Fried Brain Sandwich

New restaurants usually do a soft opening -- for the first couple of days they bring in family, friends, and the new neighbors for a shakedown cruise. Usually the food is on the house and you just pay for the booze you drink. The kitchen and waitstaff get to figure out how the place really works and how the traffic really should flow (as opposed to what it says on the blueprints).

Restaurant Sage took advantage of Taste of Clayton on Sunday to do a pre pre-opening. The restaurant is looking to be up and running by mid-July in the former digs of the Lynch Street Bistro (1031 Lynch Street, St. Louis). Chef Jack Mac Murray turned out his culinary brigade in force at Shaw Park, complete with a full mini-kitchen.

A charcoal grill at the back was cranking out 15 Spice Ribs. The meat was moist without being mushy. They ribs had not been smoked, but did have a rich flavor from the spice mixture which included some adobe paste.

Twin deep fat fryers were set up down one side perpendicular from the grill. Out of them came Crispy Cha-Cha Calamari -- flash-fried squid dunked in an Asian Aioli. The effect was captivating. The crisp hot breading and the soft/chewy flesh were in perfect tandem. The aioli sparkled in your mouth with a citrus/garlic tang.

A cold station stood across from the fryers. From it came the Shanghai Steak and Noodle Salad. What a kick-ass salad. Chunks of mango, shreds of Napa, and slivers of carrots were tossed with noddles, mint, and basil in a screaming rice vinegar, sesame oil, chili paste dressing. Three or four slices of chewy, peppery beef were laid on top and the whole thing rocked your mouth with every bite. Most Asian salads you find in St. Louis tend to be sedate, solemn, gaze-at-the-water-lilies-from-the-bridge affairs. When they are assertive it is more often from a bungled hand on the sesame oil bottle. Mac Murry displayed a Kurosawa deftness with his ingredients--each shouting for attention, each playing its role in a larger gustatory kaleidoscope.

Owner John Schute describes the Sage concept as Urban American Grille. This narrows it down just about not at all. Judging by my First Taste of Mac Murry's cooking, "Urban" is going to mean brash and diverse, a swirl of inspirations. It is also going to mean a great addition to the St. Louis food scene.

There is an old truism in business: you can make if fast, you can make it cheap, you can make it good -- pick two. Overwhelmingly in the restaurant lunch trade the choices are fast and cheap. Outside of a couple of specialized niches -- ladies who lunch, executives doing the power martini thing -- sit down restaurants must deal with the twin realities of limited time (the lunch hour) and a heightened sensitivity to price. To succeed, you have to get 'em in and get 'em out in about an hour, for less than $10 (or a nearby price point). And if you do it well, you risk being a victim of success as more and more people come pouring in at noon.

Niki's West in Birmingham, Alabama comes about as close as I have ever seen to scoring a truism trifecta. Their basic Meat and Three is $8.50, they are more efficient than a New York deli at moving people through, and the food is pretty damn good.

When we got there just around noon, a dozen cars were prowling around the block looking for a open spot like it was some kind of hot nightclub. We jumped out to get in line while Alan drove off to park. A security guy at the door is letting in a few people at a time, furthering the image that this was IT (although a sign as you go in keeps you grounded, "No Tank Tops, No Bare Feet, No Hair Rollers"). Once through the door your enter the chutes -- the wrap around lines channeling you towards the servers. The 100 people or so standing in line represented a pretty good cross section of the populace -- black / white, professional / working, men / women, young / and old. Except they weren't really standing. The line kept shuffling along and it only took us about 10 minutes to get to the front.

As you get close, you see why things are moving so quickly. In an article on Chipolte, I commented on the cheerful strategies they employed for minimizing the dawdle factor of people making choices. Niki's West makes Chipotle look like a snooze fest. A dozen big guys are standing shoulder to shoulder serving up food in a blur of ladles, spoons, and plates. A sign next to the menu on the wall sets the tone, "NO Cellphone While in Line."

"Whatllyahave?" I hadn't quite put my tray on the rails and the first counterman was already staring right through me. A gap had opened between me and the guy in front and it had to be closed up.

"What will you have?" he repeated fractionally slower. I had studied the list of the dozen or so meats on the menu board, so I had an answer, "Chicken Fried Steak". Several nano-seconds later a plate appeared on the pickup shelf about a foot past my reach. I had to move down to get it and so the gap in the line began to heal.

