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The Meaning of Food

 

Girl Power

I was tent-mates with Master Sommelier and fellow restauratrix June Rodil (of June’s All Day, one of my fave spots in Austin, and also the new, incredible Marigold Club in Houston I’m dying to try) for Wine & Chile’s Rose All Day event just last weekend. We had a blast. June was pouring her own incredible sparkling June’s Rose and we served a crispy calamari and shrimp salad with orange supremes, whole citrus vinaigrette, and baby arugula from the farm. We had so much fun we’ve decided to keep the party going. All three Vinaigrettes are now pouring June’s Rose by the glass (but it’s so good you’ll want the whole bottle). So if you haven’t tried this amazing and delectably fizzy Austrian rose, come on by. And we’ve got new seasonal sides and salads to pair with it, too.

 

ABQ friends. If you love us, please spread the word that we moved a mere two blocks east. We keep hearing from former regulars and normally plugged-in people thinking we are closed. One of the biggest changes in the industry, since I started over fifteen years ago, and that I try to talk about in my book which I swear is almost done, is how differently news and information travels, now, which can be hard for small business owners. Preference bubbles, gatekeeping by data companies, and fractured information deltas are a real thing that are changing the nature of small business commerce. So, just a reminder, we are open in the new spot at 1720 Central, just two blocks from the old. Tell your peeps! 

Mid-summer, my boo Jeff scheduled his second bike packing trip with friends from University of Texas architecture school. They intend this to be an annual thing, which I think is super cool, a way to check in and reconnect despite increasingly chaotic lives. Last year was Valles Caldera and this year they planned to ride, over three days, the Continental Divide Trail from Chama to Ojo Caliente.

Months prior, Jeff asked our friend Avery if he would give them a lift. He would drive them to Chama, leave a key at the truck they left in Ojo, and then come back to pick up the riders who didn’t fit in the truck at the end of day three. As planned, Avery came early on Saturday morning, so they had time for a decent first day’s ride. But when he showed up, around eight, our driveway was covered with sprawled bikes, and dudes tinkering with their bikes. Most of them had arrived late the night previous. So they spent the morning packing energy goos, protein bars, camelbacks, tiny water filtration systems, socket sets, tents and tarps, flat tire kits and I hope at least some underwear, into their many-zippered bike pouches and packs. No one was ready to get an early start.  

I was excited for Avery to see the spectacle, because I had experienced the long succession of doodads and thingamajigs ordered from REI that went into this trip last year, despite the extreme limits on volume implied by the term “bike packing.” This year, even more than last, they were taking longer to get ready than Kim Kardashian primping for the Met Gala. Avery and I sat, talked, and made a second pot of coffee. As it pushed past noon, I looked at Avery, who was wide-eyed, worried about how late it was getting, and said, “It’s like Boy Prom, isn’t it?”  

Finally, after a brief break for burritos, they loaded the bikes onto the racks on one car, plus two riders, and everyone else in the other car. After a couple false starts–yet more tiny essentials retrieved—they finally pulled out of our driveway and headed north. The drive from Nambe to Chama covers some of the most beautiful landscapes in New Mexico—but it’s not a short trip. Perhaps just how far north it is was underestimated. By the time Avery got back with the car, it was well into evening. It had taken three hours to get to the drop site—Cumbres Pass—which was actually north of Chama, actually north of the Colorado border. They had not started riding until mid-afternoon. Days were long, but still, this didn’t seem like an auspicious start.  

I used Jeff’s Ipad to track their progress on the “Find My Phone” app (also, I have a flip phone, so this was necessary). They were out of service most of the time, but whenever they came in proximity of a tower, it pinged their location with a sporadic and peripatetic update on their progress. The first was near the border—farther north than Chama by a bit, especially when I considered that they were ON BIKES. 

After the first day, they appeared to have made no southern progress. At one point it looked like they actually crossed back into Colorado. Switchbacks, maybe? I texted Avery from the Ipad and sent screenshots of their location. “Whoa. They are really up there.” “Yeah man,” he texted back. “It was way further north than I thought. Or anyone thought.”  

At the start of day two, they dipped south. Encouraged, I sent Avery a text: “looks like they are making pretty good time!” But then, they seemed to go north again. “Shit, they aren’t even past Chama!!” “Do you think they are lost??”  

Avery and I became fascinated by their journey, following their progress like an addictive reality TV show.

We traded theories about why they appeared not to be moving in the right direction, wondered whether they were stuck in thunder storms, huddled under those shiny tarps they had somehow fit into miniscule pouches. This year was one of New Mexico’s best monsoon seasons in a very long time–it dumped rain nearly every day or night in July. Which is awesome for just about everything but riding a mountain bike. New Mexico mud, full of plastic clays, is comically sticky, slippery, and heavy. 

