Dining Out: Miller Union (Atlanta, GA) - Emerging Foodie Roadtrip, Part 1

This spring I attended a work-related convention in Atlanta, followed by my annual trip to the Team America Rocketry Challenge national finals in Northern Virginia and a visit with my daughter (the George Washington University graduate student in American Studies) in the DC metro area. More than 10 days on the road, half of that on my own and with an expense account?¹ That could only mean... Emerging Foodie Roadtrip! Over several posts, I'll be recalling for you, my faithful readers, the best of my gustatory adventures from that trip.

When I learned I would be going to Atlanta, I made it a point to DVR and carefully study the Atlanta episode of Anthony Bourdain's Travel Channel show The Layover. One segment that stuck in my mind was his visit, with Alton Brown, to the Miller Union farm-to-table restaurant; I just knew it had to be one of my stops.



Miller Union wasn't my first blogworthy meal of the trip, but it's definitely where I want to start. Described by Alton Brown as "not the only farm-to-table restaurant in Atlanta, but it's the best farm-to-table restaurant in Atlanta," I scoped the locaton out on my first night in town, though I didn't make it there to eat 'til my last night. It was worth the wait!

The only reservations for 1 available were either very early or very late; I chose the former, arriving at (as I recall) 5:30 pm, one of the first parties of the dinner service. The early evening light actually showed off the place's marriage of clean, modern design and country farmhouse motifs beautifully:

 And, of course, it was after 5:00 pm, so naturally I began with a cocktail, the Miller Thyme, made with Millers gin (according to my excellent waiter, that name is a coincidence; it's not a house brand), lemon, and fresh thyme.

Naturally, as a starter I had to have the very farm egg baked in celery cream that I'd seen Anthony Bourdain lap up on Alton Brown's recommendation. As promised, it's such a simple thing... and yet such a rich, delicious, beautiful thing. The delicate aromatic flavors of the cream; the richness of the egg; the chewy goodness of the grilled rustic bread... I could've almost ordered a second one as my entree.

 But of course, I didn't. Instead, I ordered duck breast with celery root purée, dandelion greens, and green garlic, along with a side of roasted beets with orange and olive oil. The latter, my waiter assured me, was a signature dish, like the egg appetizer, and I can well believe it. I was a late-in-life convert to beets, but I've quickly come to love them, and these were the best I've had. The duck was amazing, too: I've just about concluded that the duck is almost as noble a beast as the swine. (Almost!) And the celery root purée filled in checked off one of those foodie ingredients I mused about years ago... although, honestly, I'm not sure I could even now isolate that flavor from all the other wonderful ones on the plate.

 When I'm just eating for fuel, I usually don't order dessert, but I was determined to have the full Miller Union dining experience, so I ordered not one dessert, but two: a cornmeal cake with rhubarb jam and rose-hibiscus cream, which I so eagerly dove into that I barely remembered to take a picture...

 ...and a scoop of the most amazing mint ice cream (which was actually part of a different dessert on the menu, but I asked if I could just order it by itself). Mint ice cream may not sound all that amazing, but this was made with cream deeply infused with garden-fresh mint, and the result was utterly different from the usual candy-like mint flavor that most mint ice creams (including my homemade ones) have. I'm determined to try to duplicate that flavor with my homegrown mint... but frankly, I'll be shocked if I can get it half as good. This was a truly wonderful way to end a truly wonderful meal!

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¹ Just to be clear regarding this and other posts about eating out during the Atlanta portion of my trip, I only ever expensed a reasonable meal cost, and covered any extravagences (including alcohol) myself. Jus' sayin'....

Half-Homemade Breakfast

I've never watched Sandra Lee's Semi-Homemade Cooking on Food Network (though I have heard Anthony Bourdain slam both the show's host and its concept), so I don't know for sure, but I imagine what it promotes is something like what I did for breakfast this morning.

Waking up earlier than is my wont on a Sunday morning, I was hungry for breakfast, but we didn't have on hand the things I consider essential to a proper breakfast: To wit, either bacon or sausage, if not both. So I decided to improvise.

I did have on hand frozen toaster waffles, which I normally use as a quick snack, rather than as a breakfast dish. A quick inventory also turned up packaged Black Forest ham lunch meat... and we pretty much always have eggs, butter, and milk in stock.

Remembering this recipe (from the goat-farming, Amazing Race winning Beekman Boys' website) for Lazy Scrambled Eggs, I hatched what Bourdain would no doubt consider an evil scheme: I would make a phoney-baloney, semi-homemade goof on Eggs Benedict.

The whole point of the "lazy" scrambled eggs is that it's a slow cooking method, so I got that started first: Three eggs broken straight into a "cold" pan, along with a tablespoon of butter and 2 tablespoons of milk, then put over low heat. Break the yolks, give it a quick stir (but don't worry about thoroughly mixing things), and wait.

