North East

March 14-15

We arrived home in the Northeast sometime Friday afternoon. But we spent Thursday night in North East, which is technically in the South—in Maryland.

We got to the Best Western before the room was ready, so we drove downtown for a stroll on Main Street. 

It’s a charming old town dating back to the early 18th century. There are buildings of all ages, but most are probably from late 19th and early 20th centuries. It has much the same feel as New Hope, Pa., or Brattleboro, Vt. 

A lot of people live there. Main Street has a large number of private homes, including many two-family attached houses.

But the center of town has gone gentrified commercial, with mid- to upscale boutiques and antique shops. I’m sure plenty of tourists stop here. There are at least a half dozen motels for them around town.

But when you go in, the exchanges between shopkeepers and shoppers sounds like much of the clientele consists of locals, or at least regulars.

One of the highlights of the walk was the old brick church, St. Mary Anne’s. The parish was established in 1706 and the building dates to the 1740s. 

According to Wikipedia, it was originally dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The “Anne” was added later, to acknowledge a bequest from Queen Anne of England, who died in 1714.

The bell tower in front apparently isn’t original. A stone plaque above the door says a parishioner donated it in the early 1900s in memory of his father.

The town has very good restaurants for its size. There are several I have yet to try. 

I’ve been to Woody’s Crab House, but prefer Steak and Main. My sister Jamy and brother-in-law Bob introduced me to the place. We sometimes met there when I was on my way south and they lived on the other side of the Susquehanna in Havre de Grace. 

This time Joanna had short ribs, and I went for lamb chops.

Both came with the most interesting Brussels sprouts I’ve ever encountered. Mine were mixed with orange marmalade, pecan honey glaze, and bliss potatoes. Joanna had the house Brussels sprouts, minus the marmalade and glaze, and still exceptionally good.

I had dinner with a couple of glasses of a fine pinot noir. Dinner was pricey, but worth every cent. 

We left Friday morning around 11. We made a brief stop at the Woodrow Wilson rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike, where we had a snack outside by the car. 

The sun was out, but a storm wasn’t too far away, I guess. It was like trying to eat in one of those prairie winds out west. 

Having been away for two months, we knew there wasn’t much to eat at the house, so we took a detour to East Hanover to our favorite Chinese grocery store, Kam Man on Route 10, and then swung by Esposito’s Deli on Ridgedale Ave.

I’m going to be making Godfather sauce in a few days. I needed my ground meat and my sausages.

We reached Joanna’s house around 3 in the afternoon.

We had great Chinese for the first time in weeks—steamed striped bass, bok choi, and rice. It felt great to use chopsticks again.

Happy trails, gang, and be well, all.

Harry

Chickening Out

March 10-13

Shortly before we left Charleston, I got an e-mail from Art, my buddy since high school whom I rarely get to see. He said he was going to be at Cape Fear on Sunday. 

That was the same day we were leaving Charleston.

Fantastic. With only a small adjustment to the itinerary, we headed there. Just like Robert Mitchum.

It was a three-hour drive to Cape Fear, and we were going to leave early. Well, early for me these days—10 or 10:30 in the morning.

I got up a little after seven, had breakfast, had plenty of time to look at the news. Then I saw a headline about Daylight Saving Time. 

Completely blind-sided, I wasn’t running on time. I was an hour late.

We followed U.S. 17 almost the entire way, and traffic was moving fast except for several miles on the Redneck Riviera. But things picked up again after we passed North Myrtle Beach.

So we still managed to meet Art before three.

Art lives in Florida and has a second home at Cape Fear because he has grandchildren in North Carolina. 

He came to the cape alone—to his Fortress of Solitude, as he put it—because he will spend a couple of weeks working on a long-term project. He is going through papers that are part of the legacy of his uncle, the avant garde composer and inventor George Antheil. 

Several boxes of papers represent only a fraction of the whole. There are manuscripts of Antheil’s works, and letters from key figures in the early 20th century—Joan Miro, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky. 

