Hump Day Story #14 - The Greatest Meal of My Entire Life
I hope everyone enjoys this one. At the end of the essay you'll see why I thought it was important to post this one today. As always, to get stories emailed to you each week, just let me know at humpdaystories@gmail.com
The Best Meal of My Entire Life
I have never smoked a cigarette. I haven’t had a drink since 2002. And drugs have never really been my thing. The only real vice I have left is food.
Point me in the direction of a good deep fried hot dog and I will drive two hours to get it. When I go on vacation, I usually know the places I want to eat, off of the top of my head, before I ever reach my destination, just from my time spent sitting on the internet reading about sandwiches and barbeque online. When my girlfriend and I first started dating, she considered breaking up with me because one of our first dates was to track down a food cart that I heard sold really good arepas underneath the 7 train tracks in a very shady section of Queens, only on weekends after midnight. Food is a pretty all-consuming passion for me. The worse for me, nutritionally speaking, the better.
People who know me and know my eating habits often ask what the best food I’ve ever had is. The answer to this question is not an easy one. I have been far and wide in this nation of ours, and have tasted many fried meats. But the best, I know in my heart, was eaten on a dusty back road in Houston in 2004. I still think about this meal at least once a week, and usually once a day.
I lived in Los Angeles for a few months at the beginning of 2004. Early in my stay there, I knew I would be returning to the east coast. Los Angeles is a fine enough place, but has to be one of the most isolating cities in America. You have to drive everywhere, so being social involves looking for parking endlessly. So even when you do hang out, everyone’s grumpy by the time they get there. It’s a city of dinner parties and board games. I like the northeast, which is a region of rude people who are around each other a lot more and weather that varies sometimes.
When it was time to leave California, I decided to go out in epic style – with a cross-country road trip that largely revolved around finding the best food items in America. My buddy Nick flew out and met me. I wrapped up at my job while he got some work done with a contact of his in LA, and when we were both done, we got in the car and set off. We had done the research, online and through books, and had come up with a directory of places that we needed to stop.
Many places still stand out in my mind – eating mufalettas and po’ boys in New Orleans for the first time was great. But in New Orleans, I mostly remember Nick getting drunk at a karaoke bar, threatening the bride-to-be at a bachelorette party, and trying to assault a man dressed as a grenade. If sandwiches can’t outshine that, then they are not the best meal I’ve ever had. The deep fried pork chop at Threadgill’s in Austin was a highlight, but the hotel we stayed in, and the chaos of Sixth Street are the predominant memories of that city. We ate at some highly recommended cafeteria style restaurant in Albuquerque, but the food was pretty bad. All I remember from that place was that the table across from us was occupied by a creepy elderly white couple who had two young black children with them, which isn’t weird except that the black children were, for some reason I still can not figure out, wearing blindfolds throughout the entire meal.
The best stop during this trip was for barbeque. In Houston. The Williams Smoke House, to be exact.
The Williams Smoke House was not a place we originally intended to stop. Our sole intention in Texas was to get to Austin as fast as possible. But, it’s not feasible to get through Texas without having to stop for things like the bathroom, and food. So as we were on the highway cutting through Houston, Nick and I both verbalized that we had no desire to stop in Houston, but we were both starving. We flipped through our guidebooks and found a blurb that said some good BBQ was to be found at the Williams Smoke House.
We grabbed the map and found the neighborhood the restaurant was in, as well as the small road it sat upon. We navigated our way through Houston, and realized that we were heading into a small, quiet outskirt of town. It was clear we were entering an outlying black neighborhood. Neither Nick or I are racist people, and both were raised in the liberal northeast. But Nick was wearing his Mets hat, my car had Jersey plates, and we were in Texas, scariest of all states, so being in a place where there were so many factors marking us outsiders definitely made us uneasy. As we got closer and closer to our destination, the roads got worse, the potholes more frequent. Plants were overgrown in some places from the roadside onto the asphalt, and sand spilled over curbs and across the street. The houses were set back a little bit into the woods. It was an intimidating place.
As we rounded a bend, we saw it. What looked to be a normal house had the words “Williams Smoke House” written on the side. We had gone this far. We pulled into the parking lot – the only car – got out, and went inside.