Part of what makes this method "lazy" is that there's no whisk or mixing bowl to clean, but really, two fewer items in the dishwasher strikes me as a fairly trivial advantage. The real point of this slow-cooking method is that it prevents overcooking, and results in smooth, soft eggs with some bits of discernibly separate white and yolk... which is to say, it makes scrambled eggs that are a plausible substitute for poached or 3-minute eggs.

While the eggs were (slowly) cooking, I popped a (round) waffle into the toaster, and lightly cooked 3 or 4 slices of the ham in a separate skillet. When everything was done, I put the ham on top of the waffle, topped it with some (also store-bought) shredded cheddar cheese, covered that with the hot eggs, and sprinkled a little additional cheese on top.

No great display of culinary skill, obviously, but very yummy. I have a more-completely-homemade version of this dish in mind, for a day when I've planned ahead a bit more. Watch this space....

Dining Out: Pho 501

So I had to work all day Saturday, but that cloud had a silver lining: It gave me an opportunity to explore some of the culinary delights of East Hartford, where my place of employment is located. For lunch I checked out longtime local favorite Augie & Ray's Drive In, and for dinner, I finally made it to Pho 501, a spot I'd been longing to try for some time. A full report on Augie & Ray's will have to wait, because I was eating alone, and sampling just one item on their menu is insufficient data.


But no such problem exists at Pho 501, which appears to only serve one item — the Vietnamese noodle soup called pho (forgive me for lacking the HTML-fu to render it in proper characters) — and only one variety of it on any given day. Saturday, it was spicy beef, and it was delicious. I must say, this was only my second visit to a pho shop, and the two could not have been more different: The other shop, Pho 75 in Arlington, Virginia, which I visited with some Pharyngula friends last August while on business in Alexandria, boasted a huge range of choices, many of which seemed to differ only in ways too subtle for this non-Vietnamese diner to quite comprehend, and accompanied by a literally bewildering array of fresh herbs, chiles, and sprouts. It was all very intimidating; enough to make me google "how to eat pho." It seems I had guessed right, for the most part.

Pho 501, by comparison, is brutally simple: The only choice to make is whether to order a small, medium, or large bowl (I ordered medium, and it was the perfect size for me, as a Gentleman of Substance®), and the accompaniments to my meal were limited to a plate full of fat, crisp raw bean sprouts and beautifully fragrant Thai basil, plus a wedge of lime. As one online reviewer put it, Pho 501 serves a "clean" broth, without the unctuous tripe and tendon that I've seen Anthony Bourdain wax orgasmic over on more than one TV show... but that suits me fine. The broth was rich, deep, and flavorful, and the noodles and beef perfectly cooked. Gentle applications of sriracha and hoisin, a squeeze of lime, and periodic additions of shredded basil and sprouts and... mmmm, heaven! I know I'll be back soon!

A word to the wise, though: This is a small place, and even for a late-ish Saturday dinner, the dining room was nearly completely full. Many times I've driven past and seen people lined up outside the door. A fellow diner Saturday told me that the chicken pho served on Sundays is especially popular, and often sells out. "You have to call ahead and reserve a bowl," he told me, "Not a table; a bowl."

More on Craft... and a Bit of a Cheat

My post from yesterday about the Top Chef: All Stars Quickfire Challenge featuring Justo Thomas spilled over into a conversation at Pharyngula, and since I'm never one to let my mindless natteringsbrilliant ruminations go to waste, I thought I'd shamelessly recycleadapt what I wrote there for a follow-on post here.

A friend wondered if there was more to Thomas' story than the show hinted at, since she thought it was more a matter of highly developed skill than craft, which she thought of as more creative. I said it was possible we were working from slightly different definitions of craft (subtle differences in working definitions are frequent there), but in any case, yeah, there was much more to Bourdain's description than you got on the show.

What I called craft involves a great deal of creativity, but it's more of a functional, problem-solving kind of creativity that what I associate with art. But whether you call it craft or merely (merely?) skill, I'm in awe of what Bourdain described.

Pressed for details — perhaps an anecdote from the book — I had to admit that I actually "read" it on audio, and while Bourdain is one of the authors whose reading/speaking style definitely makes the audiobook a value-added experience, one thing about audio is that it's hard to just grab the book and look up a specific passage.

But I had actually been thinking about this distinction between skill, craft, and art. The short answer is that I see craft as a kind of creative mastery of skills, and art as the creative expression of intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic ideas. In my mind, you can be an artist without being an accomplished craftsperson, and vice versa.

Doonesbury author Garry Trudeau, for instance, was always an artist (assuming you agree with me that satirical cartooning is within the realm of art), but in the middle of his career he made a conscious effort to improve his craft, when he took a year's sabbatical to work on his drawing.