It must be a heavy load of work to have to wade through piles of papers. But when it turns up things like that, it has to be quite an adventure.

Cape Fear is on the coast a few miles south of Wilmington and Jacksonville, N.C.

I knew Jacksonville from all the times I had gone there when Matt was stationed at Camp Lejeune. Cape Fear, though, is like a different planet.

We didn’t go to the cape itself, because that’s on an island that you can only reach by a long ferryboat ride. Instead, Art took us to Southport, a charming little seaside town that dates back to colony days.

The British had a fort there, where the last colonial governor hid in 1775. He must have been quite unpopular. 

The locals forced him to give up the fort and literally ship out of town. He was taken to a British Navy ship offshore and disappeared from the story.

Then the locals burned the place down. 

A fine Georgian building—red brick, white trim, as you’d expect—is all that remains, standing on a green hill overlooking the beach. It was the officers’ quarters and now is the local visitors’ center and museum.

We had a stiff breeze off the ocean, and a couple were having fun with it. Seagulls  were hovering in place by flying into the wind. The man and woman threw bird feed into the air so the gulls could catch it.

We walked around the corner for a beer. It was a very good IPA called Signal Fire that came from a local source, Wrightsville Beach Brewing. It had a strong grapefruit flavor, though not as strong as that unusual sauvignon blanc from the other day.

The bar was technically a club. To buy a beer one of us had to join, which Art did. They took his name and phone number and then drew pints for us.

Then Art drove us along the shore. The beaches are lined with large wood frame houses built on stilts. Some older ones are still on ground level. Given the storm damage still evident on a few houses, I was surprised that any of the old-style homes hadn’t been swept away.

But true, there weren’t very many of them left. 

Art took us to one of his favorite eating spots, Island Way on Oak Island. We all wound up ordering the same thing, a mix of flash-fried seafood known locally as Calabash. 

We had that with the house cabernet sauvignon. Cab often has a unique, but overpowering, flavor, and I’m not always in the mood for it. The fragrance, too, is often very strong. If you’ve never had it before, you can usually smell it and tell what the wine will taste like.

This one was much more balanced. It had that characteristic cab flavor, but it was under control. It knew how to play well with others and didn’t overwhelm the food.

We got some malt vinegar to put on the fish filet. The shrimp, scallops, and oysters were good by themselves and also with the tartar sauce.

My plate came with a potato cake. Think pan-fried hash browns with toasted cheese on top. Yes. Very good.

Monday we moved on to Raleigh. 

We stayed at a La Quinta hotel not far from the North Carolina Museum of Art. We checked in early enough that we thought to go there for a couple of hours before dinner. But it’s closed on Monday.

Art told us about a brew pub, Brewery Bhavana, which serves a kind of Laotian fusion food. It may be run by the same gang that runs the museum. It also closes on Monday. 

Research on Google turned up Braise Southern Cooking, which is in a Marriott Hotel about a mile from us. Its menu included a lamb shank cooked in wine. 

When I showed the menu to Joanna, that was the first thing she commented on.

We had to wait till five for dinner. So we were more than ready to eat by the time we got there. The waitress came up. “The only thing we’re out of is the lamb shank.”

We wound up at an OK Italian franchise called the Brio Tuscan Grill. I wasn’t bad. It might even be great if you’re not from New Jersey.

Joanna had spaghetti Bolognese, which is made with ground beef and pork. This version didn’t have cream in the red sauce, or if it did, very little, and that was a good break. 

I like my Godfather sauce better. I make it with sweet fennel sausage instead of plain pork. Robert Castellano told me how to do it:“You put in your sausages and your meatballs, a little bit of wine …”

I settled for a boneless chicken filet (I hate boneless chicken) done with a sauce of lemon and maybe capers. Chicken without the bone is about as tasty as paper, but the sauce carried some flavor. 

The chicken came with capellini in a red sauce that included cherry tomatoes and bits of mozzarella. I think that’s why the dish was called caprese. 

Wines were good, a Placido Chianti full of flavor but smoother than most Chiantis I know. The Valpolicella and the Sangiovese were tasty too.

