Monday, March 14, 2011
Food & Life An open letter to Kim Severson
Posted by Besha Rodell @BeshaRodell on Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 1:51 PM
Dear Kim,
I detect in your recent demeanor, which I admit I only have access to through your Twitter feed, a certain melancholy. Not a downright sadness, but a mixture of homesickness and confusion, a kind of bewilderment about ending up here in Atlanta and what you ought to do with your newfound life. In fact, your oft-used hashtag, #mynewlife, is employed most frequently alongside tweets that exhibit ambivalence about this town, this region. On Saturday morning, an almost woeful tweet showed up in your feed: “Gotta get back to NYC soon for a food romp. Dyin' down here! #dontknowwhatyouvegottilitsgone”
To many Atlantans and Southerners, that tweet seemed a little harsh — not the longing for NYC, but the “Dyin’ down here!” line, which sounded a whole lot like you were saying that there’s nothing worth eating “down here.” I know it might not be how you meant it. But that’s how it sounded.
I’ll get to that part a little later, but first I wanted to share a bit. To commiserate. Because I, too, am an ex-New Yorker who left to come to the South. And I had very hard time with the change. In fact, for years I vowed to go back to New York at my first chance.
But not anymore.
Of course, I didn’t leave New York to become a bureau chief for the New York Times. Nor did I hold any particular position of esteem in the city before I left it. Nope — I was a 26-year-old waitress, and I left because I got knocked up. I couldn’t imagine trying to raise a kid in New York — not as a waitress, not as a $12-an-hour assistant to literary agents (my sometimes daytime gig), not living in a charming but scummy apartment a block and a half from the Gowanus Canal. So I left, moving to North Carolina where my husband’s family lives.
And it was hard. Oh God, it was hard. I missed the city, its tempo, its constant hum, the friends, the art, the fun. But mainly, I missed the food. When I left, I wrote a long essay — an ode to what I was leaving behind. Not for anyone in particular, because I wasn’t writing for anyone in particular at that point, but just because my anxiety and sorrow was so great, I felt a need to put it down somewhere, to chronicle it. It was like a love letter to the food of New York. It’s one of the most heartfelt things I’ve ever written.
In North Carolina, despite having quite a few friends and some family there, I was miserable. There were some concrete reasons for this — having come from an existence of Brooklyn and parties and music and never ending NYC life, I found myself living in a tiny house off a secondary highway outside Chapel Hill with a newborn baby, no real career prospects, and no heat apart from a woodstove. But more than that I missed New York with a ferocity I hadn’t anticipated. My heart broke for the life I’d left behind, and because my heart primarily speaks in hunger, much of that ache came in the form of longing for food.
I missed out on a lot in those two years I spent in N.C. And I pushed a lot of very nice people away with my incessant moaning about how much I wished I wasn’t there.
Eventually, I pulled myself up by the bootstraps, grew out of my homesickness and depression enough to make something of myself, and got this here job in Atlanta.
It took me a while to warm to Atlanta as well though. At first, I compared every restaurant here to New York restaurants. So believe me, I get it. I get how many of the places we count as favorites serve food you could easily find in some random Brooklyn café no one really cares about. How the car culture here seemingly removes the food from the street and life of the city. How — yes, the clichés are true! You can’t get a good bagel! What I’d give some days for a decent turkey hero. There really isn’t any restaurant in town that might possibly be in the running for 4 stars from your publication. Pizza? Forget it! (OK, don’t. New Yorkers ought to be jealous of Antico. But I digress…)
But here’s the thing. And it only dawned on me after you had a twitter exchange with John T. Edge regarding your “dyin’ down here” comment (do I seem like enough of a stalker yet?) where he implored you to “look closer.” And you said, “Ah, but even you must admit that despite the deliciousness of Southern food, there some itches only NYC can scratch.” The thing is: I think you may be looking for the wrong thing here, food-wise.
It’s your use of the words “Southern food” in your response that got me. And it reminded me of something that’s been bothering me for a while, something to do with the current trendiness of Southern food. People come here from New York, Portland, California, and get all excited about how Southern we are, about our fried chicken and our biscuits, and our cute accents and how authentic our love of bacon and bourbon is, and blah blah blah. Don’t get me wrong. I love these things. They’re a huge part of what makes the South the place I love and am proud to call home. But there’s a lot of bad fried chicken out there, and worse biscuits, and I think the barbecue in this town kinda blows. I’m just saying — to find the good stuff, you need to go beyond the obvious.
