Best Food Writing 2011 Read online

“We don’t have any shucked oysters from Louisiana right now,” Sunseri explained to one such potential customer on the phone. “The shell oysters we do have are not big. Do you buy oysters often? Who is this?”

  Sunseri adjusted his position on the couch and continued: “Well, you know, Ryan, if you bought oysters in recent months, you’d know that the oysters are really small because they’ve been pulled out of the water early because of the concern of having a fresh water die-off. And that’s the reason there’s no salt in them. But I don’t have them every day, Ryan, and I’m really just taking care of my regular customers right now.”

  A Family Legacy

  The “P” stands for John Popich, a Croatian fisherman who arrived in New Orleans in the 1850s and began farming and distributing oysters in 1876. The “J” is Joseph Jurisich, the orphaned son of the owners of a French Quarter oyster bar who Popich brought on as his partner.

  The founders planted the seed that Alfred Sunseri, who was married to Jurisich’s cousin, helped nurture to bloom after he was hired around 1921, when the company purchased its current base of operations. Alfred became a full partner and, in 1952, hired his only son Sal as an accountant. Over the years, Sal, who rose to the level of president and general manager, gradually acquired stock from his partners. By the late ’70s, he had made his own signature contribution to P&J’s history: delivering full ownership to the Sunseri family.

  Sal Sunseri’s sons Al, who at 52 is a 31-year veteran of P&J, and Sal, who turns 50 this month and started in 1984, increasingly worry that their legacy could be having presided over a company the fifth generation would be wise to let go.

  “We’ve been through the Great Depression and all that stuff, but nothing like this,” said Sal Sunseri, whose voice, like his brother’s, approximates what would happen if a Boston accent traveled through the pipes of a slide trombone. “Being able to be one of the components that make New Orleans such a great destination for food is an honor. I do want my son (Dominic, age 12) to have the opportunity to continue in this business. But I also think there could be an easier life for him.”

  It was mid-October, and Sal Sunseri, dressed as if he was on his way to play golf at City Park, was in the back office helping the accountant Nolan Haro make sense of P&J’s finances. (The Sunseris’ sister Merri Sunseri Schneider used to do P&J’s books, but she retired in May.) Al Sunseri was standing near the garage door that opens up to the empty shucking room, giving yet another spill-related interview to out-of-town media, this one a collection of television journalists from Japan.

  “The marketplace is very different,” Sunseri said into the camera. “And the people we’re competing against aren’t oyster suppliers. They’re fish mongers.”

  The distinction between oyster and seafood dealers is one the Sunseris have emphasized frequently, often without prompting, in the months since the oil spill. The lack of diversification that made P&J particularly vulnerable when the disaster spun out of control went beyond its reliance on a single seafood species. Their business is based not just on processing and selling oysters but also on processing and selling Louisiana oysters. The oil disaster created an opportunity for new players to enter the local oyster market, and the Sunseris are not amused at the prospect of facing competition from suppliers whose fidelity isn’t nearly so pure.

  “Oysters in general are usually used as lead items for seafood distributors,” said Al Sunseri, who estimates P&J is able to serve only one third of its customers because of the oil spill. “They’re widgets to them. They make their money cutting fish.” Sunseri, who had just finished shucking oysters for the cameras, was wearing a mud-stained rubber glove. “We’re a specialty company,” he said. “We only sell one product. We specialize in it. It’s a premium, high-quality product.”

  “I’ve got companies I’ve never heard of calling me saying they’ve got oysters,” said C.J. Gerdes, owner of Casamento’s, the legendary Uptown oyster house. Gerdes still relies on P&J for 80 percent of his oysters because “I pretty well know what quality I’m getting from them. It’s always going to be good.”

  “In the last couple of months we’ve gone to other sources,” said Darin Nesbit, executive chef of the Bourbon House, which, like all of the restaurants owned by the restaurateur Dickie Brennan, normally relies exclusively on P&J. “They supply us with the best oysters around.”

  “I Know Where Good Oysters Grow”

  In mid-October, P&J received a shipment of 336 boxes of oysters from Grand Bayou du Large in Terrebonne Parish, just below Caillou Lake. While the load represented a fraction of what P&J would process on a typical day before the oil spill, it created an air of optimism that has become rare inside the company’s headquarters.