We made it to Fredericksburg around three on Tuesday, after a drive of about four hours. We made a couple of brief stops at rest areas to stretch and also ran into a brief bumper-to-bumper as the authorities finished clearing a crash scene.

We also stopped at the Good Earth Peanut Co., which is just off Exit 4 on I-95 in Virginia. The photo of the day is Joanna taking the advice of that sign leaning against the door: “Don’t be afraid to come in. It looks better on the inside.”

They had peanuts done all kinds of ways. We wound up buying salted, unsalted, honey roasted, and peanut butter. We nibbled on the honey roasted peanuts as we traveled up the highway. 

After we got to the hotel, Comfort Suites on U.S. 17 (a different part of the same highway that took us from Charleston to Cape Fear), it was near dinnertime.

Joanna had a yen for fried chicken. This is the South, after all. 

The chicken at the Mason-Dixon Cafe got good reviews on TripAdvisor. It’s only a mile away, so we went there. 

What the place calls Southern fried chicken is made with a white meat filet. What? No bone? No skin? They might as well be Chicken McNuggets. Who would be able tell the difference with all the flavor gone?

We asked where we could find traditional chicken cooked on the bone. The waitress said almost nobody does that any more. 

Whoa. Is invasive Middle American taste creeping into Virginia? There was a time when you couldn’t get a bad meal in Virginia. 

I know that times change, but messing with fried chicken is a terrifying prospect.

The rest of the menu at Mason-Dixon sounded uninspired, so I finished my IPA and we struck out for one of the landmarks of the city, the Capital Ale House on Caroline Street. 

We must have amused the couple at the next table. On our way out, they told us that the Metro Diner, on Virginia Highway Three near I-95 serves chicken on the bone and waffles.

I made a note of that.

We had better luck at the Ale House. We found a parking spot right at the curb around the corner. It was big enough that even I could parallel park there.

The place has 30 or 40 taps of craft brews and a wall of bottles besides. No fried chicken, but that’s all right.

Joanna polished off an 8-ounce sirloin with sides of rice and broccoli. I had one of the best burgers in memory.

The beef, the menu says, isn’t from overseas but from over yonder. Maybe there is more substance than fad about eating local.

The local IPA, called Expedition, is also good. It’s made by Adventure Brewing here in town. It has a mild fragrance and good bitter hops. The malt’s OK, but could be more robust.

A second IPA called Simcoe Triangles came from a little farther away, from a brewer called Triple Crossing in Richmond. I couldn’t find any more information on it, even at the brewer’s website.

The company does list Citra Triangles and Mosaic Triangles IPAs. They are described as “massively” or “aggressively’’ flavored with those hops. 

So I guess Simcoe Triangles is massively, aggressively, or maybe superlatively hopped with Simcoe. Whatever the case, the result is very good.

We’ve been pushing it lately, so we stayed at the hotel all morning, enjoying the luxury of not having to pack up first thing and get out before 11.

Later, we took a stroll downtown where we admired the 18th century houses and saw a wall-size postcard. 

We saw St. Patrick, bishop’s miter and all, sampling cookies with a leprechaun. They were actually engaged in serious business, tending a sidewalk bake sale raising money to help someone pay medical bills.

We read historical markers, many of them about the Civil War battle fought in these streets and about the civil rights battles to integrate the lunch counters. 

Although the luncheonettes were segregated, the town government was not. There were Black councilmen and a Black mayor by then.

According to the signs, sit-ins provoked no violence. Students sat down. The stores refused to serve them. They refused to leave. Eventually they wore down the resistance, and the counters were integrated.

In its early days Fredericksburg was a small town. It seems half the people and properties were related.

We walked along Caroline Street to see the Rising Sun Tavern. It was built by George Washington’s brother Charles as a family home; it later became a tavern and inn, and is now a museum.

Not many blocks away, on Charles Street, is a home that George Washington bought for his mother, Mary. That’s so she could live near her daughter, Betty Washington Lewis, George’s sister.

