Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh Read online

  The oldest Jewish waiter at Ratner’s turns out to be Alex Hersko, seventy, the very fellow I offended on my earlier visit. His partner, the Ethiopian woman who tried to introduce us, explains his rejection of my friendly overture: “That’s the way he is. When you’re that way for thirty years, you never change.” He either fails to recognize me or is polite enough to pretend that he does not. He tells me he was born in Romania, came to New York in 1970 by way of Israel, and shortly after his arrival here was fortunate enough to be offered a job at Ratner’s. When he started, only one of the waiters wasn’t Jewish. “I can tell you, a Jewish waiter in a Jewish place, a Jewish customer comes in, he feels very comfortable, he feels it is like home. A Jew goes into a restaurant and the waiter is Gentile, he doesn’t feel the same. Start talking Yiddish and you’re friends immediately.” Hersko’s hairline is receding, which is not news where elderly Jewish waiters are concerned, but his six-inch graying ponytail makes him one of a kind. He explains, “My wife started cutting my hair after I went to an Italian barber twenty years ago and F O R K I T O V E R

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  he cut it like a German soldier’s. She cut it for fifteen years, then one day, a few years ago, she says she doesn’t want to cut my hair anymore, I should find a barber. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll let it grow.’

  Now my steady customers, they ask for Alex with the ponytail.” And so the epoch of the Jewish waiter ends. Hersko was everything I had hoped to find—a little too cranky and a little too caring, all at the same time. He even writes songs, not that they’ve done so well. For me, he represented thousands of waiters, tens of thousands of orders of fried cheese kreplach,* millions of trips to the kitchen and back. I asked what it meant to him to be the standard-bearer of a century of tradition, to be the oldest and quite possibly the last elderly Jewish waiter working on the Lower East Side.

  “It doesn’t impress me,” he replied.

  GQ, october 2000

  *Ravioli-like dumplings that at Ratner’s, I have to say, tasted even more Amish than the blintzes.

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  Oddly enough, restaurants in most sections of the country feel obligated to offer a variety of sandwiches. That’s because not everybody has learned how to make any one kind of sandwich so perfectly that no others are required.

  Here in New York City, for example, we have more kinds of sandwiches than we have people carrying lunch pails. I was lamenting this situation not long ago while nibbling a caviar-and-smoked-salmon croque-monsieur at Le Bernardin. As I absentmindedly munched on the egg-battered sandwich, I found myself thinking not of the citified seafood combination in my hand but of an incomparable sandwich experience in my past. I vividly recalled the rhythmic crack of cleaver on cutting board, the glorious vision of wood smoke belching darkly into the sky, the heady scent of vinegar infused with Texas Pete Hot Sauce.

  I realized that my memories of the sandwiches made with hand-chopped pork that I’d eaten in eastern North Carolina had become clearer to me than reality. Almost fifteen years had passed since I’d last walked into a barbecue spot down there and said, “A sandwich, please.” No further expression of my needs was necessary, since no other sandwiches were available. On a few awkward occasions a waitress—never a man, not in those parts—would ask if I wanted coleslaw on it, and I would tell her that of course I did. It should never be served any other way.

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  I thought sadly of the lengths to which we New Yorkers have gone to transform sandwiches into culinary adventures. Even our bread has become complicated, whereas the eastern North Carolina sandwich requires only a packaged sandwich bun. Knowing that other good things come on hamburger buns, like hamburgers, for example, I had tried sup-pressing my desire for chopped pork by eating chopped beef as often as possible, but that didn’t work. So thoroughly had I mythologized the eastern North Carolina sandwich in my mind that even the hamburgers I once loved had become a cruel joke.

  I’d started proselytizing, informing those few friends who would listen that the eastern North Carolina sandwich was America’s greatest regional dish, surpassing even the jumbo-lump crab cake of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. I welcomed debates on the importance of the sandwich in the panorama of indigenous American food. Others championed fried chicken, lemon-meringue pie, even bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches. I conceded any of them second place. A friend suggested a freshly picked ear of corn, and I mocked her for advocat-ing a foodstuff that could be stored in a silo.

