When you’re not passed out on the couch or gasping for breath on the floor of your hotel room, the traveling food life is filled with all sorts of little wonders, of course. Before starting to write about food full-time, I had a travel column in Elle magazine, and I also spent years contributing work to travel magazines of every kind. I’d taken train trips across India wedged into compartments filled with jolly groups of gentlemen from Bombay, camped out in the Kalahari Desert under the twisting branches of giant baobab trees, and written columns on what it was like to visit Paris for a long weekend without ever leaving your luxury hotel. I spent a week shooting rapids down the Grand Canyon with a group of Texas cowboys in the kind of tippy wooden dory boats in which the original pioneers explored the river. When the boats flipped, which was quite often, the guides told you to calm yourself as you got sucked deep down under the whirling rapids by looking upward toward the sun shining through the bottle-green water. And sleeping out on the sandy banks in the evening, after being tumbled through the rapids, you could see satellites tumbling across the canyon sky.
Contract magazine writers tend to find one niche and stick to it forever: my specialty was the serendipitous, helter-skelter road trip. Before taking up the sedentary life of an overfed restaurant critic, I’d driven on assignment across the western deserts of the United States and traveled from the northern forests of Oregon to the top of Mexico. I’d meandered in a small Volkswagen through the beautiful hobbit landscape of New Zealand’s South Island, and I’d contrived, with my deep-pocketed editors in New York, to come up with the ideal road trip across America. This journey involved choosing the perfect time of year (early October, because fall is the best tourist season wherever you travel), the perfect longitudinal, food-friendly route (to circumvent the industrial wastelands of the Midwest and the scrubby desert scenery of Texas and Arizona, begin in Charleston, South Carolina, and head due west), and the perfect car (a wide-body silver Cadillac that I picked up at the airport in Charleston and eventually delivered, mud-splattered, with a pair of fuzzy pink dice hanging from the mirror, to the Hertz rental counter at the airport in Los Angeles).
On that two-week trip, I poked through the Carolinas, up over the Smoky Mountains, and then detoured through the Deep South and out onto the wide spaces of the open prairie. I played bingo in Tupelo, Mississippi, near the famous shotgun shack where Elvis was born, and enjoyed a frosty-glass beer at the Victory Bar on the square of a lovely little town called Las Vegas, New Mexico, which had an antique, perfectly sprung dance floor dating back to the days of Billy the Kid. I interviewed a Cherokee Indian chief on his reservation in the Smoky Mountains and a lama named Karma Dorje, who’d been born in the village of Gangtok in the Himalayan state of Sikkim in India, but now found himself running a Tibetan Buddhist center, somewhat uneasily, among the glitzy mansions of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
As I traveled slowly west, living off the fat of the land, the back of the Cadillac filled up with paper cups and discarded sandwich wrappers. I enjoyed a platter or two of the famous country ham at the Loveless Hotel on Route 101 outside of Nashville, Tennessee, where, for an extra $1.10, you could complement your stolid breakfast with fried chicken gizzards and glasses of buttermilk. I had a delicious poached egg breakfast on the lip of the Grand Canyon, grazed on cheeseburgers and avocado turkey burgers and different regional barbecues, and became an expert at unfurling giant bomb-shaped burritos from their silver wrappers as I drove down the empty country highways at eighty miles an hour.
By the time I reached the lama in Santa Fe, I’d taken to asking people I met on the road about their favorite places to eat, the way I would later do as a full-time professional glutton, but when I put this question to Lama Dorje, he let out a small sigh. A dignified-looking gentleman, dressed in cascading red robes, he was sipping a glass of tea in his favorite rocking chair while mountain birds rioted around in the trees outside. He hadn’t wanted to come to the United States in the first place, he told me, but his own lama back in the Himalayas had commanded him to go. Being Buddhist, he was vegetarian, and so not very familiar with the local cuisine, let alone the idea of the bloated, Bourdain-style culinary road trip. “In this country everything is pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, money, money, money,” the lama said. “I’m afraid I don’t even know how to drive.”