"Comeondown, Comondown" This was not the enthusiastic call from a Johnny Olsen or a Rod Roddy, but rather the urgings from the next block of servers. The vegetable offerings are not listed, so they understand that you need several whole seconds to look across the expansive array of choices. You want beans? There's lima beans, white beans, black eyed peas. You want greens? There's collards, and turnip greens, and cabbage. There's fried okra and stewed okra with tomatoes, and fried green tomatoes. There's at least 6 different kinds of potatoes, plus sweet potatoes, and three kinds of baked dressings, and don't forget the rutabagas. Can't forget the rutabagas. And there had to be another 20 things that didn't even register in my visual field -- rice? corn? squash? -- I'm sure they were all there with at least two or three choices each

"Anything else? Anything else?" they call back as they scoop each selection into a monkey dish and set it again about a foot down the line so that you have to keep moving. I end up with the fried green tomatoes, fried okra, black eyed peas, and sweet potatoes -- a Meat and Three plus one. I move into the cold area -- a dozen salads, and then the pies, and cakes, and cobblers. I grab some corn bread muffins and ask for a slice of blueberry pie.

"How many in your party?" the lone checker asks. Her face is a study in intensity, as though she could break rocks with a single glance. She is punching away on her register as she repeats and extends the questioning, "How many in your party? Drinks? Water?" "Three", I say and "uh, yes, a diet coke and water." I'm looking around for the sodas, but there are none. That gets taken care of later. She glances down the line to take in my group, and then I'm invisible to her; she has set her sights on the next group.

"Come on, come on. They'll catch up." It took about thirty seconds from tray down to tray up and I was now moving into traffic control. A tall man is motioning me to the right. I follow for a couple of steps until he catches the attention of his counterpart in the next dinning room. The tall guy throws up three fingers, the counterpart comes forward and acknowledges with his own 3 fingered signal. The relay completed, I follow the second guy into a large dinning room that is about half full. A moment or two later Alan and JoAnn show up at the same table. This is all the more amazing since JoAnn had stopped to ask a question, prompting the servers to urge the people behind her to "Come on around, come on around." Like data packets on the internet, we were broken apart and reassembled at the correct destination.

The dinning room wasn't much to look at, sort of a fern bar warmed over, with faux stained glass, paneled walls, and Formica tables. But it was calm and and relatively quiet. A waitress came over to take care of drinks. She had a ready smile, and cheerfully answered our questions. Yes, lunchtime was pretty intense, and they feed about, oh, maybe 1500 people a day. The food was all solidly good. Nothing exceptional, but above average versions of just about everything. The twin evils of cafeteria food is that it all tends towards the same taste and the textures suffer from being on the line too long. Niki's avoided both problems. The lima beans were distinct from the white beans and both were yummy. Each of the greens tasted as they should and were different from the rest. My sweet potatoes were wonderful, pretty much cooked on their own with no extra sugar. I realized later that instead of the large full and half sized serving pans on the line, Niki's used quarter and eighth sized pans. Nothing sat for very long. The fried okra was crisp and hot. The stewed okra and tomatoes was one of the best versions I have had, with a bit of onion and garlic, and perhaps oregano.

I likened the experience to shooting the rapids at a water theme park and I kind of wanted to go again. But by the time we had finished, the lunch rush was over. The line of a hundred had been replaced by a line of six. The white water rapids had been replaced by a slow moving bayou. To Alan it was about as close to being in a commodities pit or on the floor of a stock exchange as you might ever get. There was a flood of choices to make, and a shouted urgency to make those choices quickly.

In Bombay, the dabbawallahs deliver hot home cooked lunches to tens of thousands of office workers every day. The dabbas (lunch pails) are collected, sorted, distributed, and returned though an efficient network of relay couriers. In Birmingham, on a slightly smaller scale, Niki's West delivers hundreds of people to hot home-styled lunches through a efficient network of servers, checkers, and routers. Both systems have solved, in very different ways, the fundamental problem of lunch -- fast, good, and affordable.

It's hard to do barbecue on the road. You start with the advance intel reports on the region identifying likely targets of opportunity. Then there are the dossiers of the pit-masters that need to be collected and reviewed. You make a call to the forestry service to check on any problems with the hickory or cherry wood harvesting. Talk to the guy at the farm bureau about how the hogs have been running this year. But the advance stuff is only half the game. Most of it goes out the window when you get the real 411 from the boots-on-the-ground.

You think I'm kidding, son? You think this is all fun and games? Barbecue is SER-I-OUS business.

Well maybe I stretched a little with the forestry thing. And I don't recall actually talking to anybody about hogs. But scouting out the best barbecue is a serious thing. The classic method can be pretty time consuming -- drive around looking for a shack with the Mercedes and the F-150s parked out front. The best barbecue places tend to cut across class lines.

This being the age of the internet, we started with Chowhound and the debate about the best barbecue in Tuscaloosa -- Archibald's vs. Dreamland. The edge seemed to be towards Archibald's, so we checked out an interview Amy Evans did with George Archibald Jr. as part of the Southern Foodways Alliance series The Southern BBQ Trail. Finally, we asked around while we were in Birmingham. Carol Griffin of Chez LuLu was a bit taken aback, "Y'all have heard of Archibald's?" but said that was the place to go.

