The Wind Chimes Paw-Paw
A recovering food writer and a photographer head south in search of women chefs with stories to tell, traditions to share, and meals to cook
Day 4: Asheville, N.C., Belton, S.C., and Atlanta, G.A.
The Asheville sky is a hazy shade of hangover this morning. Melanie has been given an insider two-word tip: Over Easy. This cafe is where you go for breakfast, she has been told. It is, mercifully, near the loftiless Aloft hotel, and as we walk that-away, we find ourselves stopping to admire a wind chime along with some other swingy-type hanging objects outside a shop. Panic sets in. When the native tchotchkes start looking good, it’s time to split. We must get out of here before we start wearing long skirts and playing classic R.E.M. tunes on our banjos in front of the church.
Serving lavender French toast and gluten-free biscuits, Over Easy is a Berkeley-via-Blue-Ridge godsend (although, again, perhaps we’ve just been in Asheville too long). We order “Waking Up” green juices, to undo the damage of the past days’ pie crusts and cocktails. Ah, clarity. Our senses are restored; wind chimes hated all over again.
Checkout couldn’t come sooner. Adieu, Eric the Incompetent. Toodles, Starbucks in the lounge with sad-looking fruit parfaits. Adios, empty fridges that stand in place of well-stocked mini-bars. Parting is such sweet sorrow, filtered water fountain at the opposite end of my room’s floor.
Once again, we pass the Eastern Continental Divide. Today, we’re crossing state lines, too. We’re visiting Chef Number Four, whose home and restaurant are on the same property, in Belton, a town in northern South Carolina, which, to our New Yorkers’ eyes, looks like a prairie-esque middle-of-nowhere frontier. To get there, we fly by the freeway’s concentrated patches of fast-food clusterfucks. How, we wonder, can so many franchises survive so close to each other? How does a person decide between Clock, Chick-fil-A (where we still haven’t been), Sonic, McDonald’s, and Wendy’s? (We both admit that we wouldn’t mind a Dairy Queen snack.) Later, the chef we’re meeting will tell me it’s all about location; whichever outpost is closest to the turnoff wins. Deciding what’s for dinner is as mindless as that.
And these mass-produced, deep-fry-dispensing drive-thrus are what our chef has to compete with. It’s hard to convince the blind followers of a faith built on cheap, empty, greasy calories that paying a little more for better-tasting, lovingly made, and expertly prepared biscuits, pimento cheese, roast pork sandwiches or fried catfish is a soul-satisfying, community-supporting upgrade. It’s hard to teach people what value tastes like when they’ve had years to develop a predilection for, or even addiction to, crap.
Chef Number Four refuses to give up, and, fortunately, she and her co-chef/owner husband have found a loyal following. Still, she cleverly tames her fine-dining pedigree so as not to intimidate; she eases eaters in with “salmon in paper,” as opposed to its doppelganger, salmon en papillote. (What’s in a name? It has the power to scare people away.) Mostly, though, she serves traditional regional food done the old-fashioned way, with better ingredients.
After I’ve interviewed the chef, and Melanie has photographed her in the restaurant and on the surrounding land where she keeps a menagerie of animals, including a senile, forty-year-old miniature horse the family affectionately refers to as Paw-Paw, the South Carolina native insists we leave with bags full of her preserved comestibles, baked goods, and a large cupful of freshly churned strawberry ice cream.
Back in the car, we stick our spoons into the ice cream, which tastes like jam, in creamy, smooth, cold form. (Dairy Queen, who?) This is what it’s like to have truly great, ripe strawberries in season. We see berries in the New York area, but they don’t yield ice cream like this. Then I open the final box the chef shoved into my hands — inside is a palm-sized out-of-the-oven tomato pie. The chef described this staple to me during our conversation, and it sounded pretty basic with its pie shell, tomato and cheddar cheese. But what I swallow is one of the best savory tarts I’ve ever had. With its flaky crust and its cap of browned, blistered cheese, it is perfectly salty, and buttery, and most of all, tomato-touting. That fruit — or vegetable, or whatever you want to call it — is the star of the pie show and burst through, its tender, roasted slices all acidic, sweet and juicy.
This, and a spiced apple hand pie that celebrates that fruit in the same way the former savory snack did the tomato, hold us over until we reached Atlanta.
Onto dinner. One of my wise advisors on this journey, food stylist, writer, and teacher, Angie Mosier, has, long after my list of featured chefs is culled and my appointments scheduled, emailed with a last-minute nomination, a Thai mother-daughter duo named, respectively, Nan and Dee Dee Niyomkul. Nan is the chef-owner of Nan Thai Fine Dining, and, following in her chef-mom’s footsteps, opened her own establishment, Tuk Tuk Thai Food Loft, two years ago. According to my new favorite pen-pal Angie:
Nan and her husband Charlie opened a great restaurant back in the nineties called Tamarind — it was Atlanta’s best Thai food and was forced to close because of construction in the city. They opened another place called Tamarind Seed (still opened and operated by their family), and Nan opened her fine dining establishment … Dee Dee traveled and studied culinary arts then returned to Atlanta to open Tuk Tuk … It’s interesting — she learned Thai street food from her grandmother who was a street food vendor in Thailand … Anyway, I’m really proud that Atlanta has such great Thai food and these ladies have worked hard to establish their legacy here.
We might not be able to cover Nan and Dee Dee for the SFA Symposium project, but I figure we could support and learn about them another way — by making a reservation.After a long day of traveling under the hot Southern sun, Dee Dee’s Thai food is a refreshing reward.We order a bunch of dishes to try. We can’t stop shoveling in the bracing papaya salad or sticking our greedily grasping chopsticks into the Hoy Tod, a puffy fried omelet filled with mussels and scallions, and garnished with a sweet-n-sour chili sauce and fresh cilantro. It reminds me of a Japanese okonomiyaki, except it’s crispier, thanks to a light, tempura-like batter. Beneath, are bean sprouts, which remain crunchy, though they’re indirectly warmed by the omelet.
After we’ve sopped things up with a crispy roti dunked in a coconutty, spicy green curry sauce, we are thankful to Ms. Mosier, delightedly woozy from the cold sake poured, and, above all, sated.