Maybe the lama, sensing something from the slightly manic, overfed aura I was giving off, was trying to tell me something? Who knows? But later on, when I started incorporating my affinity for road trips into the world of food writing, I tried to search out curious characters like the lama along the way, in an attempt to keep the “pleasure” aspect of the assignment from veering too drastically out of hand.
For the North Carolina barbecue story, which would be published in the Washington Post Sunday magazine, I sat down with “Pete Jones,” who even back in those days was as famous in barbecue circles as any venerable vintner in the vineyards of Burgundy or Bordeaux. Jones told me that his ancestors around the small town of Ayden, which sits halfway between Interstate 95 and the coast, had been serving their chaste, unreconstructed version of pit-cooked chopped pork since before the Civil War. He was in his seventies (“Hell, I think I’m about seventy-two,” he told me) and would die several years later, but he’d managed to catch the very early waves of the coming international barbecue craze by turning the ramshackle establishment called the Skylight Inn, which he owned with other members of the family, into a world-famous hog-cooking destination. Mr. Jones traced his Spartan cooking methods back to his great-great-grandfather Skilton Dennis, who began roasting pigs for church gatherings in the 1830s; at the Skylight Inn, they still cooked their whole hogs more or less the same way as his ancestor—for up to fourteen hours in the brick pits out behind the little restaurant, over a mixture of smoldering oak and hickory wood. Over the years, dignitaries had come from around the world for a taste of his famous pork sandwich, including several presidents, and when a magazine named the Skylight Inn the best barbecue joint in the country back in 1979, he’d slapped a large plywood replica of the Capitol rotunda up in Washington, DC, on the roof to celebrate.
“This is known to be the barbecue capital of the world, so I figured I had to put up a dome,” said Jones, who looked more like a hardscrabble pig farmer than the kind of bluff, burly, and bearded barbecue pit master who would become a staple on the food cable TV shows. As I wrote in the story, he received me in his cluttered office, wearing a beat-up pair of work boots and a faded red Coca-Cola cap propped on his head. He took me out behind the restaurant to tour the barbecue pits, which still operated more or less the way they had back in the days of Skilton Dennis, whose own ancestors, living in the Tidewater region of the Carolinas and Virginia, learned the coal pit technique from the local Indians.
After the tour, I had a taste of the chopped pork for the first time. It was finely diced, interspersed with smoky, salty, barely visible cracklings of pork fat, and already seasoned by the cooks in the chaste lowlands Carolina style—with just a splash of vinegar and some salt and pepper. When Jones saw me reach for some more sauce, he gave me the same disapproving look I’d gotten from the lordly sushi chefs in Tokyo when I asked for a little extra soy sauce to go on their perfectly flavored fatty tuna belly. In the low country by the coast, the base for the barbecue sauce is vinegar, and as you travel west through the state the familiar sugary red tomato ketchup tinge slowly begins to appear. Jones regarded these newfangled developments with the same suspicious contempt reserved for slices of previously frozen American pizza by the Neapolitan pizza masters I would meet years later on another story. The chopped pork at the Skylight Inn was served between two simple slices of white bread, or piled, unadorned, on little paper “trays.” Except for the crackling bits, the fat had been slow-cooked off the soft, finely chopped meat, and the faint umami taste of vinegar made you want to come back for another deliciously addictive sandwich almost immediately after you’d finished the first one. “If it’s pure barbecue, it’s barbecue before the sauce goes into it, no way of saying nothing but that!” Jones exclaimed, as he watched me head back to the counter for seconds with my pork tray.
