Month: June 2016

The fastest way to get back to Seattle from BBQland is to go up through Montana. But there is time to get one last Top-33 doughnut stop into this particular road trip. Kansas is a doughnut wasteland, and I don’t quite have time to run back over to California – but Denver has a spot on the top list, and that spot is named Glazed & Confused.

Glazed & Confused is themed in a manner I would describe as “groovy.” Their logo stickers have a multicolored tie-dye backdrop, and they have strange green bulbs dripping from their interesting ceiling of cut-outs. Whoa, trippy.

The doughnuts do not, however, lean on Psycho-/Voodoo-Donut type zaniness in order to stand out. Certainly, there is a maple doughnut with a stick of bacon protruding from it. There are a few prominent topping elements perched on an otherwise ordinary looking doughnut. But Glazed & Confused is a serious doughnut place with a wacky doughnut place’s name.

When I walked in, they were empty. Blasting AC/DC on the overhead speakers, and a full case of larger-than-average doughzeroes. Looking at their case, they have a wide variety you might see at one of the other spots, in the fancy and extra-fancy tier.

In honor of Marianne’s part in this trip, I chose the Jack Blackberry, as a proxy for the holy blueberry doughnut grail. I got the Confuzed Samoa, since I was never able to get the Samoa from Gibson’s Donuts in Memphis. I got the Banana Bread because I’d never seen a banana bread doughnut before. And I got the vanilla bean glazed, because they didn’t even have a regular glazed ring. Not their style, you see.

The density, cream, and bright purpleness of the Jack Blackberry made for a super-sweet treat that I loved. The Samoa was just what I wanted from a Samoa Doughnut. A giant girl-scout-cookie that I’d say, “Talofa!” to anyday. The banana bread was true to it’s bananal namesake, but a little dry-seeming. This might be because I’m used to banana bread being almost pudding-like in moisture content. Finally, the vanilla glazed was the most interesting plain glazed donut I’ve had the whole trip.

Geography once again rears its often-ignored head to offer a relevant fact: Denver is more than 5000 feet above sea level. What does this have to do with doughnuts? Baking at altitudes above 3500 feet is different than baking at sea level. Gases expand and liquids evaporate more quickly, but with less air pressure things take longer to bake. The effects on fried dough, if not taken into account, are an over-risen, overcooked-outside-undercooked-inside mess.

G&C seems to have this completely dialed in. Their cake is very dense, to the point where I found the doughnuts very filling. Things were cooked all the way through. Maybe I just found them filling because I didn’t have Marianne helping me sample them. In any case, if you need high-altitude doughnuts, this is the place.

When someone says, “Kansas City Style BBQ,” do you immediately think of KC Masterpiece BBQ sauce? I don’t.  But I was warned that it was completely not like that at all, because SOME people think that it is. Fine. I emptied my mind of all barbecue sauce commercial based expectations. I would go into Kansas City with a clean slate.

First off: a US geography lesson. Where would you think Kansas City is? If you said, “Missouri,” you’re more right than I was! But there’s ALSO a Kansas City in Kansas – it’s just a suburb of Kansas City, MO. That was confusing – fortunately Wikipedia, Yelp, Foursquare, and the MacOS maps.app all have my back and pointed me directly to the best place to get Kansas City (Missouri!) BBQ: Oklahoma Joes. Which is not in Oklahoma.

Enough of that – we’re saying “KC” from now on.

Oklahoma Joes changed their name to Joe’s Kansas City a few years back, clearing up one point of confusion. Unfortunately, Joe’s is not open on Sundays, and Sunday was the only day I had in KC. Second choice: Fiorella’s Jack Stack BBQ.

As I approached Fiorella’s I noticed that the air around it smells like BBQ smoke, which is a nice smell. There are 6 or 7 groups of people sitting outside, waiting. Two good signs. I’m not in the biggest hurry. I can wait. But no – since I’m on my own now, I can just breeze in and sit by myself at the awkward 2-top bar table where one of the seats is too close to the pillar for anyone to use. And I did.