  “October has been very, very scarce, so that’s a very nice influx,” Sal Sunseri said. In the span of 30 minutes, two customers wandered into the office to inquire about the availability of oysters. One had to be turned away.

  “Maybe I’ll come back Friday,” he said.

  The Sunseris were pleased with the quality of the Bayou du Large oysters, but they did not come from one of their regular suppliers. Under normal circumstances, the great majority of P&J’s oysters come out of the Barataria Basin, west of the Mississippi River. In the Sunseris’ opinion, these particular waters are to Louisiana oysters what the soil found in certain parts of California’s Napa Valley are to cabernet sauvignon.

  “I’m not bragging, but I know where good oysters grow,” Al Sunseri said. “It all depends on the water, the mixture of fresh and salt, and you don’t find better conditions for oysters than in Barataria.”

  The oil spill shut P&J off from Barataria oysters as well as the few other areas where the company had long-standing relationships with suppliers, forcing the Sunseris to scramble for oysters worthy of their brand. The Nov. 1 opening of the public oyster grounds in Texas brought new opportunities for the Sunseris to meet customer demand, but not without some difficulty.

  “Years ago, we used to get quite a few oysters from Texas,” Al Sunseri said, “but our customers told us they wanted Louisiana oysters, so we stopped. We kind of shot ourselves in the foot.”

  If things appeared to be looking up in late October, when P&J received a shipment of Barataria oysters from Pete Vujnovich, it was only in relation to how bad things have been. Before the spill, Vujnovich, who is based in Port Sulphur, supplied P&J with between a third to a quarter of its oysters, and he hadn’t been fishing since May 22.

  On his first trip back dredging since the disaster, Vujnovich harvested 180 mini-sacks of oysters, all of which he sold to P&J. The yield was less than half of what he said he would normally find this time of year.

  “There’s a very limited resource out there,” Vujnovich said. “Seventy percent of my leases fell under the footprint of the oil.”

  “I’m happy that I got what I got,” Al Sunseri said of Vujnovich’s catch. “We got some nice oysters. I just don’t know when I’m going to be able to get them again.”

  Guilty Pleasures

  REFLECTIONS ON A TIN OF VIENNA SAUSAGES

  By John Thorne

  From www.good.is

  Co-editor of the newsletter Simple Cooking and proprietor of OutlawCook.com, John Thorne is like the Thoreau of modern food writing—his writing style is refreshingly companionable, his approach to food philosophical and deeply subversive. Even Vienna sausages can inspire a writer this good.

  My neighborhood is bordered on one side by a bike path built over an old railway bed. It rises ever so slowly up a long incline to the next town to our west, the way tree-lined and tranquil. Uphill all the way there, but downhill all the way back, which counts as perfection in my bicycle lexicon. I make the trip a couple times a week from late spring to late fall.

  Roads regularly intersect the route, where, of course, you have to stop and look both ways before continuing. One morning, at such a crossing, I noticed something glittering by the side of the bike path as I was shifting up to speed. I thought I r
ecognized it, but I’m too old to be able to turn my head when bicycling to look behind me. I made a mental note to stop and examine it more closely on my way back.

  And there it was, glittering from drops of dew caught in the morning sun—a spanking new can of Armour Vienna Sausages. A more decent person would have left it in case the person who dropped it came back to look for it; a more cautious or health-conscious person would have looked away at once. I got off my bicycle, fished it out of the grass, took it home, and eventually ate its contents.

  Why did I do this? A simple question, maybe, but the answer unfolds into a complex weave of reasons. First of all, there was the incongruity. Some wag has spray-painted “Lycra Turnpike” on the asphalt path; the pathway usuals are serious bicyclists, jogging mommies (and daddies) pushing baby carriages, elderly walkers, and so on—multigenerational, to be sure, but none of them identifiable Vienna Sausage eaters. Ideally, on such a bosky path, one would like to find a cluster of morels. But what one would reasonably expect to find is a dropped bag of trail mix. Not this.