There are folks in Atlanta making teeny little tacos out of fresh tortillas that would make you cry. Our samgyupsal houses rival any anywhere in the country. There’s this guy in Marietta I could introduce you to who makes his own tofu, and to hear him describe it, and then to taste it, is like seeing something you’ve always taken for granted as brand new, revelatory. There’s this dude who illegally smokes ribs in a gas station parking lot up the street from my house, and some days he’s only wearing one shoe, but GODDAMN those are some good ribs.
I went to a supper club a few weeks back, these guys who call themselves Dinner Party, who do a one-night restaurant type thing, and the night I went it was with Dashboard Co-op, an arts collective that had a pop-up gallery in a vacant retail space. They set up tables and served cocktails among all the art, and the Dinner Party folks served a bunch of food, and there was a dance performance in the midst of it all, and I looked around the room at these young, amazing people who are really some of the most interesting people in arts and food in the city right now, and I just thought “That’s it. I’m in love with this town.” There was so little pretension there, so little artifice, and yet there were all these people talking about food and wine and art and life and I just kind of swooned. It’s like when I went to see Big Boi’s collaboration with the Atlanta Ballet at the Fox Theater. The performance wasn’t perfect, but man it was cool. It was something that would never happen in New York. You think the New York City Ballet is going to collaborate with KRS One? Um, no.
This is Atlanta. We’re scrappy. Some of what we do lacks precision, but we’re passionate and we try and we’re not held to this unrealistic expectation of CUISINE, big type. There’s a comfort in even our high-end restaurants, a sense of community, a sense of personality that’s hard to find in the high-stakes, big money world of larger cities. This is the South, where you’re most likely to find God (or whatever you want to call it) in a strip mall. The best of what we do, the best of what we are, is hidden in the nooks. It isn’t easily found. That’s what makes it so much fun. There are places in this town, to eat, to drink, to live, that make my heart ache with pride. I haven’t felt that way since…well, since Brooklyn.
I sincerely, truly, really hope you get to that with Atlanta. We don’t want you to die down here.
Besha
Comments (21)
Showing 1-21 of 21
I'm not from NYC, but from Miami -- which is NYC in high season...well, come to think of it, it is kinda NYC all the time now mixed in with Latin America -- good and bad. Anyway, the point is I also miss home -- the culture, the food, the palm trees, the vibe, all that. But, like you have, I love what this city and the people, and gosh darn, the FOOD has to offer. It's different than what we were used to...but in a good way. I think we all tend to try and recreate (or hope to find) things that remind us of home -- that give us comfort. You have to finally throw away the security blanket for good. Once you do that, you will look at and experience things in a different light.
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Besha, I was just looking at an interview with Kim about her move to Atlanta:
http://bit.ly/fFhfMS
While some of her foodie talk focuses on the tired stereotypes—biscuits, grits, Moon Pies—that seems more joking than serious. She's trying to visit recommendations for the "best" of Atlanta and is enjoying some of Decatur's neighborhood haunts (Leon's, Cakes & Ale, Farm Burger).
It sounds like her heart's in the right place, she just misses home. And it seems like a perfect opportunity for a well-settled-in transplant like you to show her the ropes.
I mean, heck, she says, "I was excited for a chance to live in and write about the South, a region of the country I think is a lot like Italy in terms of food and family and appreciation for life." So, while she's fixated on southern pone, I think she means well.
People who did not grow up in NYC or lived there for a year or two are not New Yorkers. Just as natives down here do not consider people who moved from NYC to Atlanta, southerners. So, please don't say you're a New Yorker because you're obviously not a NY native.
"I couldn’t imagine trying to raise a kid in New York" - WTF does that mean? NYC is not good enough to raise a family? There's thousands of NY'ers doing that every day who are worse off than you.
This entire article seems like a rant and jab to say Atlanta is just as good if not better than NYC. Especially, the mention that NY'ers should be jealous of Antico. If NYC only had one pizzeria, Antico would not be the first on the list because there's hundreds of incredible pizzerias in NYC. Don't worry, no NY'er is jealous of Atlanta. No one is rushing to write about Atlanta. It is what it is down here. Bits of "scraps" of decent food here and there.
I'd like to write an enormous rant here about Southern cooking and how little of it there is in Atlanta, but I can't organize my thoughts well enough in the time I have. I will mention two of my rules of thumb.
1) Yellow corn grits are an abomination wrought by foodies who think "grits" and "polenta" are interchangable, and want to be better than they are.
