Roadtrip: Bourbon

Our roadtrip took us through the two best states for whiskey -- Tennessee and Kentucky. Jack Daniels of course is a Tennessee sour mash and bourbon derives its name from a county in Kentucky.

We had a very nice meal in Nashville at the Capitol Grille (no relation to chain) and did not make it to Whiskey Kitchen, a trendy new restaurant featuring lots of whiskeys. But the hotel concierge sent me to Midtown Wine and Spirits, a huge liquor store, to look for whiskeys I might have trouble finding elsewhere.

A very helpful staffer steered me to a bottle of Bejamin Prichard's Straight Tennessee Whiskey, which has only been on the market a few months. Prichard's distills a lot of rum and has produced a "double-barreled" 90-proof whiskey. But this is a premium product in a bottle like Woodford Reserve. Tennesse whiskey has the distinction of being filtered through maple, marking its flavor accordingly.

Otherwise, he said, the main Tennessee alternative to Jack Daniel's is Dickel, which apparently is fairly widely distributed, though new to me. He also recommended a Kentucky small-batch bourbon, Rowan's Creek, from Bardstown. Prichard's is very good, but the Rowan's Creek is excellent.

In the new cable series "Justified" with Timothy Olyphant, set in Lexington, Ky., everyone is always having a shot of neat whiskey. Easy to see why once you get there.

We didn't dally along the bourbon trail in Kentucky, but did go to dinner in Lexington, at deSha's, which was voted the best whiskey bar in the country in 2008. The bar menu listed at least three dozen small-batch bourbons, and a knowledgeable waiter helped me build a flight of bourbons to go with my steak dinner. We started with an Elmer T. Lee, a single-barrel bourbon produced at the Buffalo Trace distillery, which makes the Eagle Rare and Blanton brands, among others. A review in a spirits magazine praises the deep golden color of the 14-year-old whiskey and detects a toffee flavor. I thought it was great.

With the main course, I had a Noah's Mill bourbon, also from Bardstown. It had a nice whiskey flavor, in contrast to the final member of my little flight, which had a beautiful cognac flavor. That was a special Woodford Reserve. The waiter explained that the Woodford Reserve in the store is mixed with Old Forrester, but that deSha's had its own label of pure Woodford Reserve -- a Woodford Reserve reserve, so to speak. It was heavenly, and when I say it tasted like cognac, keep in mind that cognac, like bourbon, is aged in charred oak barrels. I floated out of the restaurant. It might be fun to go back to Kentucky and travel down the bourbon trail!

Roadtrip: Barbecue

I love barbecue and our roadtrip gave us an opportunity to sample many different barbecue places. But I worry that a focus on down home authentic food, like that in Jane and Michael Stern's Roadfood, is reducing American cuisine to barbecue, hamburgers and fried chicken.

Most of the barbecue places we went to in fact are not in Roadfood. The book's recommendation for Johnson City, Dixie BBQ, was closed on Sunday (we neglected to call ahead) so we ended up grabbing pork and brisket at another barbecue place for lunch. It was fine, tasty, quick. Barbecue is the ultimate fast food because it's been cooked for hours and is sitting ready for the diner when ordered. This was great on the roadtrip because we could not leave the dog for too long in the car in the hot weather.

That night in Sevierville, we went to Tony Gore's barbecue and it again was all right, though we were beginning to worry that we would be eating too much barbecue. A break then in Nashville, when we ate at non-barbecue places.

The best pulled pork we had was at B.E. Scott's in Lexington, Tennessee, a short detour off I-40 (not in Roadfood) between Nashville and Memphis. I had read about it in Leite's Culinaria blog, where he described spending a couple of days there learning how to smoke whole hogs. The pulled pork was fabulously tender, moist, tasting of pork and only slightly of smoke. It was served without sauce and you could add whatever you liked.

In Memphis, we followed a hotel staffer's advice to go to Central BBQ (again not in Roadfood) and had some excellent Memphis-style ribs. Succulent, falling off the bone tender. I ordered a half slab half and half dry and wet and probably could have eaten a whole slab.

The best barbecue of the trip, though, came in Kansas City at Jack Stack's, my old favorite just south of the city off I-495. I'd often gone there when my mother was at the nursing home just up the street and it was as good as I remembered it. We got burnt ends, pork and beef, and the beef stole the show. On our last roadtrip in 2008, I'd had the wonderful crown rib roast at Jack Stack's in Overland Park. This wasn't available at lunch and would have been too much to handle in any case. Jack Stack's is not in Roadfood, though they list other barbecue places in the immediate area.

Last barbecue stop was in Owensboro, Kentucky, where we went to Old Hickory for the barbecued mutton and burgoo typical of the region. We went here instead of George's, which is listed in Roadfood, on the advice of locals, but perhaps George's was better, because the mutton was dry and not very tasty. The burgoo was fine, but nothing special really.

Fortunately, there are always other possibilities, like the locavore places springing up everywhere, or the nice steak I had in Lexington, Kentucky with my bourbon flight. When all is said and done, Rocklands here in town puts out a perfectly good barbecue, and I'm sure the pit beef we saw in Maryland outside of Baltimore was very tasty, too. It's not rocket science and fairly useless to discuss just who has the absolutely best barbecue.

Batali grills

Pork tenderloin is one of my favorite meats to grill and this easy recipe from Mario Batali's Italian Grill appealed to me because he serves it with vegetables tossed in a Negroni vinaigrette.