  My phrase for the Vienna-sausage category of product is “lonely guy food”: cans of potted meat, pork loaf, beef chunks in gravy, no-bean chili suffused with textured soy protein, canned tamales. When cruising our local odd-lot emporium, I see these cans (and cans they almost always are) in the shopping carts of wistful-looking lost souls, paunchy, unkempt, and solitary. In sum, lonely guys. Women may also buy this stuff, but I would like to imagine they’re a statistical anomaly.

  Anyone vaguely acquainted with this sort of food knows that it’s bad for you—Vienna sausages being a prime example. A five-ounce can contains 300 calories, of which 250 of these are fat, and about one third of that is saturated fat. (Your salt needs are also generously attended to.) This might still be fine if we were talking fresh goose liver. But we’re not. To consume Vienna sausages is to ingest “Mechanically Separated Chicken, Water, Beef, Pork, Salt, Corn Syrup, Less Than 2%: Mustard, Spices, Natural Flavorings, Dried Garlic, Sodium Nitrite.” You don’t want to know this, but mechanically separated meat is taken from a carcass that has been stripped of everything marketable. The tattered remnants are then crushed and mashed and pushed through a sieve. (This is reasonably accurate; methods differ.) The resulting residue—“paste,” let’s call it for the sake of decency—makes its way into pet food and into a few products more or less fit for human consumption.

  In short, Vienna sausages are pretty low on the food chain and taste it. A mouthful of raw hot dog is ambrosial in comparison. The Vienna sausage is just as overly salty and unpleasantly nitrate-tangy; the difference lies in its peculiar texture, like the stuff you pick out from between your teeth. It’s one of the few meat products where if you ponder it too closely you are brought face to face with the abattoir.

  So, you ask, if Vienna sausages aren’t eaten for nutritional benefit or for gustatory pleasure, why eat them at all? I should pause here to note that some people are forced to consume them because of rotten circumstance. But they don’t, I imagine, buy cases of Vienna sausages at warehouse clubs. Or live in a relatively affluent neighborhood and bring a can home as a trophy after an invigorating ride through the woods.

  I can only answer this question out of what I dredge out of myself; readers can judge for themselves how universal the application. As a 10-year-old back in the 1950s, I was enthralled when I came into possession of some unopened packages of World War II K-rations. At this distance, memories are mostly vague: a neat mini-pack of cigarettes; a can of processed meat with a special can opener that doubled as a thumb gasher; and packets of hard, stale-tasting crackers, toilet paper, and chewing gum. What I remember best is the chocolate bar. It was made so it wouldn’t melt in the tropics—which meant it didn’t melt in the mouth either: it just sort of softened. And it tasted like chocolate-flavored floor wax. None of these things were remotely good, but I didn’t care, because they tasted of places I hadn’t been, of adventures I could only imagine. This was the food of soldiers, explorers, and mountain climbers, and so long as the mouthful lasted, I was one of them. According to the Wikipedia article on K-rations, those cans of processed meat might contain “sausages”—a neat coincidence, if only I remembered that to be so of the cans I laboriously gouged open. But I don’t.

  At lot of things I purchase today at Asian markets I enjoy for their difference rather than their quality or tastiness—it’s the same reason I try the occasional dehydrated dinner. But while Vienna sausages retain even today, 60 years later, something of this tough guy aura, I don’t think this is why most people, including myself, choose to eat them. For that we have to dig a little deeper, broaching something that I call—stealing a term from the Chinese—“eating bitter.”

  The Chinese understand the phrase to mean necessary suffering to get to a better end: “eating bitter so as to taste the sweet.” But my use of the phrase is quite different: to endure bitterness by willfully eating it. If life is grinding you down, eating something uncomplicatedly delicious can lead to deeper depression; it reminds you too much of what your life is missing. But eating what is in fact garbage—however cynically disguised—momentarily liberates the spirit. It pushes aside the weight of obligation, the gnawing sense of failure, by aggressively devouring it.

