second look on her face when Mikael says to her, “I want you to help me find a killer of women.” Daniel Craig does not have as splashy a part – but his performance is every bit as important – and much more subtle. His character has an inner core of goodness wrapped in a clock of confusion. Mikael Blomkvist is smarter than he thinks he is – and that is hard to portray.
I think I approached the film in the right frame of mind. The book is a complex whodunit and there is no way they can get all that stuff up on the screen. So I paid no attention to the “mystery” at all. The guilty person is one of a set of candidates, and it didn’t really matter to the emotional heart of the film which one it was. I simply let the detectives detect.
She is watching the detectives
“Ooh, he’s so cute”
She is watching the detectives
When they shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot
They beat him up until the teardrops start
But he can’t be wounded ’cause he’s got no heart
Long shot at that jumping sign
Invisible shivers running down my spine
Cut to baby taking off her clothes
Close-up of the sign that says “We never close”
He snatches at you and you match his cigarette
She pulls the eyes out with a face like a magnet
I don’t know how much more of this I can take
She’s filing her nails while they’re dragging the lake
—-Watching the Detectives, by Elvis Costello
After a school of red herrings swim by and the hairy McGuffin fades from importance, there will be a revelation, the hero will be rescued at the last moment, and a twist that you should have seen coming (I did) will appear as if by magic. All boilerplate. We’ve been here before. Hitchcock did it best a half-century ago, so let it fall from the screen.
What makes the film work are the characters and the relationships – and that is what I concentrated on. The film is really not about a locked-door murder on an ice-bound island, it is about Lisbeth Salander and her struggle, against all odds, to become a human being. You see, they tell you that in the English title. The Swedish title (Män som hatar kvinnor – “Men Who Hate Women”) is more descriptive about the plot, but not the heart, of the story.
A couple quibbles… First, I really didn’t like the scene that played over the opening credits. It was slick, expensive, and visually impressive – black oil-like viscous CGI liquid splashing all over everything while Karen O sings her version of Zepplin’s “Immigrant Song” – but it had nothing to do with the rest of the movie. The music was fine – I would have preferred simply wintry shots of bleak Scandinavian scenery. That would have fit the mood better. What we saw was simply showing off.
The movie struggles with the awkward construction of the novel. The two main characters don’t even really meet (well, one meets the other, but not the other way around) until the film is about half over. This works fine in print, but feels disjointed on the screen. You want to say, “Just get on with it.”
There at the end too, the international finance part, seemed a bit out of character to me. I understand the revenge motive, and the desire to help out “my friend,” but still, it was a little much. Again, I thought it was showing off.
Still, quibbles aside, I enjoyed the film and look forward to the books, and the Swedish version, and the sequels, and the Swedish sequels, and the inevitable spinoffs (HBO series?)….
Oh, the motorcycle was way cool.
This long trailer contains a few spoilers. Also, watching it right after seeing the movie – I can notice the subtle censoring of the trailer (necessary). I have a rule, I don’t wear clothing with words on it (I don’t like being an unpaid advertisement – well, except for my employer… they give me shirts for free) but the black t-shirt Lisbeth Salander is wearing when Mikael first shows up at her place has a pretty cool saying on it (it’s blotted out in the trailer).
“I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped. I already knew something was going to happen; the Factory told me.” – Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory, opening lines.
The Wasp Factory is the first novel by Iain Banks, published in 1984, and the minute I saw the opening sentences I knew I would read the whole book. He had plenty of time to think through the opening, and it is crackerjack. How can you not be irresistibly intrigued by a first person narrator (probably unreliable), “Sacrifice Poles,” an escaped brother (escaped from what?), and a “Factory” (capitalized) that foretells the future.
I had seen mentions of the book here and there – mostly associated with strings of adjectives such as: dark, disturbing, violent, disgusting, hard to read, gruesome, grotesque, unparalleled depravity, monstrous, shocking… and plenty more. Well, so far so good. Then I found it mentioned in a book titled 500 Essential Cult Books. That was enough for me to move it to the front of my to-be-read queue.
Always, when I read a first-person work of fiction, I like to start to work out how reliable the narrator is. In “The Wasp Factory” the protagonist, Frank Cauldhame, is surprisingly honest, reliable, and self-aware. Especially considering he is a sixteen year old serial killer (though he claims his days of killing human beings are over) eunuch, living on an isolated island with his father, trying to deal with life through an endless series of violent, cruel, and depraved rituals – a litany of horrific obsessive compulsive behaviors that, while nasty and disgusting, are the only defense that he has against the hopeless situation that he is trapped in.
