Nashville Restaurants: Tango Grill

Tango Grill: Photo by Michael W. Bunch

Tango Grill: Photo by Michael W. Bunch

This week the Nashville Scene visits Tango Grill, where owner Alexia Humphrey layers South American and European traditions into an eclectic and endearing menu, the highlight of which is the decadent chivito. Find that review and other recent restaurant columns at:

Nashville Restaurants.

Nashville Restaurants: Bella Nashville Bakery

Bella Nashville Bakery: Photo by Eric England

Bella Nashville Bakery: Photo by Eric England

This week the Nashville Scene visits Bella Nashville Bakery in the Shops on Fatherland in East Nashville. The peanut butter sandwich might remind you of a favorite childhood song, but the made-from-scratch delicacy is anything but child’s play. Find that review and other recent restaurant columns at:

Nashville Restaurants.

Characters of Conexión: Meet Maria

GreenBoots

As a food writer, I spend a lot of time gnawing on words, attempting to grind the grist and gristle of raw ideas into succinct and digestible prose. More often than not, it’s hard work. But every now and then, a story is so clear and beautiful, it can tell itself in just a few words.
That is the case with the saga of new Nashvillian Maria Ramos, whom I met through Conexión Américas. Maria’s story is not a food story. It’s a story of an American dream. And it is so elemental that it is inspiring, even when stripped down to the few characters I tweeted when Maria welcomed me to her store.

Meet Maria, a character of Conexión.

Spring Theory

Originally published in Chapter16.org

sad kale

It has been five years since I first asked my husband, “Why don’t we just grow our own food?” and we set out to farm our sunless quarter-acre in urban Nashville. After a half-decade of composting, weeding, and watering, I can safely declare the experiment in self-sustainability a success. But not in the way I had hoped.

If measured on a scale—not from one to ten, but an actual scale—the fruits of my labor could be tallied in ounces, not pounds. There was that handful of blueberries we harvested one year. And that sublime ear of corn the next. There has been the occasional arugula salad and the intermittent tomato, but for the most part there has been drought, excessive shade, blight, rot, and cussing. Thank God for mint, which perennially pushes through parched soil and into iced bourbon with enough fortitude to make us forget our farming heartache, at least for a cocktail hour or two. The full story

The New Sick Day

When I was a kid and stayed home sick, Mom and I would snuggle up and watch Days of Our Lives and Tic Tac Dough. Before the prime-time soaps and game shows kicked in, I’d while away the flu-ridden mornings by sipping ginger ale and watching Picture Pages on Captain Kangaroo. Remember? “Picture Pages, Picture Pages. Time to get your Picture Pages. Time to get your crayons and your pencils…”

Today I had a sickie home with me. We snuggled plenty, but we didn’t watch any Bo and Hope, and Picture Pages has been off the air for two decades. But who needs crayons and pencils when there’s an app that can let you make this?

Mothers and Sisters

kombuchaLike so many paths to hell, my road to kombucha addiction was paved with good intentions. I started hanging out with some cool girls. They grew vegetables and raised chickens. They composted and crafted. I wanted them to like me.
When one of them led me to her pantry and lifted the cheesecloth from a vintage wide-mouth candy jar of aging kombucha, I recoiled. It looked like snot and smelled like kimchi soda, but I wanted to fit in. I took a sip. I tried not to inhale.

Soon I was breaking bad with my own kombucha operation.

“What the hell is that?” my husband asked, while searching for mac-and-cheese in the cupboard. He was referring to the gelatinous ectoplasm of “mother,” a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY) that transforms tea and sugar into kombucha, a beverage hailed for its dubious immune-boosting properties.

“It’s kombucha,” I said.

SCOBY is one ugly mother, like a cross between a saline breast implant and placenta. Some people refer to it as a mushroom, others as jellyfish. It’s probably that association with sealife that makes “Moby” a popular name for SCOBY.

“How long will it be here?” he asked, backing slowly away from the oversized Mason jar.

“Forever.” I said.

