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