At one point we considered trying to retrieve them. But where they seemed to be, was equally far from any road access from the east or west, north or south—literally right in the middle of nowhere. And they were really, really far from Ojo Caliente. What should we do? What if they didn’t get service? I kept calling Jeff but it went straight to VM. I combed the internet for maps of the Continental Trail, cursing myself for not mapping their route, and for making light of “Boy Prom.” I tried to pencil a rough outline of the trail onto my analog New Mexico maps, and sent a picture, hoping Jeff would see it if his text messages loaded. 

Finally, Jeff called me at the end of the second day, in a pocket of service near Lagunitas Creek where they were camped out. They were OK, he said, just tired, and the ride had been rough, slow and—yes—muddy. Very muddy. “Did you guys go the wrong way?” I asked, helpfully. Yes, more than once. We needed to change the pick-up plan. Could we meet them at Hopewell Lake—in between Tierra Amarilla to the west and Tres Piedras to the east—after a full days ride tomorrow? OF COURSE. I said. 

Then I called Avery, worried. We looked at the map as we talked, wondering if they would make the lake, even. Because that would require their longest and most successful day so far in terms of southward progress. But between the Lagunitas Creek campsite and Hopewell Lake there are numerous extremely high peaks with foreboding names like Jawbone Mountain, or Broke Off Mountain. 

With Plan B in place, and after hearing how exhausted Jeff sounded, Avery and I decided that it would be cute if we brought orange wedges and watermelon slices, like kids get after soccer games in elementary school. Win or lose, north or south, these guys deserved snacks. I bought and prepped super simple food I thought I might crave after peddling through three days of mud and sweat: tangy hydrating fruit, rotisserie chicken for protein and salt, string cheese because everyone loves string cheese and it requires no utensils. Avery was on beverage detail—jugs of water, sparkling lemonades, gatorades, a large case of beer. We packed everything into two coolers with ice, headed north to pick up the truck in Ojo then continued on in separate cars to Hopewell Lake.  

The drive, like so many in New Mexico, was sublime. We lurched up and over the rolling hills with that belly sinking feeling, through fields lit near-neon green, seductive and soft from summer monsoons. The cottonwoods lining the Rio and its feeders—for years chlorotic or skeletal, uber-stressed from drought—were bushy and deep green, finally quenched. We turned off the main road. Signs of civilization retreated further as we passed herds of cattle grazing, picturesque old barns. Hawks erupted from fence posts along the road as we cut through black-green stands of Ponderosa Pines.    

Finally we slowed and turned at the sign for the Hopewell campsite. Jeff was standing in the middle of the road, waving his arms, telling us they were there since cell service was not an option. He looked….rough. Then I saw all the other architects. Bikes and shoes were coated in mud like chocolate-dipped ice cream cones. Mud splatter crept up legs and even faces. Arms had fiery red scratches, knees and elbows angry scrapes. An award-winning architect in Austin, wiry when he left, now looked mal-nourished. They all had what I call Moon Face—that pale, deeply concerned, hollow-eyed look very hungry or sad people get. Sometimes our dog Mcgee gets it when he thinks we are going to forget his dinner.  

Avery and I parked side by side, looked sidewise at each another. This was no time to fuck around, we said, one food person to another. We are restaurant people. We know what to do with this. The food we brought had been a lark, practically a joke; now we realized it was life itself. Wordlessly, we got to work, tabling (temporarily) all the jokes recently swapped such as “how many architects does it take to read a map?” We went straight to the trunk of the car, got out the coolers, and set the picnic table at Hopewell Lake like emergency room docs scrubbing in for surgery. 

The bruised, beleaguered bikers set upon juicy oranges and watery triangles of watermelon, tore into salty chicken, ate sticks of string cheese in two bites, slurped quenchy bubbly water, gulped Gatorade. Sated, they pried the lids off Modelo Especials, sat down, took deep breaths. And, then, they started talking. Soon, laughing. Telling stories. Processing the journey. In a span of mere moments, they became human again. The food had brought them back to life.  

This is the meaning of food—its most important job after keeping us alive. And that is culture—how we process what has happened to us. And, this is why it feels so good to feed people. It is one small way that we can save one another, that we can tame one another, that we can turn the drama and pain and delight of life into story, together, IRL.

Restaurants have a secret language. The alphabet is comprised of tiny actions and multi-sensory details—most of which you don’t even notice because we try to link them together, letters into words, words into sentences, sentences into story, which is the overall atmosphere of a place. Part of that language is the food itself, which is a tremendous pain in the ass to make well for lots of people, so we never stop tinkering, tweaking, trying to make it a few increments tarter or a quarter teaspoon saltier, giving you a nudge more pleasure. We always notice the look on your face when you eat it, whether you loved it or were “meh.” But it’s also the lights, the music, the heft of the fork, the weft of the napkins, the texture of the menu paper, the colors on the wall, the fall of the flowers in the pear-shaped vases. No detail is too small. They are beads strung on a thread of hidden meaning, a kind of talking that doesn’t have to label or define or hashtag itself, only be. If face-to-face oral communication is “intersubjective,” restaurant communication is communal intersubjectivity. It has a weight, a density.