The second great contribution of the modern era to the barbecue search is the GPS navigator. No more of those instructions that start out, "You go down the road a piece, till you see some cows on the left, then you ..." We punched in the address and were quickly led the back edge of little bedroom community in Northport, across the Black Warrior river from Tuscaloosa.

You pull up into a driveway on an embankment and you know you're in the right spot because there's a large pile of split hickory logs standing next to a tall gray chimney. On the other side of the chimney is a little shack. Inside the screen door is a counter with three or four stools, two refrigerators and a sink. If ten people came in at the same time the fire marshal might have to close the joint down. On the far wall ("far" being about 6 feet) is a large metal door built into the side of the chimney that slides open to reveal a grate sitting about waist high over the pit. Slabs of ribs and mounds of pork shoulder stretch back into the darkness. There's a garden hose with a spray nozzle hanging from the pit door handle. A counterman is taking orders and there's a woman tending the pit. I'm guessing she's Mrs. Paulette Washington, George Jr.'s sister. According to the dossier she takes over in the late morning and works till George comes back at three. Every five minutes or so, she takes that hose and sprays it into the pit, kicking up a cloud of smoke. That's when you realize that the pit / restaurant distinction is a false dichotomy. There is just the single edifice -- the smokehouse -- part of which is more accommodating to people wanting some 'cue and the other part more accommodating to pork in the process of becoming 'cue,

Archibald's Rib Platter

We ordered two large rib platters and a sliced pork platter. The counterman sets out three paper plates on a little table next to the pit door and covers each with a couple of slices of Sunbeam bread. Miss. Paulette grabs a wicked looking polearm, (actually a kitchen fork clamped onto the end of broom handle) and begins wrangling in the pork. She does all of her work right there at the edge of pit. She chops up the ribs on a block of wood set into the brick lip and piles them on to the plates. From a piece of shoulder she slices off meat and weighs it out on a little kitchen scale. She takes each plate and ladles on the sauce from a pot sitting on the grate. The counterman piles on two or three more pieces of bread, covers each plate with a sheet of butcher paper and sticks in a couple of toothpicks to keep it all together.

We sit at the counter and eat our pork. The ribs are large and meaty, crisper at the thin end and still a little fatty at the thick end. The flesh comes off easily enough, but I wouldn't say that it just falls apart. Sitting there that afternoon, I couldn't really taste any smoke, which I thought was kind of odd. It was clear that they cook over a hotter fire for a shorter period of time than some folks do. We got a couple of orders to take back to Columbia and I tried some later that night. Nice smoky flavor, not dominating; but a clear compliment to the pork flavor. Very nice balance with the nod being given more to the pig than to the wood. What had changed? Then I realized the futility of trying to taste a subtle hickory smoke flavor while sitting in a smokehouse. When everything tastes of smoke, nothing tastes of smoke.

The sauce is a thin vinegar base, with some ketchup, mustard, and a fiery pepper kick. More like a North Carolina sauce, which narrows it down to about 3,000 possibilities. I believe I read somewhere that North Carolina has more barbecue styles per capita than anywhere else on earth. If I could get hold of Hoppin' John Taylor, expert on all things in the Carolinas, he might be able point me to someone who could determine that Archibald's sauce was closest in style to those restaurants on the right hand side of Highway One (going south) between mile markers 43 and 57. Which of course is all the difference in the world from those restaurants on the left hand side.

Lacking those resources and left to my own devices, I can only add some general observations about the sauce. The fieryness suggested to me a pepper vinegar, either store bought or made themselves. I suspect they are adding their own peppers and letting them steep, in part because the heat is fairly intense, while the acidity is fairly low. There's just a bit of body to the sauce, suggesting perhaps some kind of culinary gum. This might come from ketchup or from certain kinds of hot sauce. When we got our order to go, they gave us two large (16 oz) Styrofoam cups of sauce. Looking into the cup, I was reminded of art class and the cup of water I used to clean my brushes after painting a sunset. Its a ruddy orangey, red, with flecks of yellow. However it is made, it is to my mind just what you want in a sauce. Thicker sauces take over, obscuring the meat. The pure vinegar sauces lack enough body to really add anything.

Since we didn't get to Dreamland, I can't chime in on which is better. I can say that this the way I think barbecue should be. The pig is primary. The smoke and the sauce is secondary. When you start selling the smoke or hyping the sauce, you have lost the main focus. As for technology, I suspect that it is still possible to find great 'cue without the internet and GPS, but one day we will look back and wonder how we ever did it.