As the book goes on Frank’s constructed mythology begins to make internal sense. His series of altars, rites, and symbolic defenses begins to come together as a terrible religion that he has developed in response to a hostile world. For me, one of the surprisingly disturbing sections was a relatively innocent night Frank spends drinking at a pub on the mainland with a friend of his. He drinks way too much and struggles through a horrible night of sickness and vulnerability. It serves as a reminder of how helpless he is once he ventures away from his carefully constructed bulwarks of ritual.
It is a first novel, however, and sometimes you can almost hear Iain Banks thinking, “Let’s see – how can I up the horror a little bit more, what to do next? What taboos can I break now? What will crawl out from under this next rock?” It’s a harrowing ride, but if you are willing to go along with it – there are rewards. Frank is an undeniably unforgettable character and one that you will be glad you met in fiction – because you certainly won’t want to meet him in real life.
Don’t invite him to your family picnic.
The novel picks up momentum, unveiling secret after mystery after shocking revelation. Frank’s brother is on his way home, his father is beginning to seriously unravel, and even the island itself seems about to unleash some final cataclysmic horror as the novel comes to a terrifying climax.
It is at this point that the novel did let me down a little bit. The promised Götterdämmerung never does arrive. Instead there is a “twist” ending – which, although it certainly isn’t expected and does explain more than a few mysteries – for me, it failed to really satisfy the promise of the earlier story. It left me flat – which is a shame, because the rest of the novel was really something – though I’m not sure exactly what.
If nothing else, The Wasp Factory is a unique and polarizing piece of literature. A lot of people have written about the book, with a lot of widely varied opinions. I spent way too much time surfing around looking at WordPress Blogs that discuss The Wasp Factory. Read through some of these – you might learn something.
Blog Reviews of The Wasp Factory
The Anatomy Lesson – a very interesting and comprehensive review of The Wasp Factory (Be careful – Spoilers) with an especially intelligent discussion of the ending.
I wanted to do the right thing. When the alarm screamed, I tore myself out of bed and put on my bicycling clothes. I had meant to work on my bike the night before, but had run out of time, so I went out in the garage and cleaned and oiled for about an hour.
Then I set off down the trail. I had been looking at google maps and, in my mind, had a long route planned, through some newly constructed bits. A small camera was in my bag – I wanted to take some pictures here and there.
But things didn’t feel right. The saddle was uncomfortable, so I stopped and fiddled with it – to no avail. Then I turned and faced into the wind and it felt surprisingly cold, harsh, and impenetrable. Things were fading fast, so I turned and headed home. I felt defeated.
Well, it was a good thing. Over a short period of time, about an hour, the weather turned dramatically. The mercury plunged and the wind grew to a cold howl from the north. Jagged rain started spitting and the whole world became a dark grey. I was not dressed or prepared for that.
If I would have stayed on my bike I would have been trapped a few miles from home huddling in a doorway somewhere calling people on my cell – hoping to convince someone to come rescue me and give me a ride home. For once, my instincts had served me well.
I decided to celebrate by finding a new food truck.
The folks that brought us Gandolfo’s have a sister truck out, The Butcher’s Son. It is in cahoots with a sausage company and offers a selections of meaty treats. Two trucks were perched out in a busy parking lot not too far from our house.
I decided on the selection of sliders – the tiny hamburger-like sandwiches are perfect for slinging from a gourmet truck – sort of like round bread-y tacos.
Like usual, it was pretty good.
The two trucks in the chilly parking lot
The Butcher's Son gourmet food truck
Three Sliders
This is a selection of sliders called “The Butcher’s 3-Way.” Clockwise, from the bottom – The Longhorn “Braised Mexican Beef, Fresh Jalapeno, tomato, and pepper jack cheese on a mini brochette bun” – The New Frontier “Johnsonville Andouille, Naval Pastrami, sautéed onions, Swiss cheese and spicy mustard on a mini brochette bun” – and The Southern Belle “Johnsonville Chipotle Monterey Jack Cheese Chicken Sausage, fresh onion, cheddar cheese and barbecue sauce on a mini brochette bun.”
On the extremely rare occasions that I watch certain films or especially certain television programs featuring fashionably cool people (Sex and The City come to mind immediately) I am always gobsmacked by the amount of time these people spend leisurely sitting around cute round tables at outdoor sidewalk cafes, sipping mimosas and chatting away. It appears these people are able to enjoy several hours every afternoon with their dearest chums completely relaxed and rested, exercising their witty bones: a little tète-à-tète, a little repartee, topped off with a dollop of vicious gossip and a viscous ice cream sundae.
Do real people actually live like that? Of course not. Life is not leisure and conversation. Lunch is a short brutal orgy of quick gobbling, if it exists at all. Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so (Douglas Adams). In Texas at least, the weather is only conducive to al fresco dining a handful of days each year.
