All the Cool Kids Drink Beer and Eat Tacos

Whilst in Nashville before my big move to Brooklyn, I went to 3 Crow Bar. Twice. In one week. Sunday and Wednesday. For why, you might ask? Well, my friend Ryan, who is married to one of my besties, and his Mean Tamborines mates enjoy 3 Crow Bar very much on those nights for the 2 for 1 specials. Double drinks or two beers for $4.75, which you can drink on their amazing patio among many many cutoff jean shorts and plaid flannel shirts. It's a great deal in a very neighborhoody setting with great people watching. My caveat is that my love for 3 Crow turns into straight up disdain during the cooler months or when the weather is crappy. Nashville still allows smoking inside for bars that are 21+, and the chain smoking clientele combined with poor ventilation makes the atmosphere more like Aushwitz than awesome.

But back to what I love. 2 for 1's. And an AMAZING draft beer selection. Lots of local and regional brews, such as Yazoo, Sweetwater, and Terrapin, as well a rotating selection of straight up good beer. During the wintertime when I went they had the Bluegrass Brewing Company Jefferson Reserve Bourbon Barrel Stout - it wasn't 2 for 1, but it was still there, and that gem is the type of brew they often have on tap. They also have Magic Hat, which is not my thing but is for a lot of people, and black and tans made with Guinness and Bass.

And outside of 3 Crow, for your late night munching pleasure, is often parked the Mas Taco truck, pictured up top. It's a tricked out Winnebego serving up hot tacos. We got there kind of late and all that was left was chicken, which is never my favorite, but the taco was hot and hit the spot at 2 am, and only set me back $3. 

After the bar and the taco truck, I got to experience the pleasure of drinking a Four Loko. It was warm. And flat. And we drank it on ice. It was like mixing Robitussin with flat soda water and putting it on ice cubes. I tried putting an orange slice in it to make it taste better but it didn't work. But. It's 11% alcohol and freaky caffeinated. They don't sell them in Nashville, to the best of my knowledge, but if you're in the Northeast you should pick one up, bring it home, and share it with your friends. Or enemies. Either one.

Pho Yeah

Saigon Tokyo

1745 Galleria Blvd.

Franklin, TN 37067

Pho is a beautiful thing. A hot, savory, slurpy bowl of noodle soup is universally comforting, but fresh beansprouts, the warming effect of star anise, ginger, and cinnamon on rich beefy broth, savory bits of thin rare beef, chewy meatballs, and fresh herby hits of Thai basil and green onion take it to the level of "I must have this now or I will kill people" craveability. 

Pho is considered the national dish of Vietnam, where it's eaten first thing in the morning. I first found out about it when I tutored for a Vietnamese family in high school. I would head over around 6pm every day, straight from hitting the gym after school, and the kids would be sitting in the kitchen eating whatever their parents left in the fridge for them. I was astounded by 1) how the hell an 8 year old could eat tablespoons of Sriracha on everything without crying or breaking a sweat, and 2) how awesome everything looked. I would ask the kids what they were eating, they would tell me, and then proceed to laugh hysterically when I tried to repeat. "Phow?" "Bayhn mee?" Hahahhaha. 

While its dishes may be an awkward mouthful, Vietnamese is one of the world's greatest cuisines - it fuses the comfort of French comfort foods (baguette, pate, roast pork, crepes) with Asian freshness/funk (pickled daikon, cilantro, Thai basil, cucumber, fish sauce - lots of fish sauce).

My senior year of high school, a Vietnamese restaurant opened in the unlikeliest of places: a strip mall. In suburban Middle Tennessee. Next to Target. It was Miss Saigon. Call me a cynic, but I doubted very much that the soccer mom set would be adventurous enough to bypass Subway and Honeybaked Ham to tuck into some vermicelli and tofu or lettuce wraps with egg and shrimp crepe. But I jumped on the opportunity to actually sit and savor my very own plate of Vietnamese cooking rather than looking lustfully at the kids' dinner until they politely offered me bites of whatever they were having. 

And Miss Saigon and I began a beautiful relationship. I remember my first bowl of pho there. I ordered and the waiter kept gently correcting my pronunciation. A huge steaming bowl of broth and noodles came out, and the matron of the place practically held my spoon while she showed me the proper way to eat it. Garnish with beansprouts and basil. Squeeze some lime. Put the jalepenos in if you like it spicy. Take the chopsticks in one hand, the spoon in the other. Put the noodles in first, then dip in to some broth. A squirt of hoisin, a squirt of sriracha. Slurp. Repeat. While I sampled other things, the pho was what kept me coming back. I was addicted. I couldn't get enough. 