  My fixation became so overwhelming that I realized only a visit to North Carolina would end it. I prepared to go, even though it was the dead of summer and I recalled that the establishments making the sandwiches I so loved had little in the way of ventilation other than the hot breezes stirred by a few haphazardly placed electric fans. It would be me, a sweating pitcher of sweetened ice tea, a fat sandwich wrapped in wax paper, and a few flies torpid from the heat. I so looked forward to the trip. I could consume unfathomable numbers of sandwiches in the course of determining who made the best, not that I expected any to be less than magnificent.

  Barbecue, of course, is America’s greatest gift to the culinary world.

  The French, the Spanish, and various others seek praise for inventing it, but we perfected it. I speak now of meat slow-cooked over wood or charcoal, not supermarket cuts of beef incinerated in backyards by suburbanites cooking over briquettes soaked in lighter fluid. By selecting the eastern North Carolina sandwich as the beau ideal of barbe-F O R K I T O V E R

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  cue, I was placing it above pork ribs and beef brisket, the industry favorites.

  I had no qualms about my commitment, for this sandwich is barbecue at its most sublime. I believe the reason it has never received proper acclaim is that it is little known outside the coastal regions of North Carolina, which are seldom visited, except by devastating hurricanes.

  Before setting off, I tried to make certain I wouldn’t make the calami-tous mistake of eating barbecue prepared with gas or electricity. Barbecue without wood is like French food without butter, inappropriate and insulting. I wanted to detour around all such cookery. In addition, I decided I would only seek out places east of U.S. 1, the north-south highway that passes through Raleigh, the state capital.

  I have at times enjoyed a meal in central and western North Carolina, where the hush puppies (undersized deep-fried cornmeal cakes) are superior to those in the east, but the barbecue there is fatally tainted by ketchup. Long ago, settlers in eastern North Carolina feared the tomato, believing it to be poisonous, and they were right, at least where barbecue is concerned. When a piquant vinegar-based sauce is mixed into chopped pork, the sweet, wood-cooked flavor of the meat is intensified. When the heavy, tomato-based sauce obligatory in central and western North Carolina is added, the flavor is masked. It goes without saying that either is preferable to the mustard-based sauce of South Carolina, which makes a chopped-pork sandwich taste like a ballpark hot dog.

  I telephoned every barbecue spot east of U.S. 1 that I could find and asked this question: Do you cook with wood, gas, or electricity? I reached fifty-nine of them, and fifty-six were kind enough to give me a straight answer. By that, I mean they didn’t insist that I telephone their public relations firm, which is what every New York City restaurant would have done. At Bunn’s, the fellow who answered the phone pugnaciously replied, “We don’t give out our secrets, but we’ll put our barbecue up against anybody’s.” Now, I understand the South has a lot of secrets it doesn’t want us Yankees to know, but there is no secret to 2 1 2

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  how barbecue is cooked. If there isn’t a pile of wood behind the place, the owner isn’t cooking with wood, and if the pile of wood is so neat it looks as though it hasn’t been touched, it’s probably there to fool people like me into thinking the cooking is done with wood.

  The woman who answered the phone at Betty’s Smoke
House Restaurant ambiguously said, “We use smoke,” which could mean anything, including a cook with a three-pack-a-day habit. The woman at Big Nell’s Pit Stop allowed that hers was “open-pit,” a coy barbecue come-on. Open-pit is a non-fuel-specific term used to crowd-pleasing effect in the South, in much the same way that chefs up north label their own cooking as “gourmet.”

  Thirteen people assured me that they used wood, although in this region wood cooking is usually indirect. Oak or hickory is burned down to charcoal, and the charcoal is then moved to the open pits where the whole hogs are cooked. Smoldering charcoal adds less smoke flavor than a flaming log, but the fires are easier to control, and charcoal cooking seems to give a creamy, soft texture to pork. Regardless, wood in any form is better than gas. With wood I imagine delicate tendrils of smoke and heat encircling the pig, massaging it, caressing it, permeating it.