It is the most family-restaurant-like of all the BBQ places I’ve been, with the possible exception of Bobby-Q.  Judging by the full-restaurant experience, I could see people preferring to come here and sit in a moodily lit place where everything is wooden, instead of the brutally down-to-earth spots at which I’d been eating in other states. You can just show up at 8 PM and get whatever you want, too. Not as much of a burden.

The menu item I got was “Jack’s Best,” which is what the website recommends if you’re looking for a sample representing good KC BBQ. Yes, website, that IS what I’m looking for. It includes: Pork baby back ribs, Beef burnt ends, aaaand one Prime beef rib, so there’s your single KC rib serving again. Two sides, cheesy corn and “pit beans.”

The meat on all these is noticeably smoky and very tender. They’ve all got BBQ sauce on them – it’s that dark, sweet, mollasses-based stuff that everyone I know thinks of when you say “barbecue sauce.” It’s what the stuff you get with chicken mcnuggets is a pale imitation of. I’m pretty sure this meat would be good without the sauce – it’s still smoky and pretty nice meat. But that’s not what KC BBQ is about.

What I’m getting from all this is: KC BBQ won the hearts and minds of the mainstream. When you get BBQ pringles or whatever, what you’re getting is not like a dry rub, not like a tangy or vinegar-based BBQ. You’re getting the KC heavy molasses sauce metaphor. And looking at the restaurants I chose to represent each, it’s not hard to see how KC won the PR war. It’s accessible.

The beef rib was, by the way, amazing. When I was young, one of my favorite mom-dishes was oxtail stew. This beef rib was kind of like a giant mostly-meat oxtail in consistency, but a little more steak-like in flavor. Plus BBQ sauce. Really satisfying. I’ll have to check out beef rib night (at Jack’s) when I get back to Seattle, for comparison.

I did get the carrot cake for dessert, as recommended by Yelp, but I had to take it to-go. I had a little bit back at the hotel, but I wasn’t really feeling it. I mean, on top of near-daily BBQ, I’ve been eating around 5 ostentatious-level donuts a day, guys. Something’s gotta give. And it’s probably my pants.

If all you ever eat is wonderful top-tier barbecue, you wind up with a skewed notion of what the food should be like. I’m in this lucky position because I did not grow up in a place like Texas, Tennessee, the Carolinas, or Missouri where I would have access to all sorts of BBQ places of varying quality, so well known that they are the local culinary touchstones.

To get a control group BBQ place in for Kansas-City style, I’m going to a relatively unsung BBQ restaurant in the general region of St Louis airport. This one’s called Bandana BBQ. It’s well enough rated on Yelp that it won’t be distractingly bad, but it makes no lists of the best places to eat. Should be a nice middle-of-the road BBQ experience.

The interior of this place is like a typical dive bar, but better lit and with no music playing. Dive bars are generally more pleasant the less you can see and hear what’s going on inside, so this is not a point in its favor. The room tone is just dads chortling at each other.

I ordered a pork plate with an added rib. Each rib you add is $2.50. This won’t be the last you see of the single Kansas-City rib portion.

The rib was the best part. It was a Texas-style dry rub rib. Hands down the worst Texas-style rib I have ever eaten, but that’s not quite fair given that I’ve only eaten them at great places like Franklin and Jack’s. The relative quality was something like, if you could order a rib at Red Robin.

The pork was chopped and was split into two different kinds of pork. One was interior meat, the other was cubed and included charred surfaces. Maybe that’s what burnt ends are? In terms of tenderness, it was somewhere between a fried pork chop and pulled pork as I know it.

The sides are pit beans and potato salad. I don’t know what makes pit beans pit beans. I think they’re supposed to taste smoked. Those sides are unremarkable. What IS remarkable is that this dish comes with two pieces of garlic bread that are comparable in size to a pair of my slippers. Or “flip flops” if you’re from the continental US.