As we entered, the smell of smoking meat hit us in the face. And it smelled good. There was a counter to order. A bored looking black lady stood behind it.
“Ya’ll know what you want?” she asked immediately.
“Umm… I’m not sure, just one minute please,” I answered. She sighed in my face and walked away, annoyed. Nick and I both decided on the ribs. We also decided to take a chance and split something called a “link potato.” When the lady wandered past again, I made eye contact and gave her our order. She told us to go sit down.
She was kind of rude. But that, to me, is a sign that you’re about to have a good meal, universally. When you’re in a BBQ shack, or a hot dog joint, or a little burger place, and someone is an asshole to you, it’s because they know that their food is good enough that they can still stay in business despite it. It’s a universal rule that I have found to be true in every mom and pop restaurant I’ve ever patronized. If they’re nice, it doesn’t mean the food is bad, but if they’re an asshole, it means the food is almost definitely good.
We went into the dining room, which was just a few outdoor style wooden tables with cheap tablecloths, and plastic chairs. The decorations were bare bones. It looked like the type of place where everyone was ready to close down and hightail it out of there, permanently, on thirty seconds notice. Nick and I sat, the lady leaning over the counter and watching us, in uncomfortable silence.
After about three minutes of that, Nick got up to use the bathroom. So I was in there alone. The food came out. The lady came out with paper plates and dropped them down in front of me without a word.
The link potato was a huge baked potato stuffed with cheese and ground up sausage links. This is, in my mind, the greatest description of ingredients a food can have. That is a literal combination of my three favorite ingredients that can make anything taste better – potatoes, cheese, pork.
But even more impressive were the ribs. Ribs are one of the trickiest foods. When they’re good, they’re good like manna sent from heaven. But if there’s anything even slightly wrong with them, it’s like eating garbage picked from a dumpster on a hot summer’s day. They can have too much sauce, too little sauce, they can be too stringy, too mushy off the bone, too tough on the outside, and a million other things.
These ribs were clearly none of those things. Looking at them, I knew, they were perfect. The outside had spices and sauce in the perfect combination, and looked crispy but not tough. The ends showed a hint of the moist, tender meat inside. The amount of meat on the bone was sizable, but not unmanageable. These ribs were basically to meat what the third season of the Wire was to television – the pinnacle of all it could be – and they were sitting on a plate in front of me.
I couldn’t even wait for Nick. I knew I should share this experience with him, but even as I was thinking that, I was involuntarily reaching for one, like Gollum for the ring, or a desperate junkie for a dealer’s hard cock. I lifted it up, trembling, watching the dim fluorescent light reflect and actually turn brighter somehow in the sauce. I held it a few inches from my face and inhaled, and the flavor filled my nostrils. It was so intense that I bit into the rib, not even realizing what I was doing.
I swear to God, it was so good that I dropped it and stared at it. My eyes were wide. I was looking at the rib like I just watched it punch my mother in the face, like I was angry at it for what it had done to me. In a sense, I was, but only because I equate pleasure with anger due to my damaged childhood. The bite of meat was already starting to melt in my mouth, the sauce mixing with fat and salt. Simply put, it was the most perfect bite of food I’ve ever taken.
And to make things even better, it was only at that moment that I noticed that a jukebox had been playing the entire time. And just as I realized how perfect that bite of food was, the chorus of the song playing kicked in –
“Take my breath awaaay,” the jukebox sang. The words of the band Berlin were never truer than in that moment.
I knew that there would never be a bite as good as the first bite. It was in that moment that I understood what “chasing the high” meant. I’d always heard that heroin users always wanted each experience with the drug to be as good as their first time, but could never get there. Those ribs would be the pale horse I would chase, food-wise, for the rest of my life. They set the bar then, and nothing has topped them since.
Nick came out. I didn’t say anything. He bit into his rib, dropped it, and yelled “Oh my God!” We both devoured our helpings, devoured the link potato, and sat back in the sort of content you can only achieve after you have eaten way too much meat.