Betty’s husband, or some member of his family, operated the Lewis Store, warehouse, etc., which were down the hill from Mary Washington’s house.

We were standing on the sidewalk talking about which way to go when a silver-haired lady with a rake asked if we could use some directions.

She confirmed that, yes, we walk one block forward and turn left to Mary Washington’s house. I had the wrong bearing for the Rising Sun, though.

It wasn’t on a side street, but on Caroline, the way we were heading.

She was taking a break to talk to us. She’s restoring a 19th century house and hopes to open it as a B&B. 

She and her husband were doing much of the work themselves. After he died, she took on the whole project herself.

The kitchen is either already done or about to be. She stripped the walls down to the frame, insulated, and then put everything back, including the original bead board wainscoting. There are at least a half dozen rooms on the second floor that have gotten similar treatment.

She has to be at least my age. She was cleaning up the leaves in the yard when we came by. There were bits of leaf in her hair.

She claims to love the work, especially the garden. And she seems very happy.

She says everybody thinks she’s crazy to be doing this, so she wants to open for business on April Fools’ Day next year.

I had made some notes about the location of the Metro Diner before we left the hotel. They got us there from the old town. 

We stepped out of the car in the lot and right there on the window it read “chicken and waffles.”

That meant half a chicken—breast, wing, thigh, drumstick with bones and all—and a waffle almost as big as the pile of chicken. It may have been unsafe to eat it all in one sitting. I think it was bigger than my head.

I’ve heard about chicken and waffles for years. I even saw a chicken-and-waffle competition with Bobby Flay on the Food Channel. But somehow, for no reason I can fathom, I have never eaten them before.  

It was fantastic. Savory chicken cooked in boiling oil and a sweet cake with syrup on the side. What an ingenious combination of flavors. 

We wound up taking one leg and both breasts back to the hotel.

They’re sitting in the fridge now. And I’m sitting here with a beer that I had to take out of the refrigerator to make room for the chicken.

Space is still tight in there, so I will probably take out a few more before I turn in.

Be well, all, and don’t eat anything bigger than your head.

Love to everybody.

Harry

Piracy, Confederacy, and Cornmeal

March 7-9

Thursday we wandered in the French Quarter of Charleston. It’s the old town, and many of the buildings are survivors from the 18th century. It was the original colonial walled city.

This is the place where the Civil War started, where secession began. But I’m not interested in its traitor history. More interesting is that pirates of the Golden Age used to work here. 

The city wall was built to keep them out. It didn’t always work, though. Blackbeard once held the entire city for ransom.

According to Wikipedia, Charleston’s old town wasn’t called the French Quarter until sometime in the 1970s. Preservation efforts were well under way by then. The name is supposed to acknowledge the many French merchants who operated in the area. 

I dunno. The pink stucco and iron railings convey a suggestion of the Vieux Carre and the Garden District in New Orleans, where the bars run all night long.

Giving Charleston a French quarter was likely a marketing idea: “We have one too.” Although the bars here do close at night.

We stopped at a historic site called the Powder Magazine and chatted with a couple of volunteers in the gift shop. The building held the city’s gunpowder supply. To keep city blocks from blowing up, residents were permitted to store only small amounts of powder at home. 

The rest of the city’s powder supply—some privately owned and probably a lot publicly owned —was kept in the magazine.

They needed lots of powder to keep the pirates out.

Nobody wanted to live near all those explosives, though. So the powder supply was moved to a new location when this part of town needed to be developed. 

Not far away from the old powder magazine, we found a restaurant called Slightly North of Broad that served some Low Country dishes. So we decided to have an early dinner. 

S.N.O.B.is similar to Grace & Grit in that it also offers unconventional twists on Southern food. I had a crawfish hoecake. It held identifiable pieces of okra, but the crawfish must have been ground up. The cake was served under an arugula salad with bits of grilled ham.

The sauvignon blanc came from Les Deux Moulins in the Loire Valley. It was fresh and light, a good lunch-time wine. 

Joanna had a Dixie-fried pork cutlet that looked like a schnitzel. It came with rice middlings. Neither of us had heard the term before. 