If Batali knew his cocktail history better he would have called it an Americano vinaigrette, because he uses only the vermouth and campari (along with orange juice and red wine vinegar) and leaves out the gin. Also, the recipe calls for Jerusalem artichokes, which are only available in the winter, hardly the prime time for grilling. Rather than taking a chance on substitutes (jicama roots did not seem very promising), I just tossed the other vegetable in the recipe, haricots beans, in the vinaigrette.

What stole the show, though, was the rub for the tenderloin. The secret ingredient was "porcini powder," which you can make by grinding dried porcini in a spice grinder. This is combined with brown sugar, crushed red pepper flakes and ground fennel seed in a dry rub that you put on the pork 12 to 24 hours before grilling. The rub chars quickly and gives the meat a nice crust and a wonderful flavor. Batali never salts or peppers the meat, but I found it needed both when served.

The Negroni vinaigrette was great on the beans -- helped no doubt by the addition of sautéed pancetta in the final phase. In lieu of the missing Jerusalem artichokes, we served separately prepared green lentils, cooked classically with a mirepoix and more pancetta. For hors d'oeuvres we had melon wrapped in prosciutto -- a cliché, but an acceptable one at the peak of melon season -- and for dessert the wonderful cornmeal pound cake along with strawberries macerated in that ripe peach balsamic vinegar and a sabayon made with Grand Marnier instead of Marsala.

The main course was paired with the very nice Philippe Cambie La Deveze Cotes du Rhone 2007 that I got from Wine Til Sold Out and all in all it was a delightful meal. I bought the book earlier in the summer after the son of a friend asked me if I knew a grill cookbook he could give my friend for father's day that also discussed wine pairings. My googling came up with the Batali book and it looked so interesting I got a copy for myself. Will use it again!

Roadtrip: Locavore

The first meal on our roadtrip out to Wichita and back was at the delightful Staunton Grocery just before getting on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Staunton is a charming little town with, it turns out, a Shakespeare theater.

The restaurant has an open kitchen and we sat at the bar where Chef Ian Boden happened to be prepping dinner as we ordered from the brunch/lunch menu. Boden worked at New York restaurants for a decade before returning to Virginia about five years ago when his parents retired to Staunton. He has built his restaurant on connections to local producers, who are listed on his menu on the Web site. It alerted us to a phenomenon we saw throughout our trip -- the locavore movement has made great inroads on America's eating habits.

The "pre-fixe" brunch menu (hope he's kidding) was a bargain at $15. I started with Surryano Ham, a pun on Serrano for a cured ham made locally. It was out of this world, sliced fresh and wafer thin with that creamy, melt in your mouth salty flavor of great ham and served with baguette, mustard and cornichons. It stole the show and was the best advertisement for local sourcing you could ask for.

We also got the fried chicken, which Boden said came from a local producer who fed her chicks goat's milk. The breast, small like God intended for chickens to have, was moist, ever so flavorful and perfectly sealed in a batter fried just right. My main course, Boden's take on "hon poss," was less to my liking, partly because I misunderstood what the menu meant when it explained that it included a "confit" of pork and guineau fowl -- me thinking of the French confit, as in confit d'oie or confit de canard, a bird cooked and preserved in its own fat. Instead, this was ground meat that was spiced somewhat oddly and needed to be served much hotter than what I got.

That said, we loved the place and can't wait to go back. Boden and his sous chef filleted whole salmon and halibut while we sat, ate and chatted with him. He is clearly passionate about food and about what he's doing with his restaurant. He pointed out the charms of Staunton -- the theater, antique stores, B&Bs -- and suggested coming back for a weekend and eating dinner at the restaurant. Happy to do it first chance we get.

Probably the best meal we had on the trip was at the Capitol Grille in the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville (pictured above). The restaurant, as the staff repeated mantra-like, is not related to the chain and is the city's top-rated restaurant. The Hermitage is a fabulous hotel and was voted the country's No. 1 pet-friendly hotel the very week we arrived with our dog, Ziggy.

Chef Tyler Brown also cultivates local producers and, as our waiter explained, much of the produce is grown at a farm outside Nashville operated by the restaurant under pre-modern conditions -- no artificial fertlizer, etc. The summer salad with sassafras vinaigrette was bursting with flavor; you could feel the energy of the sun still in the fresh lettuce and vegetables, no doubt enhanced by the mysterious properties of sassafras.

For main courses we had the smoked Berkshire pork chop with fried grits, Swiss chard and local peach jam -- very nice, though the portion was small -- and braised Painted Hills beef short ribs -- a good portion and very tasty. The wine by the glass choices were great -- we started out with a Chandon Classic Brut from Napa Valley and moved on to an Erath Pinot Noir from Oregon with the short ribs and an Artessa Merlot from Sonoma with the pork. The short dessert menu held little appeal.

Locavore of course doesn not guarantee a good meal. In fact, a sure sign that the farm-to-table movement has really arrived is the abuse by pretentious restaurants that use it as an excuse to overprice their offerings. This was the case with Annie Gunn's in Chesterfield, Mo., a St. Louis suburb where we stayed overnight on the return trip. In fact, a Tripadvisor comment described it as "overpriced and pretentious" but we went anyway because it was the only non-chain restaurant in the vicinity. We should have listened. We weren't too venturesome, but it was noticeable that the "locally grown" tomato served with minuscule dabs of burrata was almost completely tasteless.