Overall, it was tolerable. 3 out of 5. Right next to the airport, so if you want some slightly-better-than-food-court BBQ and you are a pilot/flight crew stuck in a hotel next to STL, maybe this is your spot! As for me, I’m feeling pretty calibrated and ready to go to the real KC BBQ spot… sooon.

There are many ways to “innovate” in a given business. In this context, we’re going to define innovation as getting more money by doing something you haven’t done before. One way is to be inspired by new ideas about how to do what you do in a new way which your customers could love, but that they don’t yet know about. Another is to look at old ideas which seem to work in other fields and then bringing them to bear in yours. DaVinci, I think, is mostly the second of these two.

This place is different from all the other doughnut places I’ve been in two ways. 1) The doughnuts are smaller and lend themselves to mass eating – a regular full order is 16. 2) You can choose your own combination of icing and toppings to apply to a blank doughnut.

It’s the custom combination part I think I’ve seen before. Usually it is applied to frozen yogurt. A colorful assortment of toppings and icings displayed in an array of bins in front of the customer line – kids love it! DaVinci even sort of sounds like “Menchie’s”. And the shop aspires to be franchised – it says so on the side of the box.

Business plans aside, the doughnuts are pretty good. Brown, firm cake doughnuts that work with many, many combinations of flavors. I can barely remember all the ones we tried. French toast, Cinnamon roll, Key lime, Samoa, Cream pie, Maple bacon, Birthday cake, Salted caramel – I think. Of these, maybe the key lime was best. The icings are quite goopy and sweet, which works out pretty well with the tubby small doughnuts.

I thought these might be donut robot doughnuts, but no! They’re regular cake doughnuts. Not that donut robots (I keep typing “robuts”) are considered bad. A donut robot place right in Seattle (Daily Dozen) made thrillist’s list of top doughnut places, a couple years back.

Marianne and I have at this point developed a way of trying lots of different doughnut flavors without getting too full. And that is to daintily slice little sectors off each flavor and share them all at once. I’m ashamed that it took us so long to start doing it, but one of us is not particularly fond of sharing – especially desserts.

The aftermath is a box full of half-eaten doughnuts. Just like at your work meetings! I mean, if you work at a place where people are really diet-conscious, as I once did. Like most cakes, doughnuts get stale on the cut ends if exposed to the air. But I’ve found this diminishes their value as leftovers only slightly compared to a whole old doughnut.

There are at least two noteworthy doughnut places in or near Atlanta, GA. Given how well these bold places have been going over, we choose the boldest first – boldly named, anyhow. Revolution Donuts in Decatur, which is a suburb of Atlanta.

One of Marianne’s side quests is to get all the blueberry doughnuts she can. It was one of her favorites back in the GADS days, and they seem to elude her. On two separate occasions (in two separate cities) we arrived at places which serve blueberry doughnuts but were too late to get any. They sell out fast, apparently.

Revolution had blueberry doughnuts on hand, and we got one! Achievement progress. The peppy, fast-talking, and very friendly man behind the counter told us that their most popular doughnuts sell out quickly, early in the day – and that we should get to the shop early if we wanted to try their best. This is generally true for doughnut places. We schemed to return early in order to pick up some elite treats.

As for the ones we got, they were quite firm! Almost like sourdough bread, the raised doughnuts were. They were still made of tasty doughnut bread. It occurs to me that cheap doughnuts are always very soft and chewy to start with – maybe this sturdy puffy doughnut texture is hard to get right. Is it the mark of a fine doughnut? In this case, it works well – the glazes (we were only able to get glazes) were thick and sweet, and quite tangy, if I may use the word tangy again.

The best doughnut we got was the orange pistachio. It looks fun, too. Who doesn’t like a bright yellow doughnut? I’m smiling just thinking about it. The rest were also above average for this trip – triple chocolate, true blueberry, and caramel bacon.