I MET OTHER GRAND BARBECUE PERSONALITIES ON THAT TRIP, LIKE Keith Allen of the famous Allen & Son barbecue restaurant outside of Chapel Hill, who was shoveling coals around his cooking pit when I found him, wreathed in blue hickory smoke. Allen used only hickory in his cooking, gathering the wood from fallen trees in the forests and neighborhoods around town, and every day he woke up at 3:30 a.m. to tend his fire. Like French vintners tasting wine, he took a taste of pork only now and then and went about his work with a deliberate slowness. “I can cook a rib eye steak in fifteen minutes,” he said, “but it will take me half a day to cook you a proper barbecue sandwich.” Wayne Monk, in the famous barbecue city of Lexington, maintained that good barbecue, like anything else, is predicated on freshness. He cut me a taste of crispy-skinned “brown” shoulder, which was baby pink and succulent to the point of sweetness, and told me that discerning locals knew when one of his brown pork shoulders was perfectly cooked and in a state of peak deliciousness and would begin to line up outside his restaurant, Lexington Barbecue, a half hour ahead of time, in their pickup trucks and wide-body cars, to wait for a taste.
I introduced myself to William McLawhorn, a former cotton and corn farmer who operated B’s Barbecue and Grill. This ramshackle establishment at a country crossroads near the town of Greenville was famous for the addictive quality of McLawhorn’s barbecued chicken. “Cook ’em low and slow and keep watching ’em, that’s my secret,” said McLawhorn, who cooked three hundred birds per day over hot coals for two hours, bathed them in a warm vinegar sauce of his own design, and then closed up shop when they were gone. McLawhorn’s chicken was the best chicken I’ve had before or since—the skin was parchment thin, and even the little bones disappeared to nothing on the back of your tongue. I ate one of McLawhorn’s chickens at a picnic table under the shade of a spreading oak tree, chatting about the finer points of regional Carolina barbecue with a county judge who was a regular at McLawhorn’s; and for a taste of the best chicken in the world, with corn bread, coleslaw, and a tall sweet iced tea, I remember we paid a grand total of $3.95.
On that trip, I also visited with a genial gentleman named Martell Scott in the town of Goldsboro, who told me he’d earned an accounting degree from Howard University before going into the family business, which his grandfather, a minister, had started back in 1917. The Scotts were famous for their barbecue sauce, which was patented and sold by mail in every state of the Union. It was the ribs that grabbed my attention, however; when I got a second order, along with a tray of lean chopped pork, for the road, the waitress cried, “Go for it, baby, it ain’t gonna kill ya!” as I waddled out the door.
That trip didn’t quite kill me, but over the years several of these madcap excursions almost did. The awkward gout flare-up during my visit to El Bulli would be cured by a few pills, once I tapped out my farcical deadline story in a hungover frenzy (yes, there was a helicopter ride to the restaurant at sunset) and hobbled off to the doctor when I got back home. The closest I’ve ever come to an actual near-death experience on the job, however, was at the end of another long eating excursion to Tokyo. I’d already spent a week in the city, recording the strange food manias that took hold in Japan during the early part of the millennium and spread from there around the world. I’d visited the sets of the frenetic, Iron Chef–style cooking shows and stood in line with legions of young girls waiting for a taste of the latest social media pastry sensation. I’d roamed again through the department store food halls from my high school days, interviewed diffident sushi masters and tempura chefs, and taken the train up the coast to wander around the wonderful ramen museum in Yokohama, which was built during the 1990s by an eccentric developer to celebrate the favorite comfort food of his youth. The developer had spent years turning a large subterranean space in a nondescript Yokohama office building into a ramen geek fantasia, designed to look like his childhood neighborhood back in 1958, the year instant noodles were invented by the great Momofuku Ando in his small workshop in Osaka. All of the different styles of ramen from around Japan were collected under one roof at the museum and sold at little street stalls and stands by cooks dressed in full costume. In that uniquely obsessive Japanese way, replicas of vintage Godzilla movie posters were plastered on the fake building walls, and hidden stereo boxes filled the space with clattering subway sounds and street noises. There was even a diorama on the ceiling, lit up with orange and purple colors, designed to look like the early evening sky.