We got up and paid our bill. We promptly tipped our waitress with a twenty dollar bill, well over a 100% tip. We aren’t high rollers by any means, and she had been nothing but rude the entire time we were there, but she deserved it.
Just last night, I saw Nick online. Within two minutes, we were talking about the Williams Smoke House. We are contemplating driving from New York to Houston, eating ribs, and driving straight back. It will never be as good as the first time, but I simply can’t live in a world where I will never taste those ribs again. I just can’t.
ADDENDUM:
Apparently, I have to. Four months after writing this essay (last night for you Hump Day Stories readers), I went online and checked the food message boards only to find that the Williams Smoke House burned down in December of 2007.
This is basically the equivalent of The Princess Bride, if, when Wesley found the Princess and freed her from the evil Prince, after he has spent his whole life climbing mountains, climbing ropes, and fighting Andre the Giant, just as he was finally able to take his one true love into his arms again, she had a fucking aneurysm and dropped dead in his arms.
That’s exactly what it’s like.
The Best Meal of My Entire Life
I have never smoked a cigarette. I haven’t had a drink since 2002. And drugs have never really been my thing. The only real vice I have left is food.
Point me in the direction of a good deep fried hot dog and I will drive two hours to get it. When I go on vacation, I usually know the places I want to eat, off of the top of my head, before I ever reach my destination, just from my time spent sitting on the internet reading about sandwiches and barbeque online. When my girlfriend and I first started dating, she considered breaking up with me because one of our first dates was to track down a food cart that I heard sold really good arepas underneath the 7 train tracks in a very shady section of Queens, only on weekends after midnight. Food is a pretty all-consuming passion for me. The worse for me, nutritionally speaking, the better.
People who know me and know my eating habits often ask what the best food I’ve ever had is. The answer to this question is not an easy one. I have been far and wide in this nation of ours, and have tasted many fried meats. But the best, I know in my heart, was eaten on a dusty back road in Houston in 2004. I still think about this meal at least once a week, and usually once a day.
I lived in Los Angeles for a few months at the beginning of 2004. Early in my stay there, I knew I would be returning to the east coast. Los Angeles is a fine enough place, but has to be one of the most isolating cities in America. You have to drive everywhere, so being social involves looking for parking endlessly. So even when you do hang out, everyone’s grumpy by the time they get there. It’s a city of dinner parties and board games. I like the northeast, which is a region of rude people who are around each other a lot more and weather that varies sometimes.
When it was time to leave California, I decided to go out in epic style – with a cross-country road trip that largely revolved around finding the best food items in America. My buddy Nick flew out and met me. I wrapped up at my job while he got some work done with a contact of his in LA, and when we were both done, we got in the car and set off. We had done the research, online and through books, and had come up with a directory of places that we needed to stop.
Many places still stand out in my mind – eating mufalettas and po’ boys in New Orleans for the first time was great. But in New Orleans, I mostly remember Nick getting drunk at a karaoke bar, threatening the bride-to-be at a bachelorette party, and trying to assault a man dressed as a grenade. If sandwiches can’t outshine that, then they are not the best meal I’ve ever had. The deep fried pork chop at Threadgill’s in Austin was a highlight, but the hotel we stayed in, and the chaos of Sixth Street are the predominant memories of that city. We ate at some highly recommended cafeteria style restaurant in Albuquerque, but the food was pretty bad. All I remember from that place was that the table across from us was occupied by a creepy elderly white couple who had two young black children with them, which isn’t weird except that the black children were, for some reason I still can not figure out, wearing blindfolds throughout the entire meal.
The best stop during this trip was for barbeque. In Houston. The Williams Smoke House, to be exact.
The Williams Smoke House was not a place we originally intended to stop. Our sole intention in Texas was to get to Austin as fast as possible. But, it’s not feasible to get through Texas without having to stop for things like the bathroom, and food. So as we were on the highway cutting through Houston, Nick and I both verbalized that we had no desire to stop in Houston, but we were both starving. We flipped through our guidebooks and found a blurb that said some good BBQ was to be found at the Williams Smoke House.