It may refer to broken rice grains, a by-product of rice milling. It had the consistency of a thick risotto.

The cutlet came with a red sauce of cranberries or maybe lingonberries. We’re not sure which.

At the next table were two women, whose names, we learned, are Tommie and Dana. Tommie comes from Tennessee. Dana lives in the area. They are mother and daughter who were out for a joint celebration of their birthdays.

They cut us a piece of the birthday cake. They and we have been to many of the same places—Rome, Charleston, Florence, the Alamo.

When they heard we were staying in Mount Pleasant, across the harbor from Charleston, they told us about Water’s Edge, another of their favorite places to eat, where they would be going for lunch the next day. “Maybe we’ll see you there.”

Later we strolled down the block to the harbor, where we got to watch dolphins play and birds dive.

We walked out onto a pier perhaps a hundred yards long. By the time we reached the end of it, the wind was so strong that I had to hold my hat in my hand to save it from blowing away.

When we got back to the beach, the wind wasn’t half as strong. We did get a sprinkle when we walked past the water fountain.

I took a brief rest at a cafe in front of another glass of vino before we retired to the hotel.

Lunch was the size of dinner so we went to the Whole Foods around the corner to grab a few things for a picnic. We had sardines, Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, Wasa crispbread, fruit. Oh, I felt so sophisticated.

Friday we took it easy all morning at the hotel and decided to go to Water’s Edge for an early dinner. Maybe we actually would run into Tommie and Dana there and get to say hello.

Water’s Edge is one of several restaurants overlooking a waterway called Shem Creek. The restaurants are next to a wetlands nature park named for the creek.

We indeed met Tommie and Dana. They were finishing lunch with a friend and saw us. They called us to their table and introduced us.

There were two things on the menu that had been recommended by the ladies at the Powder Magazine.

One is she-crab soup. Joanna and I ordered bowls of it to start. 

It is a rich, creamy soup, thick like New England clam chowder, but the flavor is very different from anything I’ve tasted before. 

Joanna detected dill in the broth. There may have been something else too, but I’m not sure what.

Joanna suggested that, since the soup is made only with female crabs, perhaps the eggs are cooked in the broth and that accounts for some of the unusual flavor.

Joanna followed the soup with a seafood pasta made with shrimp, scallops, and swordfish.

It was good, but I was occupied with shrimp and grits.

This is another delicacy mentioned at the Powder Magazine. Just about everybody in Charleston serves shrimp and grits. Each cook, though, has an individualized version of the dish.

This one came with a scoop of bright yellow grits smothered in a white gravy that contained shrimp, red onions, mushrooms, and andouille. The sausage was hot, but the rest was mild. 

A funny thing happened with the wine. Early dinner, white wine. Well, sometimes. 

I had a glass of Drylands sauvignon blanc. The winemaker’s name didn’t mean anything to me, but the grape variety did. I had enjoyed it the day before.

What a surprise. It tasted distinctly of grapefruit, like a mildly spiked grapefruit punch. Joanna took a sip and laughed at the illusion. 

I found out later that the wine is from New Zealand. Maybe there’s something about the dirt that accounts for that flavor.

The only problem was that the light, fruity wine was overpowered by the hearty soup and the gravy on my grits. It was still OK, but I couldn’t taste that grapefruit any more. 

We were eating lunch when dolphins appeared in the creek. You see a fin occasionally break water and then disappear for a while. 

Brown pelicans started to gather, too. I guess it was lunch time for them as well as for us.

In a way, pelicans remind me of turkeys: so ungainly that they’re beautifuI. They swoop down and sit slump-shouldered on the surface. Their bills are so long that the tips dip into the water. Downy feathers on their crowns look like bad haircuts.

Sometimes, they don’t land at all, but swoop across the water a few feet above getting wet. Ducks do the same thing.

They don’t mind the motorboats or paddlers coming in and out. They’re used to it.

I noticed a man painting a window frame on a restaurant across the water. He was taking his time. I could hardly see his hand move. 