2) Unless you're in the coastal Carolinas, "shrimp and grits" means you're in a restaurant which either buys into New South cuisine, or is being blindly imitative. Same for grits with gruyère, but with no geographic limitation. In either case, you deserve what you get.
Also, I agree that the popular BBQ joints in Atlanta are all middlin'-to-disappointing. If you want to taste something good, head to Dillard's in Suwanee.
We're not New York and we don't want to be. But Antico WILL rival any NY pizza. La Pietra Cucina is just as good or better than Mario's Babbo or Lupa. Sure, you have to drive to get a good bagel, but BB's is worth is. Need a NY cocktail - try Holeman & Finch. Think NYC has good fried chicken, biscuits, or BBQ... fuggetaboutit!
I think Kim will find a swarm of Atlanta foodies who will take pleasure in sharing her new city with her. I moved to Boston and was so, so disappointed in the food there compared to Atlanta. I think that the BBQ in Atlanta is awful and that the southern cuisine was equally so until the last year or two. Contemporary, ethnic and imaginative-casual cuisine is where this city shines. Kim, I can make you a list as long as my arm. I can't wait for you to taste it all.
Besha. Thank you for your eloquent and sincere defense of our food culture in Atlanta. I think the best thing, as in any instance of culture shock, is for Ms. Severson to look for and focus on the things she does enjoy, and to accept the things that are different for what they are: different.
I hope this all sinks in and the snarky, winey posts stop, and fast. There's nothin worse than a know-it-all yankee come to town expecting this to be just like that.
Besha
I loved this article. As a native of Athens, GA, a current resident of Atlanta, and a former resident of New York City, AND as a founder of the Buford Highway Adventure Club, I can truly say with some degree of self-appointed expertise that Atlanta has fantastic food.
True, to come to Atlanta and compare it to NYC and to look for a truly equal representation of the enormity of ethnicities that a city of 12M people offers is not only unrealistic, it's also unfair. That said, I can say without a doubt that the finest piece of raw fish I've ever tasted was at Ege in Marietta, a sushi joint in a strip mall. The best torta I've ever tasted outside of Mexico is in the back of a grocery on Cheshire Bridge. It also happens to cost $3. Peter Chang is making some of America's most exciting Chinese food right in Sandy Springs.
Atlanta's food culture is phenomenal. What most people fail to get past is the onslaught of publicist-driven hype about this new chef or the interior of this 'hot' place in Midtown where the appletini's (is that even a word?) are 'amazing', etc. All of these places disappoint because the message is far more thought-out and evolved than the food usually is.
The way to truly appreciate what Atlanta REALLY has to offer is to approach it with a sense of humility, discovery and wonder. There are things that I never would have ordered at Sushi House Hayakawa had I not asked Art to tell ME what to eat. Now, I'm eating ankimo like it's going out of style!
The reality is that Atlanta food culture-be it the localvore movement seen in it's farmer's markets, the enormous variety of authentic Asian food on Buford Highway, the budding food cart scene, or the downright artisanal spirit of the King of Pops-is truly it's own animal. It's time that Atlanta shed it's self-image of inferiority and second class status. Give me 5 nights of your time and I'll show you some of the best food not only in the Southeast, but in America, right here in Atlanta.
Despite all the boosterism, maybe Atlanta really is a second or third tier city, in quality of life. What people rave about are small things. What sucks is the car culture, which will forever keep Atlanta off the list of best or most interesting cities. Kim Severson compares the Deep South to Italy in that article, which is sweet and charming thing to say. Ben will give me a great time for five nights. What about nights 6-1,000? That's where Atlanta starts to sag.
You have to look really hard to find the South in Atlanta. I say that as a native who grew up here, left for 20+ years and then came back. The transplants arrive, look around for 5 minutes, then declare that you can't get decent (whatever) here. You can, but one has to know where -- information not usually shared with bleating ex-New Yorkers or ex-anywheres, as we get very irritated with all that.
p.s. Moon Pies have nothing to do with Atlanta. And yes, we are a 2nd or 3rd tier city and a decent bagel is hard to find -- but not impossible.
I like the imprecision of passion. I don't care about image or perfection. I'd much rather get served the heart of someone's labor of love and feel a little bit of their soul shine through. And I'm more likely to find that in a small hole in the wall, where someone is following their dream, than in a 5 star restaurant where food becomes a product.