The day before I was about to leave town to fly home, my editors in New York called and asked if their wandering restaurant critic could locate a fugu restaurant on short notice and write about the experience. I knew all about the dreaded puffer fish, having been living in Tokyo in 1975, when one of the biggest stories of the year was the death of a famous Kabuki actor named Bandō Mistugorō, whose organs shut down after he ingested too many deadly fish livers at a restaurant in Kyoto. The emperor of Japan was forbidden by law to eat the fish, which fed on a deadly shellfish common in the waters around Japan. The poison, called tetrodotoxin, collected in the liver, eyeballs, and ovaries of the fish, and if you ate too much of it, you would slowly become paralyzed and suffocate to death. There was no cure for the poison, and its effect was so slow and insidious that victims in the fishing villages, I’d read, were laid beside their open caskets for several days to ensure that they were not being buried alive by mistake. Once certified fugu chefs passed an exam, they were given an official government certificate to display in their restaurant. Because people had died foraging in garbage cans behind fugu restaurants, and because toxic fugu entrails were occasionally used by enterprising murderers as poison, the fugu chefs, by law, had to keep the poisonous entrails in a metal container under lock and key, then deliver it every week to Tokyo hazmat officials stationed at the fish markets, who disposed of the poisonous remains in sealed toxic waste cannisters.
“I don’t want to write about the goddamned fugu,” I told my editor.
“See what you can find!” was his cheery reply.
My guide on that trip was Shinji Nohara, a writer and former law student who had developed a specialty leading jet-lagged foreign journalists and other fat-cat food adventurers on culinary pilgrimages around the city. It was a Sunday afternoon in early spring—the end of the fugu dining season, Shinji said—and my flight out of town was the next day. When I told him about this new assignment, he smiled happily and started making calls.
“You’ve never had fugu?! You will love it! I’m a big fan!”
After ten minutes or so, Shinji had found us a fugu restaurant, one of the few that could open on a rainy Sunday evening. We piled into his battered Jeep Wagoneer and rumbled through a spattering of springtime rain to a lonely little restaurant in the working-class district of Tokyo called Sumida. When we arrived, a TV was flickering on the wall of the empty little room. A food show was on—starlets were learning to cook a dish from a dour chef wearing a tall white toque. Our chef, Mr. Hashimoto, was hacking at a fugu carcass behind the bar when we arrived. There were speckles of blood on his apron, and I remember thinking, as I wrote in my story, that he had a striking, not very confidence-inspiring resemblance to the famously bug-eyed, twentieth-century American comedian Don Knotts.
Like lots of cooks in Tokyo, Mr. Hashimoto lived above his restaurant, although there was no evidence of a Mrs. Hashimoto on this stormy Tokyo evening: no shoes were lined up neatly by the stairway leading up to his apartment, and the pitter-patter of children’s feet could not be heard from the floors above. There was no one in the dining room; in fact, there were no chef’s assistants, no waiters, and no busboys to clean the tables and wash the dishes. As I scanned the walls nervously for the chef’s government-approved fugu certificate, Shinji asked him about the evening’s menu. He was preparing the usual smoked fugu fins, he said, slices of raw fugu sashimi, and delicate helpings of Kara-age fugu ribs rolled in flour and sizzled in oil. But the chef excitedly reported that he’d also procured some very fine shirako, which, according to Shinji, was one of the ultimate seasonal delicacies in the fugu canon. It appeared only briefly in the spring, the way white truffles from Alba filled the grand New York restaurants every fall.
“Shirako?”
“The literal translation is ‘white babies.’”
“You mean fugu eggs?”
“No, the ovaries are deadly poisonous! This is the fugu’s sperm sac,” said Shinji with a look of barely suppressed glee on his face.
“I’m not eating the engorged sperm sac of a deadly fugu fish.”
“We’re not eating the whole sac, just a little.”
“I’m not eating even a little bit of sperm sac.”
“It’s a famous delicacy, like the smoothest brie cheese from France!”
“I don’t like brie cheese.”