He prepared the noodles in silence. He has learned—from the chickens in our backyard and the terrarium of salamander and crickets in our bathroom—that there’s no arguing when I set my mind on an ecosystem. Kombucha is indeed an ecosystem: Yeast feeds on sugar, transforming it into alcohol, which bacteria ferment into acetic acid. It takes about ten days for the magic to happen, after which you drink the kombucha and start a new batch with the mother. In this endless cycle, kombucha is like sourdough, which can yield infinite generations of bread, so that millennia from now a piece of space-age toast could trace its roots to a single loaf my grandmother baked.

It makes me wonder what might have happened if Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton had turned his science fiction toward kombucha instead of petrified amber and the dinosaur DNA therein. Depending on what reports you believe, Fermentation Park could be amply terrifying, since kombucha can be fatal. Again, depending on whom you believe.

When it comes to risk-reward analysis of kombucha, the literature is about as straightforward as the Federal Reserve Board prognosticating about interest rates. On the one hand, rates could rise; on the other, they could fall. Kombucha research has its own variation of FedSpeak: On the one hand, kombucha might cure cancer, arthritis and irritable bowel syndrome; on the other, it might kill you in a single swallow.

And still, such a spell kombucha has cast on me that every ten days I add a pot of sweet Darjeeling to the Mason jar, then sit back and wait for the symbiotic symphony of scum to yield a festive fermented fizz. That is, until recently, when a family vacation set me behind in my manufacturing. I wasn’t home to tend the ’buch, and the liquid evaporated, leaving the mother protruding above the surface like a dried, shriveled oyster. When I looked closely, I thought I saw a pattern of dots—spores, possibly?—scabbing on the surface.

Research on kombucha is clear about one thing: Don’t truck with moldy mother. But were these tiny carbuncles actually mold? On the one hand, I didn’t want to euthanize a perfectly good SCOBY; on the other, I didn’t want to risk a nanobattle of microorganisms in my colon.

I emailed a photo to a friend whose mother shared bloodlines with my jellyfish. “Do you think it’s mold?” I typed with trembling fingers.

She replied immediately, “I’m coming over.”

In minutes, she was in my kitchen, probing in the Mason jar with a fork. It didn’t look good, so we bowed to the prevailing Internet wisdom: When in doubt, we threw it out.

“I’ll bring you some of my SCOBY,” she promised, as Moby slid down the garbage disposal. I felt sad and a little guilty. Maybe we should have buried him?

Meanwhile, she put the kettle on and made a pot of scum-free Earl Gray. We sat at the kitchen table and talked about our mothers until it was time to get the kids from school. Even without the stench of vinegar and the slime of SCOBY, a cup of tea and conversation made me feel better. It’s enough to make me think that friendship—not fermentation—is the real value of kombucha.

Doctors of Culinary Arts

Image

The pastor stopped by this week. Yes, in the Year of Our Lord 2013, a full two centuries after Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice, a man of the cloth dropped by for a chat. Afterward, my 10-year-old described the visit as “very Southern.”

With my children and Lulu, the utterly useless Havanese terrier, looking on curiously, the reverend and I sat in the living room and talked about my kids, his grandchildren and the joy of living in a city with extended family. He offered to bless my dog. Then we talked about my restaurant reviews. It was on that topic that he made his only reference to religion.

The context was that he has come across a lot of young people who want to become chefs. No surprise there, since chefs are the new rock stars. But what interested the reverend was how many of these budding culinarians are the children of physicians.

Of course, we are in Nashville, healthcare capital of the world, so you could pick virtually any vocation and chances are many of its practitioners are the spawn of MDs. And there’s no doubt the offspring of affluent docs get exposed to a certain level of culinary sophistication. But the reverend had a few other ideas that blended the secular and soulful in a way that makes this a fascinating topic.

For one thing, he suspects physicians are becoming increasingly frustrated with the healthcare system and consequently nudging their children toward other industries.

For another, he suggested that these parents and children share an instinct for nurturing, which they can exercise in parallel careers of healing and feeding.

Both are very Christian activities, he added.

I know a lot of non-Christian doctors and chefs, and the best homemade chorizo I’ve ever had was made by a Jewish orthopedic surgeon on his day off, but I take the point that a generosity of spirit runs through both the medical and culinary arts.