Revolution gave us more than doughnuts. They took us to doughnut school. They categorize their doughnuts by the method used to produce them. They separate them into yeast doughnuts, cake doughnuts, and baked cake doughnuts. Now I can say with certainty that yeast doughnuts DO involve rolling the dough out. Donut Country’s slogan (“That’s how we roll”) is vindicated.

Yeast doughnuts are made with a yeast risen dough which is rolled out and then cut into circles, then fried in oil. Cake doughnuts are mixed into a batter which uses baking soda as a structuring agent, and dropped out of a special doughnut extruder into the frying oil. Baked cake doughnuts are cake which has been baked in toroidal cake molds.

We learned all this from a set of doughnut life cycle posters. Like this one for yeast style.

So what happened to our plan to stop by early in order to get some of the in-demand items? We were on our way to the airport (Marianne must sadly return to the West today) and we stopped outside Revolution again.

There was a line stretching out the door and down the block. We were not expecting that. In fact, we sort of forgot about lines after Franklin BBQ. If we weren’t rushing to catch a flight, we probably would’ve gotten out our hats and umbrella.

This is the style of BBQ that surprised me the most. I thought I knew what the deal was with the Carolinas. BBQ here is made of pulled pork and the sauce is vinegar based. I thought it was going to be kind of like Portuguese Vinha D’Alhos. Tangy, and acidic. As usual, I don’t know anything.

Backyard BBQ Pit is in a sturdy but humble-looking establishment right off highway 55 (known as “Apex”), in Durham, NC. When I pulled up at noon there were two police cruisers parked in the lot and the lineup at the counter was a wall of digital camo clad soldiers. I felt pretty safe at this point.

I ordered a plate of their tried-and-true pork BBQ, and Marianne got the sandwich. This is reportedly some of the best Eastern NC style BBQ you can get at any price. Actual cost: $7.50 for the plate.

So why is this BBQ surprising? It wasn’t tangy, like Memphis BBQ. I thought the vinegar would make it tangy. Instead, it was unlike any BBQ I had from the continental United States. What it resembled the most to me was kalua pig – the Hawaiian traditional food. Kalua pig involves burying a pig full of really hot rocks in a dirt pit full of really hot rocks and a mesquite fire. The word “kalua” is a lot like the word “BBQ” in that it specifically refers to a cooking technique. The resulting meat is pulled, and looks pale, tastes smoky, and is pretty damp.

The Eastern NC BBQ was drier (though still very moist), a little spicier, and had a little more tang to it – but not to the point where I would say it had vinegar in it. It just had a different quality to the savoriness of the meat. Not so much smoky as a slightly melon-fruit-like quality?

It’s hard to describe unfamiliar tastes, beyond the simplistic seven “basic tastes” – I guess that’s the challenge of food criticism. Imagine trying to describe the difference between salt and salmiak (ammonium chloride). They’re different, but it’s hard to describe exactly how. You probably don’t know what salmiak tastes like if you aren’t Scandinavian, and I’m afraid I’m not going to be any help with that either.

Since it was so new to me, I had a hard time categorizing it, mentally. Certainly, it tastes great. I wanted to put it in a taco, make sandwiches out of it, or spread it over rice. I quickly finished my whole plate as I sat there thinking about this. The sides were perfectly functional, though not notably different from any other mac & cheese or collards I have had.

Later, driving through the city of Dunn on the way to Savannah, I stopped at the tourism info office because they have a restroom. I chatted with the tourism info woman at the counter about what I was up to, and she confirmed that Backyard BBQ Pit was a good choice as a representative of the style. “They do catering, too. Sometimes at a BBQ, everyone serves themselves right off the pig. They call it a pig pull.” Thanks, tourism lady. That fact was actually pretty fun.

Now that I’ve had this particular type of BBQ, I wonder what other supposedly unique cuisines I could find doppelgangers for. Is there a thing like lau lau out there in the American hinterlands? Are Marianne’s Appalachian brethren secretly using unconventional chloride salts to season food? Wikipedia did not make the connection between kalua pig and Eastern NC BBQ for me, though I have looked at those pages many times. Some things must still be found out by looking for yourself.