Ege, Hayakawa, Peter Chang, tortas, bagels and Asian food on Buford Hwy is of course all very Southern. Not saying those places or cuisine is bad but it is not representative of the South. Not a mention of any Southern restaurant within these comments. This is what Kim has to work with. Why would she move here just to eat at Antico because it rivals any pizza in NYC? Best sushi ever in Marietta vs. MASA or Soto in NY. C'mon, it's absurd.
NYC has some amazing fried chicken, even some decent BBQ if you have ever eaten in NYC. For Atlanta to only have a handful of good BBQ is sad to say the least. All these commenters hate NY and never been, so how would they know what's in NY?
PR in Atlanta is the death of the service industry, they will pimp any dump for a paycheck. And yes you can eat the best of what Atlanta has to offer in 5 days. Maybe less if you don't include Asian cuisine.
I'm still curious what this 5 day list for Kim will comprise of. I would love to know which restaurants will blow my mind.
Eff Johnny! Delta flys to NYC 20 times a day so don't tell me Atlantans have never been to NYC. I've been to NYC plenty and not one of you can stop bitching for one monment to enjoy anything!
I don't understand why all these sad and depressed New Yorkers don't go back to their 500 sq ft $2000 apartments in New York and bitch about taxis, subways and how the matzo ball soup is better in the LES than the Bronx. Bitch, moan and leave!
First off: Thank you, Besha, for a lovely post.
Now: CharlieMac: are you serious? REALLY? I'm pretty pleased with the quality of life in Atl. The weather, the beauty, the cost of living, the ever-increasing options for in-town and suburban housing, the recreational opportunities, the proximity of vacation destinations, the exciting work ops in technology and startups, the crazy array of restaurants - good, bad, wonderful, varied, etc. So NY has some great restaurants...and some REALLY crappy ones, and shitty weather, and crowding, and trash everywhere. Fortunately, I don't have to bitch about it because -- since I don't like that -- I choose to not live in NY.
Nom is totally right: if you need a stupid bagel and rigid adherence to whatever you were brought up to believe was "the best" that bad, go back to NY and stay there.
@Johnny: you totally miss the point. Everything you mentioned IS the South. Traditional "Southern" cuisine has not defined the people who are from here since maybe the 1950s. I sense some serious anti-Southern bias. Why do you live here? Oh, and I have managed to visit NY (where every day is put-your-garbage-on-the-street day) once or twice as well as spending significant time working in London, which kicks NY's ass, so don't patronize me.
besha, what a wonderful tribute to not only your journey but to our fair city.
ben, that was wonderfully written as well. I'll put some of the places on Buford Hwy. up against any restaurant in the country when it comes to ethnic eats. I think this is where Atlanta shines compared to the rest of the South. Our diversity. New Orleans food is wonderful but it's so bogged down in being New Orleans. We're free from all that and I can feel it whenever it takes me forever to pick a restaurant from all the great and cheap places we have here.
Why do people who defend Atlanta have to rag on NYC? Is it not possible to like both?
@ Foodgeek: Because that was the specific comparison made by the person who inspired Besha's post. That Atlanta was so much worse than NY.
And I don't hate NY; I was just pointing out some of the quality of life downers *there* since CharlieMac was ragging on the quality of life here.
I'm willing to bet that half, if not all of the so-called New Yorkers on this discussion list are the garden-variety idiots who grew up in Indiana, Virginia, or wherever, went to college in NY or lived there for a few years and now think they're too-cool-for-school natives. What they are in fact, is the worst-kind of insufferable asshole there is.
Atlanta will never be NY and NY will never be Atlanta. And as a native of this city, born in Northside Hospital and raised in the burbs and inside the perimeter, I can say without doubt or affliction Atlanta will never want to be NY. We take much pride in our roots and we have come a long long way but we are established in a completely different way than NY. You can't even begin to compare the two. There are amazing places to eat not just inside the perimeter but out as well, but as others have stated you gotta know where to go and not be afraid to put your keys in the ignition, shut your mouth, and drive. Our city wasn't laid out for subways, it was laid out by the mapping of train tracks and roadways and this is how we've grown. We aren't perfect. But we always know if you can find your way back to Peachtree your foot is in the right place. And if you can't and you get lost, lose yourself completely and find yourself all over again by discovering our hidden gems on your own. NY is amazing in its own right as is Atlanta. But for the record if Atlanta is so lousy why do we have so many transplants that move here and plant their roots in our hard turned soil? Food for thought.
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