When I went off to college, every time I came back home I would make it a point to skip breakfast and head to Miss Saigon hungry for a huge bowl of pho. And year after year, I would pull into the parking lot, practically with my hands over my eyes, hoping that the fates were kind and that Miss Saigon survived another year in a cultural abyss of suburban whitebread tastes. And year after year, to my self-serving delight, it did. 

Until this year. Mom and I pulled up, hungry for pho, and the sign made my heart drop. "Closed for Remodeling. Grand Reopening July 23rd." 

Disappointed, I resolved to come back. And I did. And my heart sank lower when I saw the sign. Saigon... TOKYO? They are nowhere near each other. Their cuisines are nothing alike. Sushi and bahn mi do not speak the same language, and should not be served under the same roof. The cultural authenticity snob in me wanted so badly to hate it.

But the business pragmatist understood. White people want sushi. And teriyaki chicken. And fried rice. And you gotta give the people what they want. Basil also recently succumbed to the sushi bar. And that's fine in my book, as long as the proprietors still serve some food with some soul. 

And soul the restaurant has indeed. This picture is the offering immediately outside the restaurant. Most Vietnamese are Buddhist, and it is customary to offer up sweets, fruits, and flowers for good fortune in new ventures. The kids enthusiastically showed me their "Buddha room," a small little altar the family had set up in the office nook at the front of their home. It was a good sign, as was the lively crowd of Vietnamese friends and family of the new proprietors hanging out in the restaurant over big bowls of soup. 

I avoided the sushi bar and gained immediate respect when my only response to the owners' nervous apologies for the limited menu of sushi, noodles, and spring rolls was "yeah, but you still have pho, right?" And pho they did have. It was certainly different than Miss Saigon's - it was heavier on the cinnamon and anise, and the portion was less oppressively huge. But it was still really satisfying and delicious, and it still has that charming family run feel. Pho is not a dish one can eat gracefully. The slurping. The heat. You end up with soup and snot all over your face, or at least I do. The restaurant was still in the process of getting organized and halfway through my soup I realized there were no paper goods on the table and had to get up and snoop around for something with which to mop my face. After 30 seconds of wandering around wiping my nose on my forearm, the matron of the restaurant came running to my rescue. She stooped down next to me in my booth, holding my hand and patting my back, apologizing profusely and laughing gently. "It's not a big deal, seriously, I am just making a mess." 

"It's pho! You enjoy pho."

A command, an explanation, but so much the truth. 

Suburban Adventures

My oh my I am terrible at blogging. I just don't have the discipline, and I get too caught up in doing things to actually sit down and write about them. In my defense, I've been busy. After galavanting about Europe with Grace and Adam, (Oh yeah. I meant to write about that. Oops.) I left Bloomington for Nashville, and then Nashville for Brooklyn. In the process did some pretty cool stuff.

Like picking blueberries in my mom's neighborhood. Golden Bell Farms (4084 Clovercroft Rd., Franklin, TN 37067) is a U-pick blueberry farm. You go to the shed, get a bucket, and then get to work walking up and down the rows of blueberry bushes searching for ripe berries. When you're done, the farm owners weigh your bounty and then charge you by the pound. I picked blueberries there two years ago - because of the late freeze and drought, the farm wasn't open in 2008 - and had four pound of berries to show for an hour's work. This time wasn't so productive. I guess they had record berry picking over the weekend, so the pickings were kind of slim. I still walked away with one and a quarter pounds of fresh blueberries, and it only set me back $3. Golden Bell Farms is open Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, and conversely closed Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. 

Peter's Sushi

330 Franklin Rd.

Brentwood, TN 37027

615.370.1493

On Tuesday Christina and I went to Peter's Sushi, which the last time I visited it was a goofy little neighborhood sushi bar and Thai restaurant in a suburban strip mall. I grew up in Brentwood, and the place is seriously a ghost town on weekday nights after 7 pm. I was seriously befuddled when we showed up to the Kroger shopping center and found that someone completely revamped the stripmall (fancy brick, huge signs, more restaurants, and no TCBY- noooooooo), AND the place was hopping. We had to wait 45 minutes for a spot at the sushi bar, but it was totally worth it. 