North Carolina is home to Duke University. That never really entered my awareness until I went to Monuts, which is in Durham, North Carolina. I was staying at the cheapest Motel possible, so from that perspective, Durham is entirely populated by work crews and truckers. Walk into Monuts, and now it’s all Duke students.

Monuts is an oasis of something, in a sea of something else. I will have to call that first something “hipsterness,” because that’s what I imagine the denizens of the something else would call it. A harmless bath of progressive thinking, concern over authenticity, and fashion shibboleths. It’s familiar and comfortable to me, and I am all the more aware of it after being on the road and out of my element for a couple of weeks.

One of the things that comes along with “hipsterness” is putting “hipster” in quotes. Another is caring about coffee quality. The relevant section of Monuts’ menu has the subheader, “Counter Culture Coffee,” so you know they aren’t going to be serving Sanka. Or even Starbucks. Marianne and I got delicious coffee at Monuts. Though I didn’t check, I think there’s a good chance it was traded-for fairly and grown in the shade of a canopy of trees.

The yeast raised doughnuts here were a bit chewy, but not unpleasantly so. The cake doughnuts were great. More and more I am realizing how unremarkable Top Pot’s cake doughnuts are. In the doughnut hierarchy as defined by Whoo’s and District, Monuts tops out at Fancy – and their best doughnuts are the Fancy ones.

German Chocolate Cake: Best doughnut here. Just like a toroidal piece of German chocolate cake.

Maple Bacon Bourbon: A nice variant of what’s become de rigueur for wacky doughnut places, maple with bacon. Well done.

Blueberry pancake: Like a maple glazed. No detectable blueberry flavor. Ho hum.

Glazed ring: Chewy, as noted. Not unpleasant, as noted.

Monuts also serves a full menu of things that “hipsters” would like, involving kale, lox, and cilantro (not in the same item) and beer. If you’re in town and need a hip-me-up, stop in. If you attend Duke, you probably already have.

Today is the day I venture into unfamiliar BBQ territory – Memphis, Tennessee. Unfamiliar everything territory, really. I know that there’s a storied musician named Elvis Presley and he has a house here called Graceland. Beyond that, Memphis is a mystery. What are the people like? Do they eat a lot of BBQ? What’s the Memphis BBQ style?

The pinnacle of Memphis style BBQ may be found elsewhere, but I wasn’t quite ready to try my luck in the Mississippi delta. So! One of the places with a good reputation in Memphis is Payne’s BBQ. It is from this place that I would take my imprint of what the elements of Memphis style were.

Reviews warn of the location seeming “sketchy” or (ugh) “ghetto.” Coming from a Hawaii resident perspective, it looks a little like an L&L BBQ. Usually these are made out of cinder blocks, have a linoleum floor, and serve you several pounds of meat in a styrofoam box. Very similiar, actually. From a Seattle perspective it looks like a distressed retro store facade. So hip. Except that in Seattle the place would be a bar or club which does not serve BBQ, despite the name.

Inside, it does have a sort of highway-rest-stop atmosphere. It does not distract from the food at all.

The foods we got here were: the chopped pork sandwich, a rack of ribs, sides of beans and slaw. All of these items were chosen for their fundamental importance to the menu, and for the wildly positive reviews.

I’m pretty sure that the way you are meant to eat this type of meal is with your hands, not touching anything that needs to be clean until you’re done, and then hosing your hands down with a faucet or using half a box of wet wipes to neaten up afterward. With the amount of sauce on the sandwich, let alone the ribs, it would not have made any difference to my cleanliness if I had eaten the beans with my bare hands.

So. Memphis: saucy and tangy! The sauce on both the sandwich and saturating the ribs is a sweet and sour type tangy sauce, with a little vinegar or pickly element in it. The beans have some meat in them too – rib meat I think – and have a tang to them. The bright yellow coleslaw is unusually – and I’m aware that I’m wearing this word out – tangy to boot. Tangy tangy tangy.