“I’ve already ordered it, so we’ll just take a little taste. Your editors will be happy!”
“So where the hell is everybody in this restaurant?” I whispered to Shinji, looking around nervously at the empty tables in the deserted dining room and at the chef, who had returned behind the bar, where he commenced hacking at the fish again in his blood- and guts-stained apron.
“Maybe it’s the rain,” he replied. “Or maybe Sunday is not a big day for fugu eaters. Or maybe Chef Hashimoto has killed everybody.”
Shinji was a prankster and also something of a fugu promoter, having introduced the dish to Anthony Bourdain when he came through town. Like most local diners, he considered fugu to be generally safe, and he liked to poke fun at what he considered the hysterical foreign caricature of the dish. “We don’t think about the poison,” he said. Fugu’s appeal, he believed, stemmed from a different kind of primal force. “It’s seasonal, it’s ceremonial, and it’s expensive, so you can impress the girls.” When I asked him how Bourdain handled his fugu ordeal, he said that Bourdain had handled it well, although there had been some suspicion that the producers and crew substituted a “caged,” farm-raised, nonpoisonous fugu for the actual wild-caught fish so as not to jeopardize the health or fragile psyche of the talent.
As we sat down to dinner in the empty restaurant, the only sounds were the pattering of rain on the windows and the clattering of plates as the chef prepared dinner behind the bar, interspersed with occasional, ominous rumblings of thunder outside on the deserted street. Presently, the food began to arrive—miso soup first, with shreds of pale fugu flesh that, in color and texture, looked like pale candle wax. Then fugu sashimi, which Shinji enjoyed more than I did. As he gobbled my portion, he showed me how the pieces of fish had been arranged in the shape of a chrysanthemum—the traditional funeral flower of Japan, he merrily reported.
We tasted the small, crunchy fugu ribs, which had been rolled in flour and fried, and then Chef Hashimoto emerged from behind the bar to proudly display the engorged sperm sacs before preparing them, the way waiters in grand restaurants bring out the whole roasted duck or prime rib for everyone to admire before returning to the kitchen to carve it or fire it on the grill. The sacs of shirako looked pale and glistening, like two wet plastic bags filled with condensed milk; they were a little slippery and bouncy to the touch, like water balloons, and as I examined them, I began to feel the first faint tingling sensation around my lips and the tip of my tongue.
“Do your lips feel numb?” I asked Shinji.
“My lips don’t feel numb!” he cried, gobbling more sashimi and looking at the engorged sperm sacs the way a hungry cowboy looks at a well-cooked steak.
To settle my nerves, I ordered a glass of beer, then another, and then excused myself to visit the tiny bathroom before the shirako arrived. The small, faintly creepy dining room felt even smaller and creepier when I returned. A sheen of flop sweat had collected on my forehead, and my heart began racing like a baboon’s. Trying not to act like the terror-stricken foreigner undergoing the classic fugu near-death experience, I took out my notebook and started scribbling random things about Chef Hashimoto’s apron, the waxy nastiness of the raw fugu, and the sounds of the weather outside. Presently, more sake was served, followed by more beer, followed by a few more fugu ribs, which had the nice meaty texture of monkfish and were actually sort of delicious. I ate several of them, trying not to focus on the faint numbing sensation that now seemed to be creeping, inexorably, from my tingling lips, down the back of my throat, toward my lungs and heart. I was moved, between bites, to ask Hashimoto whether there had ever been a fugu “accident” in his restaurant. Shinji translated my question, and the chef said something that caused them to burst into what, for two dignified Japanese gentlemen, was the equivalent of riotous laughter.
“Chef Hashimoto says if someone had an accident in his restaurant, he wouldn’t tell you, because it would be bad for business,” said Shinji. “But don’t worry. There was an American in here a few weeks ago, and he didn’t have an accident.”
“That’s good.”
“But Mr. Hashimoto thinks you should know something.”
“What’s that?”
“That other American, he didn’t eat the sperm sac.”