In the case of Justo Thomas, I can remember one item: In Medium Raw, Bourdain notices that Thomas doesn't sharpen his knives as obsessively as many chefs, and asks him about it. Thomas says that if the knives are too sharp, they'll cut through soft fish bones without him being able to feel it, and thus bones will evade his notice and end up in the portioned fish. He has a very specific level of sharpness he maintains that's perfectly matched to the task he's performing. Now that might be simply a matter of skill... but to me, it's a level of mastery that transcends mere skills competence, a kind of zen genius for the task at hand. OTOH, no matter how perfect his output is, it's still just portions of fish, not Guernica.

Appreciation of Craft

I planned to post about cocktails tonight, and I'll certainly get to that later, but I'm in the middle of watching Top Chef: All Stars and I just had to stop and write about tonight's episode... and more specifically, about the Quickfire Challenge, which took place in the kitchen of Le Bernardin, Eric Ripert's great (or so I've read, and really, who the hell am I to question it?) seafood restaurant.

The guest/guest judge was ace fish prep chef Justo Thomas, the star of my favorite chapter of Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw... and perhaps the favorite thing I've ever read about food or cooking. I alluded to this chapter in my very first post here. It occurs to me that the reason I so love cooking "reality" shows is not just that I love food, but that I love craft, and I'm in awe of great craftspersons.

Bourdain clearly does, too: Beneath his crusty, punky cynicism is this: His most loving prose was left for this man, far from the glamour of the great restaurant, who is simply the best there is, in every way he can think of to be, at the humble but essential task of reducing up to 1,000 lb of fish per day into the perfect portions... the perfectly formed materials with which his fellow chefs will make their art.

The All Stars acquitted themselves well, both those who managed to cut their fish acceptably and those who humbly admitted they couldn't (you should pardon the expression) hack it. And the four finalists made dishes I wish I could've tasted... ironically, from the heads, bones, and other "waste" parts of the fish they'd just butchered. First craft, then art. What's not to love?

An Epiphany

Welcome. I've been thinking about starting this blog for a while now, but have been dithering because I didn't really know where to start until recently, because I couldn't quite figure out what my food-blogger identity should be.

I had always been interested in food (well, who isn't, right... but I mean beyond the everybody-has-to-eat level), had been a casual fan of Iron Chef, and had puttered about the kitchen at various times in my life, but I wouldn't have described myself as a foodie of any stripe. Then a few years ago I was bedridden for about a week with whooping cough (ask your doctor about updating your vaccination, by the way; you do not want this), and at some point during that week I stumbled onto a season-so-far marathon of Top Chef Season 2 episodes on Bravo.

I was hooked. Before long, I was watching every cooking competition show I could find — Iron Chef America, Next Food Network Star, Next Iron Chef, Top Chef Masters, Chopped, even Worst Cooks in America — along with noncompetition shows like Alton Brown's Good Eats and Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations. I started putting cookbooks and kitchen gear on my lists for every gift-giving occasion. I bought an ice-cream maker.

For years I'd been growing hot peppers in a tiny garden patch in my yard, and occasionally pickling the meager yield or making jelly; now I added tomatoes and cucumbers, and containers of herbs on my deck. From listening to Rachel Maddow on her old Air America radio show, I'd become fascinated with cocktails, and had acquired bar tools and stocked the liquor cabinet. I'd dabbled in homebrewing decades ago in college, and now I purchased gear to try it again.

But I still wasn't cooking. In theory, I'm an amateur cook and mixologist and brewer and... but it's all just theory; in fact, what I really am, so far at least, is a food voyeur. Not only do I not cook, I don't even really eat: Though my wife and I eat out a lot, we don't manage to go to real fine-dining restaurants very often.

All this crystallized for me a few days ago. I'd been out running errands and listening to the audiobook of Bourdain's Medium Raw, and when I got home, I sat down to prep some of my jalapenos for canning. By chance, I'd just heard Bourdain's paean to the artistry of the fish prep chef at Le Bernardin, and here I was hacking through my peppers with all the subtlety of a weedwhacker. I mean, the closest thing I have to a "knife skill" is the ability to (usually) avoid cutting any part of myself off. I felt silly even trying.

But then it dawned on me: Of course I'm a hacker; what else would I expect to be. The fellow Bourdain so praised was a trained professional, and had been honing his art at one of the best restaurants in the country for a couple decades. It was stupid in the extreme of me to make that comparison at any level, even in a fleeting passing thought.

And it further dawned on me that I haven't been cooking much because, subconsciously, I know I can't cook like the people I watch on TV. And I don't go to fine restaurants because I know I don't have the palate of Bourdain or his friend Eric Ripert or the hosts and judges on the shows I watch.

Well so what? Of course I can't, and don't. It's been silly of me to let that hang me up. So now I'm going to just frickin' cook... or at least I'm going to try to. And I'm going to write about it here, along with anything else that pops into my head that has to do with food and drink. Maybe a few folks will come along for the ride.