Throw in the fact that, to be done well, both healthcare and cuisine require a facility and fascination with science — not to mention a lack of squeamishness — and you’ve got a good argument for scalpel and cleaver being two edges of the same sword.

That doesn’t mean there is likely to be such a mass exodus from medicine that we’ll all be going to bistros for healthcare or, conversely, to hospitals for haute cuisine. Medical school enrollments continue to increase, as does enrollment in culinary schools. But imagine if the best points of healthcare work their way into restaurants and the best points of culinary hospitality leech into medicine. Think restaurants serving healthy food and hospitals treating patients as if their success depended on word of mouth, not to mention tips.

If that shift happens, I suspect the medical-culinary families in question will have a hand in it. I’d be interested to hear their thoughts about the overlap of medicine and cuisine, so if you know of any such doctor-chef families, please send them my way.

Meanwhile, let’s hope my own hospitality habits improve. In hindsight, I realize I was so flustered by the unexpected visit from the reverend that I failed to offer him anything. Not even a glass of water. That wasn’t very Southern. I hope that doesn’t mean he won’t visit again. I really enjoyed our spirited, if not overtly spiritual, conversation. 

Life Imitates Music

IMG_0029Fourth of July is upon us, and it’s looking like the Tennessee state song knows what it’s talking about: Corn don’t grow at all on Rocky Top, nor do it grow in my Nashville back yard.

If you plant corn after the first frost, it should be knee-high by the Fourth of July, they say. But my crop is looking like a bunch of lawn cowlicks, those stray blades of grass that escape the mower.

It’s possible I planted later than I should have. I was aiming for Tax Day, but it was still a little chilly here, so I waited until my husband said it was time. Admittedly, he doesn’t know Shinola about farming, urban or otherwise. He’s a hedge fund analyst. But he was on a conference call one day in May and his macro-strategy commodity fund managers happened to mention that Big Ag was starting to plant. That sounded like solid intel, so I ploughed the back 40. Forty feet, that is.

Anyway, I’d say we have about a one-in-six yield of stalks growing from seeds planted. What’s worse, the anemic stalks that are emerging could double as dental floss.

The problem is not that the dirt’s too rocky by far, as the song says. The problem is that there’s no sun in my yard. There used to be, and when there was, we grew one helluva an ear of corn. Literally, one ear. But dammit, it was good. It tasted like Summer herself had shape-shifted into a grid of sweet, milky bubbles, smooth and crisp to the tooth, but silken and custardy inside. Oh good lord, it was delicious. Unfortunately, bugs got all but that one ear. Farming — urban or otherwise — is a difficult business. Big Ag, I salute you.

Anyway, the summer after that magnificent crop of one, we relocated our garage. The original garage in our 1930s house was built to fit either a Model T or a bicycle built for two or some other vehicle too narrow to meet the transportation demands of today’s traveling fat-asses. It was so narrow, in fact, that twice I pulled off the front panel of the building when reversing my 2000-era station wagon. When I finally succumbed to a minivan, I couldn’t even fit that bubble-butt bus inside.

Building codes being what they are in a historic neighborhood, we couldn’t construct a new garage on the footprint of the old garage. Go figure. So we scooted a few feet to the left, i.e. north. The new garage helped the parking, but seems to have put an end to our corn cultivation. Too much shade. Hence, the feeble crop of lawn cowlicks.

I was weeding this morning, taking care not to extirpate the cornstalks, which, in some cases, were dwarfed by more robust invasives. Like big, strong clover. Miraculously, the weeds were replacing themselves as fast as I could pluck, like the Augean stables filling up with manure as fast as Hercules could muck. Or like Whac-a-Mole. Pick your metaphor. Either way, it was supremely frustrating.

As I rhythmically ripped crab grass from the furrows and smacked sweat bees against my thighs, it occurred to me that this was the kind of fruitless labor that could drive a person to drink. A familiar tune crept into my head.

“Corn don’t grow at all on Rocky Top, dirt’s too rocky by far…”

Then it hit me: I wouldn’t be the first failed farmer to turn to the bottle. As the song goes, that’s why all the folks on Rocky Top get their corn from a jar.