  With gas I imagine Audie Murphy with a flame-thrower, charging a Kraut bunker.

  A number of owners who were cooking with wood warned me that their way of life was dying out, which they blamed on nefarious state regulators. The man who answered the phone at Murray’s blamed “the bureaucrats” for driving out people like him. Exaggerating quite a bit, he added, “I’m the last that’s left, and I’m going to be gone.” Laziness could be another cause of the proliferation of gas cooking, because turning a valve is easier than chopping down a tree. Whatever the reason, less and less barbecue is being prepared with wood, and I was somewhat dismayed to learn that I could count on finding only thirteen sandwiches I was certain to like. It didn’t seem nearly enough.

  To ensure I wouldn’t go hungry, I made up my mind to look into the impertinent “we’ll-put-our-barbecue-up-against-anybody’s” boast issued by the little-known Bunn’s, in Windsor. I also decided to include Big F O R K I T O V E R

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  Nell’s and Betty’s, the only establishments in the southeastern part of the state that hinted at the possibility that they might be using wood. I also wanted to eat at B’s, in Greenville, which I’d heard about. B’s is so famous it apparently has no use for a telephone.

  I understood from past adventures with barbecue that it was unlikely I’d actually eat at B’s, even if I found it. Going out of your way to visit a barbecue spot you aren’t absolutely sure is open for business is never a good idea. The proprietors of barbecue places wouldn’t be the proprietors of barbecue places if they liked to work regular hours.

  Odds are they aren’t going to be at work if there is any excuse for them not to be.

  I took a plane into Raleigh-Durham International Airport, which strad-dles the vinegar-ketchup line of demarcation, picked up my rental car, and set off. What I didn’t know at the time but was soon to discover is that all the best vinegar-based chopped-pork-and-coleslaw sandwiches—I’ll just refer to them as sandwiches from here on—are around Route 70. It should be renamed the Barbecue Beltway of North Carolina. My explorations took me as far north as Albemarle Sound and as far south as the South Carolina border, and it turned out that all the sandwiches I preferred were either right on Route 70 or no more than thirty minutes away.

  I’d set aside six days for the trip and ended up driving an effortless 936 miles in four days. The eastern North Carolina I recalled from my last trip to the region, back in the eighties, had quite a few back roads, but the transportation grid has been upgraded from asphalt to Auto-bahn. North Carolina has always loved wide highways (one of its nicknames is the Good Roads State) and just about every road I traveled was a four-lane divided highway, even when it didn’t seem to make economic sense—Interstate 40 has one exit leading to Jones Sausage Road. The bridges of eastern North Carolina are even more astounding. They are soaring, arching, futuristic structures much like the kind I used to see in the Flash Gordon comic strips of my youth. Call me an envious Yankee, but we New Yorkers pay $3.50 to go from the Bronx 2 1 4

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  to Queens, and not once in all my North Carolina travels was there a bridge or highway toll.

  The lavish distribution of federal highway funds to this modest region astounded me, but there were other sights to behold. While waiting in a long line to board a ferry, I decided to remain in my car after spotting a danger: quicksand sign. I can’t think of a more effective deterrent to nature walks. While driving along Route 172, I suddenly found myself entering Camp Lejeune, a Marine installation. The sentry looked in my car and seemed taken aback to see the backseat covered with Moon Pies, a packaged cake made in Chattanooga, Tennessee. (I became addicted to them years back in the course of researching why people would eat something so awful.) Every so often, while driving through the camp, I’d pass a diamond-shaped yellow traffic sign that read tank xing, which gave me a thrill of anticipation, until I realized I had no more chance of encountering a tank than I did of coming across a moose at one of those moose xing signs all over Maine.