  During the most depressing time of my life, when I was working at the bottom of the white collar food chain, I almost always ate bitter, especially when I was providing myself with a solitary treat. This was epitomized by red-glazed Chinese spareribs and Kentucky Fried Chicken: deeply greasy and possessing a superficial tastiness that just barely disguised the inferior meat beneath. At that time in my life, nicotine was what I thought my necessary drug, but in truth the addiction that best deals with a dreary life is the craving for saturated fat. Some like it salty, some like it sweet, but the craving is for the stupor that comes from a massive calorie hit. And, for the best bang for the buck, edge that with a kind of nihilistic omnidirectional contempt—“No, it doesn’t taste good. Yes, it is terrible for me. I’m eating it. Now go shove your head where the sun doesn’t shine.”

  Eating bitter is something that no cookbook will ever address except by turning it inside out, giving us innocent-seeming glossy photos of overstuffed burgers, recipes that heap on the butter, cream, and bacon. Better, maybe, to just shut the door to all that pretty-making and rip open a can of Vienna sausages—at least when you find one by the side of the bikeway. Otherwise, I recommend canned tamales.

  800 WORDS ON TATER TOTS (NO, SERIOUSLY)

  By Kevin Pang

  From The Chicago Tribune

  Chicago is a city of great bars (and great drinkers), but rarely do restaurant reviewers investigate bar food. Enter the Tribune’s Kevin Pang, whose Cheap Eater column has become a Chicago must-read. Surely the buzz about Sylark’s tater tots was too good to be true.

  Some things, like spray-on hair, are so laughable and ingenious, your forehead turns red from all the palmsmacking.

  So the idea that a bar lives and dies by the reputation of its ... get ready ... tater tots might be the savviest marketing hook I’ve heard. Think about it: This happy and humble food of our collective youth (no one ever reveals horrifying tater tot flashbacks to a psychiatrist) gets elevated by a shrewd restaurateur who makes it a signature dish. Tots! What person with a halfway-decent childhood would turn that down?

  It’s a smart business move, because tater tots look great on paper and are nearly impossible to mess up. They are either really good (hot, crispy) or really bad (not hot, not crispy). There is no middle ground, no shades of gray. As long as you diligently tend the fryalator, the tots market is yours to corner.

  That is what Skylark in Pilsen has discovered.

  The corner space at Cermak Road and Halsted Street sat vacant for six years before a trio of business partners aiming for “a good bang-for-your-buck food and beer-wise” opened Skylark in 2003. They intended the bar to cater to the burgeoning Pilsen/Bridgeport artists community. They’d keep the kitchen open
late, serving beer-battered cod sandwiches and panko-crusted chicken breasts into the early morning. It would have the interior charms of an American Legion Hall in Akron, only with a liquor license and the lights turned low. Soon, the nearby Chinese and Latino enclaves took notice, University of Illinois at Chicago students wandered far enough south on Halsted, and 20-something hipsters thought: “Neat-o, an ironic photo booth.” They all made Skylark their own. The bar celebrates its eighth birthday next week.

  With it came the growth of Skylark’s tater tots reputation. It was the idea of co-owner Bob McHale, who thought tots would be a memorable alternative to obligatory french fries.

  Plus: “It’s easy to share a basket of tater tots,” McHale said. “And it stays hotter.”

  What’s more, they haven’t spent one cent on marketing. Besides an animated all-caps graphic on its website suggesting you “TRY OUR TOTS,” the campaign couldn’t have been more organic, driven by word-of-mouth and online chatter. Now the bar goes through 150 pounds of tater tots every week. In the last year, no fewer than three people on separate occasions have told me, “Skylark has amazing tater tots.”

  OK, just how amazing can tater tots be? Did Grant Achatz personally hand-stuff with Perigord truffles and fry them all in Kobe A-5 beef tallow?

  I thought this would be a good conversation starter with my waiter: “So, what makes the tots here so good?”

  During one visit: “We change the oil here regularly, so I guess that helps.”

  A second visit, accompanying a shrug: “Beats me, man.”

  On the really-good-or-really-bad rating system, the Skylark tater tots are, for sure, really good. They are tailor-made for cold suds to chase. From the fryer, they emerge as hot lil’ buggers—pop ’em in your mouth prematurely and you do the open-maw huff and puff.