“ACCIDENTS” IS THE POLITE EUPHEMISM THAT FUGU ENTHUSIASTS like Shinji tended to use when discussing the perils of fugu fish dining, and despite all the precautions, they can still happen. I would report in my story that, according to the Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health in Tokyo, 315 cases of poison by fugu were reported between 1996 and 2005 in Japan, 31 of them fatal. Most victims were fishermen engaging in Russian roulette–style bouts of fugu consumption, or amateur cooks who were trying to duplicate cooking demonstrations they’d seen on TV. There was also the experience of shibireru, a much-debated, slightly alarming numbing sensation, which some thrill-seeking fugu enthusiasts described as one of the addictive pleasures of the fugu experience (the word means “to become numb” in Japanese) but others considered to be an urban myth.
Chef Hashimoto had prepared two varieties of Shinji’s favorite delicacy for our enjoyment—one raw, tipped with a lime-flavored ponzu sauce; and the other grilled and chopped into little bite-sized nuggets. I dabbed at the raw fugu with my chopsticks and put a little of it on the tip of my tongue. It had a creamy consistency and tasted icy cool, but the real pleasure aside from the buzzy, thrill-seeking aspect, it would strike me later on, was in the complete absence of flavor. It was like tasting the ultimate palate cleanser, albeit one that might or might not lead to slow paralysis and a certain, highly unpleasant death. The grilled shirako was just the opposite—piping hot and grimly unpleasant, like warm, fishy curds of milk. I swallowed one little chunk, and while Shinji merrily devoured the rest, I excused myself and retreated again to the coffin-sized restroom, where I examined my tingly, possibly lifeless tongue in the mirror. I’d read that fugu victims get their stomachs pumped and are force-fed charcoal to absorb the poison, and I had images of doctors waving long green tubes over my paralyzed body, my face seized in a black, charcoal-covered grin. I flipped through my notes, which read “feeling disoriented, a little panicky,” before trailing off into a series of illegible scrawls.
When I returned to the table, I was in the midst of a full-on paranoid fugu meltdown, and Shinji, now a little drunk on sake and sperm sac, could barely contain his glee, having seen this condition in sensitive, overfed foreigners before. He asked if I wanted to try some pickled fugu ovaries—which would also lead to certain death if they had not been soaked in poison-leaching salt for several days—but mercifully, Chef Hashimoto, who came to the table with more sake, reported, with a sad shake of his head, that he was out of pickled fugu ovaries that night. Instead, we sampled nasty-tasting smoked fugu tails stuck in little cups of tea and a warm, vaguely soothing nabe stew, made with tofu, fish broth, and parts of the fugu carcass, including the spooky, eyeless skull.
Outside in the quiet neighborhood, the rain had stopped, and after we finished our nabe stew, the chef came out to clear our dishes away. “Mr. Hashimoto wants to know how you have enjoyed your dinner,” Shinji said as I nervously poured the dregs of my third sake carafe into a bowl of ponzu sauce. I told him that the grilled shirako was not one of the best things I’d ever tasted but the ribs and nabe stew were excellent, and that all in all it had been a very interesting experience. Chef Hashimoto nodded politely and said that shirako in all its forms was an acquired taste.
Then, gently feeling my tingling lips, I asked again about the numbing shibireru sensation, which I thought I could still feel tingling down the back of my throat, although now that my fugu experience had mercifully ended, the tingling was not quite as extreme as before. According to Mr. Hashimoto, some chefs said that they purposely left a trace of poison to create the sensation, and some people said that they could actually feel the sensation, but he was a member of the urban myth school. Maybe in my excitement I had experienced a phantom-shibireru, which he said he’d seen many times before, especially in people who were trying the dish for the first time. “Don’t worry,” he said, as I paid the check and we got up to leave as quickly and politely as we could. “It is your mind playing tricks. If your lips are really numb, then nobody can save you. If your lips are really numb, Mr. Platt, then you are already dead.”