Still, you do drive by these places and see people sitting outside… sometimes. There they are, take a quick glimpse before you plow into the car in front of you and are late for whatever unpleasant task awaits at the end of the drive. They seem happy enough. Who are these people?
I’ll never know.
At any rate, the other day while we were visiting that pleasant oasis of interestingness in the desert sea of the big evil city, The Bishop Arts District, we realized that the weather, while a tad coolish in the shade and a bit sweltry in the sun, was bearable and we had an opportunity to dine out in the open. After considering a number of opportunities (most establishments had at least a couple tables out on the sidewalk) we had an appetizer tray in a couple of very well-worn comfortable Adirondack Rocking Chairs in front of Eno’s Pizza and Tavern and, as the sun set, headed on down to a place called Oddfellows for dinner.
Oddfellows seems to be gathering a following and I can see why. It is an open plan, with both sidewalk tables and an innovative and attractive set of open bench spots along the windows. It must be a popular hang out in addition to a place to eat as a number of folks had their laptops out and seemed to be settled in for the duration.
The bar dining spot at Oddfellows - a wooden bench, metal pipe for a backrest, and a log for a footrest. Our waitress has my wheat beer and Candy's wine.
The restaurant was attractive and had a good attention to details. While I was waiting in a corridor for the men’s room, I saw they had their larder on display (This may have been a fake shelf meant to impress… it doesn’t really matter) with such things as a dozen boxes of Cafe du Monde Beignet mix, gallon jugs of Frank’s Red Hot Wing Sauce, and large boxes of Bisquick, all comestible ingredients of necessity and quality. When they serve tumblers of water, they leave behind a glass bottle (like an antique quart milk bottle) of the cool stuff.
Candy ordered the Macaroni and Cheese with Buffalo Chicken. It was very, very good (I ate the leftovers later) – the Mac N Cheese was flavored with Blu Cheese which was great and the chicken was really spicy (Now I know where all that Franks’s Wing Sauce goes).
Looking over the menu, I was quickly drawn to the Chicken and Waffles. Who wants to live forever?
Chicken and waffles, a bottle of water and a wheat beer. This is truly the best of all possible worlds.
The waitress said that was her two favorite things. I’ll bet she always says that.
The chicken was spicy and crispy, the waffles were nice and fluffy. What more do you want?
They come with butter, syrup and white southern gravy. I ate every scrap. My only complaint was that I was too full and stuffed and sleepy on the way home.
But it left me with a powerful hankering. I wanted some real chicken and waffles. I wanted some of Big Mama’s Chicken and Waffles.
I had been driving by the spot – a long abandoned drive through burger joint on a shady corner of the diciest intersection in my section of the city – but I had never actually stopped by. Now it was about time.
Big Mama's Chicken and Waffles. Does anybody know what this building used to be? It was a drive-through burger joint in the ancient past - but I don't know which one. I'd love to know.
I had to drive past the place and do a U-turn at an apartment complex to get into the drive-through. As I went through the intersection, the smell hit me. The wonderful smell of fryers and soul food. It floated through the neighborhood like a greasy cloud of deliciousness. The miasma of saturated fat was enough to give you coronary artery disease before you ever pulled up to the barred ordering window… but who wants to live forever?
I leaned out my window and looked the menu over. They don’t have an intercom so I drove to the window to speak directly to a live human being and ordered a “three piece regular, with waffle.”
There are several things that separate a place like Big Mama’s from the vast conspiracy of corporate franchise clone grease-heaving locations.
The prices on the board include tax. It said five-fifty, it cost five-fifty.
Your order comes in a plain brown paper sack. This adds a subtle flavor, in addition to the visual appeal of grease soaking through brown paper.
Heavy black iron bars welded on the drive-through and walk-up windows.
A confused history of decorations. The crumbling tower overhead boasted two old clocks, hands long gone missing. A big banner proclaimed, “Under New Management – Same Great Taste.”
Cash only.
Friendly, human service by people that give a damn.
They even serve Kool-Aid.
I paid my cash and collected my brown paper bag. There were two little metal tables on site, perched over a muddy drop down to a stagnant creek hidden back in a thick stand of trees, but I had some errands to run so off I went, eventually gulping my meal down in another parking lot.
You know something is good when it is delivered in a plain brown wrapper.
There is something terribly primitive about eating fried chicken in a car.
The food was great. The chicken spicy, but not too much. The waffle was big, soft, and waffle-y. They drop little tubs of Country Crock and Chef’s Quality Breakfast Syrup into the bag. There’s no way to keep from getting a little sweet syrup on the chicken… and that’s a good thing. If you don’t know any better, you might be a bit confused by the combination of Chicken and Waffles. Get over it. Waffles and Fried Chicken go together like grits and greens.
Big Mamas Chicken and Waffles. Three pieces chicken with waffle.
Bill Chance 