No. His hand didn’t move at all. It took me a while to figure it out. It was some kind of decoration at the window, probably a pirate climbing the wall.

After lunch, we went out for a closer look. As you do in most swampy parks and nature preserves, you see things from a boardwalk. This protects the oyster beds, birds’ nests, and grasslands as much as it protects us from the mud.

There were more pelicans and lots of ducks. Also some black birds that look like skinny crows. I don’t think they are really crows. Could they be grackles?

The boardwalk took us to the end of the creek, where it meets Charleston Harbor. You see downtown Charleston in the distance, Crab Island nature preserve, the top of the cable-stayed bridge that leads to Charleston. 

A map showed where Fort Sumter is, but I couldn’t make it out on the horizon.

Besides tour boats and personal craft, there are shrimp boats on the creek. Signs show how the nets work. They drag behind the boat, one on short lines and the other on long so they won’t tangle. 

Several shrimpers got their start in the 1930s. They had been in a local shipping industry, carrying goods between Charleston and the far side of the harbor. 

A bridge across Charleston Harbor in 1929 put an end to the need for that service. So when shipping business dried up, shippers became shrimp fishermen.

Saturday we went back to the French Quarter. 

My sister Jamy had recommended a restaurant called the Peninsula Grill. Google Maps put it at the corner of Market and Meeting Streets. We had been right there on Thursday.

It’s across Market from the Confederate Museum.

We got there about one or so, and found it unlocked but empty. We walked into the dining room looking for someone who works there. We found a lady working on a laptop computer who told us the bar didn’t open till four and the kitchen at five.

We didn’t want to wait that long. It looks like a good place for a serious dinner. When we’re in Charleston next we’ll try it.

We saw flags on storefronts down Meeting Street and people milling on the sidewalk outside. When we got close enough we could make out the names of Arnold’s Deli (which appears to be closed), Hyman’s Seafood Co., Hyman’s Half Shell, and Hyman’s General Store.

We had a 15-minute wait for a table. The crowd outside was plentiful, but the place is huge. All those Hyman’s are one big happy family. Currently fifth generation, according to the menu.

Hyman’s has Confederate food. It doesn’t try to be hip; it makes a nod to Kosher instead.

The menu has shrimp and grits, which may be required to do business in Charleston, but shellfish is forbidden under Kosher law. So the menu also has a variant, salmon and grits, which I believe is Kosher. 

Hyman’s website says the restaurant offers Glatt Kosher meals prepared by Chabad House of Charleston.

Last time I was in a Glatt Kosher restaurant, it was in Little India in New York and served strictly vegetarian South Indian food.

The walls of Hyman’s are covered with celebrity photos. We were told that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and ate at Hyman’s. We saw head shots of Oprah Winfrey, Billy Joel, Michael Bolton, Martha Stewart, and people I don’t know. 

A small label on the edge of our table said that Alan Dershowitz ate there. The name didn’t ring a bell. He was a hotshot lawyer, professor, and author.

I had a combination dinner with a half dozen boiled crawfish and some fried oysters. That came with red rice, hush puppies, and collards.

Joanna had a broiled tilapia filet with a baked sweet potato and corn on the cob.

This was comfort food. 

I tried a glass of Riesling, the first I’ve had in decades. The food was so good I don’t remember a thing about the wine. So that means it wasn’t bad.

We went for a walk, backtracking to a store where a lady on the sidewalk had given us some sweet pecans. They were good, so we wanted to buy some,.

But not at $13 a bag. 

We did get a cone of vanilla bean ice cream. We shared that as we walked along Market Street. 

We stopped at the old burying ground at the Congregational church on Meeting Street. We finished the ice cream on the sidewalk. Call it superstition: We felt it was inappropriate to eat ice cream while we walked among the dead.

A few of the stones were recent, from the first half of the last century. But most were so old that we couldn’t make out the inscriptions. Some of the stones were made of slate that had lost their messages entirely.

So it was another great day in pirate country.

Be well, gang, and to all a good night.

Harry