We ordered some hot sake, one of the daily special rolls (salmon, white tuna, tomato, avocado, and cream cheese wrapped in soy paper), a red dragon roll (shrimp tempura, crab, and cucumber topped with tuna and avocado), and Christina's fave, salmon nigiri. The sushi came with miso soup and a salad topped with bright orange ginger dressing. It was all awesome, and the damage wasn't too bad. The special roll was $10.95, and the red dragon roll was $13. Nigiri is always too expensive for what it is, but this was artfully done and made the $4.50 a little less of a blow. The sushi is so freaking good there I don't think that I will ever get around to trying the Thai food, but if anyone's had it you should let me know how it is.

First Real Day in Trencin, Slovakia

I made it to Trencin! Ivana picked me up at the Vienna airport and we drove from Vienna through Bratislava (about a 20 minute drive) then onward through the Slovakian countryside to Trencin, a pretty small village tucked at the feet of some pretty rad mountains. I’ve been checking up on things to do and apparently there are some beautiful mountain springs and other delightful outdoorsy locales in which to romp and frolic.

 

Mostly, it’s been all about getting settled in. I got to the house around 11:30 am, made myself some lunch, and proceeded to pass out. Hard. I woke up a couple of times while it was still daylight and made the half conscious decision to just keep on sleeping, figuring (correctly) that given the amount of sleep I had gotten in the past week (hardly any), if I woke up in the middle of the night it would be pretty easy for me to go right back to sleep.

 

I woke up at midnight and stumbled around in the basement darkness looking for the stairs. After finally feeling my way up to the third floor (I’m in the basement, Ivana’s mom lives on the second floor, and Ivana and my sisters inhabit the next level up), I made myself a midnight snack of cheese, crackers, and vermouth with campari, dicked around on the internet for two hours, and went back to sleep.

 

So after sleeping away one full day of jet lag misery, I woke up at 7:45 am, and my first real day of European adventures began.

 

European adventures commenced with going to get things I didn’t pack because I assumed I’d be able to mooch. Shampoo and conditioner. An American/European converter for my computer charger. I forgot to get razor blades, so Trencin will have to endure my hairy legs until the next time we run by the store.

 

9:45 am

 I was dying for coffee so I ordered breakfast in a café while I waited for Ivana to pick up some stuff. I was hungry and speak exactly 3 words of Slovak (one of them is the word for beer, which sounded like it would put me right back in a jet lag coma). I ordered a cappuccino and the thing on the menu for 4 euros. It turned out to be a caprese salad served with a tiny glass of orange juice. Success. Tomorrow I am going to raid my little sister’s books in search of anything that can teach my retarded ass how to read a menu.

 

12:00 pm

I came back to the house and cooked some lunch. I need to do something to earn my keep. Potato salad is a start. Shelling two pounds of peas that I’m gonna use to make a spring pea and chicken risotto tomorrow night was a good follow-up.

 

2:00 pm

Yoga in the amazing backyard garden. No mat, so I had grass all up in my business, but the breeze felt great and the neighborhood sounds were an amazing background. Neighbors laughed at me and said things to me in Slovak, I laughed and grinned like an idiot and carried about my weird business.

 

4:00pm

Went running more errands with Ivana. Discovered that as much as I fucking hate going to the grocery store at home, where annoying shit happens in English, I hate it 10 times harder when I can’t understand a word of what is going on. Also mailed postcards that I bought, wrote out, and meant to send in New York. Helped Ivana buy a charcoal grill so that we can have a barbeque garden party. I can’t wait.

 

7:30am

Departed on a “city tour.” Holy jesus. Best. City. Tour. Ever…. Videos next time.

 

I promise the next post won’t be so mundane.

Sleepless in Vienna

This is me after a sleepless 8 hour nonstop flight from JFK in New York to Vienna. Sleepless because I got the middle seat. In the section where they put all the annoying 2 year olds who won't stop whining for no reason, apparently. Currently I'm waiting for my stepmom to pick me up and deliver me to her place in Trecin, Slovakia, where I'll be spending the next three weeks. There's also a bed there. I haven't seen one of those since Friday night. And even then it was only for 2 hours. I don't know when I am going to learn that travel is always infinitely more confusing and generally more difficult when embarked upon with whiskeybrain and mild to severe sleep deprivation. 

For the second time this year, I flew out to JFK from Bloomington after pulling an all-nighter, and sat myself on a long transatlantic flight after raging in Brooklyn the night before. Hopefully this will not become my modus operandi. I'm going to live in New York City soon - I should learn to interact with the city like a normal human being instead of some beer starved animal with no respect for her physical limitations or other passenger's desires to sit in peace without being subjected to someone else's hangover stink.

More on the New York trip in a bit... it is now the magical hour, 10 am, and time for me to start searching the crowd for Ivana.