  After heading out of the airport on day one, the Buick set on cruise control, I quickly came upon the first assurance that I was in barbecue country: a pork-packing-plant billboard beautified with a cartoon of a pig wearing a crown. Most of what I saw after that was cornfields, churches, double-wide trailers, and way stations for refilling propane tanks. The prefabricated building thrives in this part of the state, in part because of the ever-depressed economy and in part because of last year’s Hurricane Floyd, which brought waters twenty to thirty feet high. I occasionally passed long-abandoned farm buildings, grayish brown and mummified. The miracle is that they still stand despite the eighty-mile-per-hour winds that have shaken them so many times over so many years.

  My first stop was Goldsboro, an hour’s drive east of Raleigh, where I showed up at Guy Parker’s yellow-brick eating spot a half-hour before the opening time of ten a.m. It was closed. Instead of giving up and leaving, I walked around back and started poking my head into windows and doors until Parker heard me trespassing and invited me F O R K I T O V E R

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  inside. “C’mon in, we’re open,” he said, explaining that he’d been on the premises since three a.m., cooking pork.

  Parker’s place had once been a service station, pretty common in the barbecue business. He’d remodeled it himself, adding overhead fans, wood-grain booths, brown vinyl benches, pig paraphernalia, and baskets of artificial flowers. His sandwich was filled with plenty of chopped pork, and it was correctly served at room temperature, which I believe is a holdover from the days when refrigeration was a luxury. On top of the pork was a dollop of decent coleslaw.

  Up to that point, the sandwich was pretty standard, but there were two modifications I’d never seen. The bun looked as though it had been placed on the grill with an anvil set on top of it, because it was a little warm and a lot squished. Then there was Parker’s tour de force, a slice of crisp skin atop the chopped pork. I’ve eaten plenty of chopped pork laced with bits of skin, and I’ve always admired the resulting crackle and crunch, but this was the first time I’d seen a whole slice added to the sandwich the way a slice of American cheese is added to a burger.

  “How do you like that?” asked Parker, when he saw me take the skin from the sandwich for a closer examination. I just nodded, not wanting to tell him that the skin seemed a distraction. I ended up eating it separately, munching it like a wafer. The real problem I had with his sandwich was vinegar-related. Parker bottles and sells his own brand of vinegar sauce, and he is too generous with it, sprinkling in so much that his sandwich tastes more like vinegar than pork.

  Still, I was so thankful to be sitting there, I smiled happily throughout my meal. When I paid the bill, I noticed that the sandwich came to $2.12, and his explanation of how he settled on that sum was too complicated for me. Mostly, the eastern North Carolina sandwich sells for $2.00–$2.50, and there is no reason to stop anywhere that charges more.

  About twenty minutes away, right on Route 70, was Wilber’s, a near-legend in barbecue country. Just past Wilber’s, off on the other side, was McCall’s Bar-B-Q
ue & Seafood. McCall’s worried me, not because of the way it spells barbecue—it’s the same food, whether it’s written 2 1 6

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  barbecue, BBQ, or bar-b-que—but because it doubles as a fish restaurant. Barbecue owners who sell fish tend to forget they’re in the pork business. I’m particularly wary of the ones who fry croakers, whatever they are, because there’s nothing worse than sitting down to a meal in a barbecue place that smells like a fried-croaker place.

  Wilber’s wasn’t a whole lot more promising. There was a sign outside offering two specials of the day, one of them spaghetti with tossed salad and the other a fish plate that came with two vegetables. I don’t like to see greens on barbecue menus, although I understand that cabbage is required for coleslaw.

  To my surprise, each made a first-class sandwich. I’d rate Wilber’s slightly better, because the pork was chunkier and more peppery. At Wilber’s, I had my second and last sweetened ice tea of the trip. I’d promised myself that I would drink only sweetened iced tea, because that’s what the locals like, but after a big glass at Parker’s and another at Wilber’s, I was trembling from sugar shock. Sweetened iced tea in North Carolina isn’t a beverage; it’s an intravenous glucose drip. From then on I drank unsweetened tea—identified as “untea” on my check at McCall’s.