The chopped pork sandwich is unlike a pulled pork sandwich in that the meat has smaller and more heterogenuous chunks of pork, ranging from tender to crispy, this gives it variations in texture which are really satisfying. It has a generous pile of the yellow slaw on it. A moat of sauce quickly forms around its perimeter, if left on the plate for any amount of time. The bottom bun really doesn’t stand a chance, and it fell to pieces when I tried to pick up the sandwich.

Covered in sauce from fingertip to wrist. Might as well try the ribs! The rib experience is one of pure meat and sauce. They are thick with meat, unlike many ribs I’ve had. This is good, because it diffuses the, uh, tanginess of the thickly applied sauce. The ratio of sauce to meat is very important, I find. Too much of this sauce and your mouth will get more and more sour. Too much meat and the flavor will fade.

I’m sure this assessment misses all sorts of important points of quality in this kind of BBQ. It’s practically the first time I’ve tried it, conscious of the difference in styles. Someone who’s seen a lot of Memphis style BBQ might notice a lot more than: that the ribs were really saucy and tangy. I don’t expect that out of myself, and I’m not going to overthink ribs any further. They’re yummy.

I ziplocked the half rack which Marianne and I combined could not finish. Unlike Texas style, I don’t know of any place near where I live to get this sort of thing, so I’m going to keep some with me on the road to nibble on – next to a roll of paper towels and moistened towelettes.

At my local bar one night, I struck up a conversation with a durable-looking man who told me of his travels all across the world and US. Of all these places, he singled out New Orleans as a place one was obligated to visit at some point. “But only stay for three days,” he warned. “Or it’ll kill ya.”

I’ve just left New Orleans, and I understand what he meant now. The French Quarter is like your intensely charming and energetic friend who never gets tired. If I had another day or two, I could explore the other famous areas – but I don’t. My last stop in New Orleans is in the slightly-less-supernatural lower Garden District, to visit a top-quality doughnut shop called District Donuts.

This shop has a distinct blue and white storefront, and an enviably stylish but uncontrived rustic-industrial interior. It’s possible to endlessly chase your tail about authenticity, but when you encounter something with the quality of doing the thing that it does in a way entirely consistently with itself, no evidence of spin doctoring or micromanagement of perception, “authentic” seems like a good way to wrap that idea up. New Orleans in general gave me that impression and this place in specific did too.

Like Whoo’s, they have 3 tiers of doughnut fanciness. Basic glazes and sugars, “creative” glazes and fancy garnishes, and filled doughnuts and ones with house made toppings. Like Gourdough’s, they serve savory entrees which use doughnuts as a staple. We got one of each of these categories: basic, fancy, extra-fancy, and croquenut.

The doughnuts use a soft, but less sweet dough than you’ll find at the corner doughnut place. It’s close to Portuguese sweet bread. It isn’t chewy like some soft breads. The glazed ring we got was so simple that this part was very prominent, and the less sweet doughs are really growing on me. Or maybe this one is just really well done.

My fancy cinnamon-roll doughnut was good – just like a glazed doughnut with a very fancy glaze that tasted just like a cinnamon roll. They do sell bruleed cinnamon rolls too, so it’s probably made of the same stuff.

A “croquenut” is a griddled sandwich using a doughnut as a bun. You can get them as a croque monsieur/madame, a cubano, a monte cristo, or a caprese sandwich. We got it as a croque madame, which was a very satisfying breakfast. A griddled doughnut with this dough is a bit crispy, remeniscent of a croissant.

Marianne got the “Chunky Monkey,” an extra-fancy doughnut. In life you will encounter many menu items named the chunky money, funky monkey, junkie monkey etc, and I must be averse to such items – I passed right by this thing without looking at it. But it’s the best doughnut we got here – like a little banana cream pie with praline chunks on top. My sentiment toward Marianne was, as we have taken turns saying at several recent meals, “I wish I got what you got.” She is good at sharing, mind you. It’s just that I wanted 2 chunky monkeys.