We grabbed the map and found the neighborhood the restaurant was in, as well as the small road it sat upon. We navigated our way through Houston, and realized that we were heading into a small, quiet outskirt of town. It was clear we were entering an outlying black neighborhood. Neither Nick or I are racist people, and both were raised in the liberal northeast. But Nick was wearing his Mets hat, my car had Jersey plates, and we were in Texas, scariest of all states, so being in a place where there were so many factors marking us outsiders definitely made us uneasy. As we got closer and closer to our destination, the roads got worse, the potholes more frequent. Plants were overgrown in some places from the roadside onto the asphalt, and sand spilled over curbs and across the street. The houses were set back a little bit into the woods. It was an intimidating place.
As we rounded a bend, we saw it. What looked to be a normal house had the words “Williams Smoke House” written on the side. We had gone this far. We pulled into the parking lot – the only car – got out, and went inside.
As we entered, the smell of smoking meat hit us in the face. And it smelled good. There was a counter to order. A bored looking black lady stood behind it.
“Ya’ll know what you want?” she asked immediately.
“Umm… I’m not sure, just one minute please,” I answered. She sighed in my face and walked away, annoyed. Nick and I both decided on the ribs. We also decided to take a chance and split something called a “link potato.” When the lady wandered past again, I made eye contact and gave her our order. She told us to go sit down.
She was kind of rude. But that, to me, is a sign that you’re about to have a good meal, universally. When you’re in a BBQ shack, or a hot dog joint, or a little burger place, and someone is an asshole to you, it’s because they know that their food is good enough that they can still stay in business despite it. It’s a universal rule that I have found to be true in every mom and pop restaurant I’ve ever patronized. If they’re nice, it doesn’t mean the food is bad, but if they’re an asshole, it means the food is almost definitely good.
We went into the dining room, which was just a few outdoor style wooden tables with cheap tablecloths, and plastic chairs. The decorations were bare bones. It looked like the type of place where everyone was ready to close down and hightail it out of there, permanently, on thirty seconds notice. Nick and I sat, the lady leaning over the counter and watching us, in uncomfortable silence.
After about three minutes of that, Nick got up to use the bathroom. So I was in there alone. The food came out. The lady came out with paper plates and dropped them down in front of me without a word.
The link potato was a huge baked potato stuffed with cheese and ground up sausage links. This is, in my mind, the greatest description of ingredients a food can have. That is a literal combination of my three favorite ingredients that can make anything taste better – potatoes, cheese, pork.
But even more impressive were the ribs. Ribs are one of the trickiest foods. When they’re good, they’re good like manna sent from heaven. But if there’s anything even slightly wrong with them, it’s like eating garbage picked from a dumpster on a hot summer’s day. They can have too much sauce, too little sauce, they can be too stringy, too mushy off the bone, too tough on the outside, and a million other things.
These ribs were clearly none of those things. Looking at them, I knew, they were perfect. The outside had spices and sauce in the perfect combination, and looked crispy but not tough. The ends showed a hint of the moist, tender meat inside. The amount of meat on the bone was sizable, but not unmanageable. These ribs were basically to meat what the third season of the Wire was to television – the pinnacle of all it could be – and they were sitting on a plate in front of me.
I couldn’t even wait for Nick. I knew I should share this experience with him, but even as I was thinking that, I was involuntarily reaching for one, like Gollum for the ring, or a desperate junkie for a dealer’s hard cock. I lifted it up, trembling, watching the dim fluorescent light reflect and actually turn brighter somehow in the sauce. I held it a few inches from my face and inhaled, and the flavor filled my nostrils. It was so intense that I bit into the rib, not even realizing what I was doing.
I swear to God, it was so good that I dropped it and stared at it. My eyes were wide. I was looking at the rib like I just watched it punch my mother in the face, like I was angry at it for what it had done to me. In a sense, I was, but only because I equate pleasure with anger due to my damaged childhood. The bite of meat was already starting to melt in my mouth, the sauce mixing with fat and salt. Simply put, it was the most perfect bite of food I’ve ever taken.
And to make things even better, it was only at that moment that I noticed that a jukebox had been playing the entire time. And just as I realized how perfect that bite of food was, the chorus of the song playing kicked in –
“Take my breath awaaay,” the jukebox sang. The words of the band Berlin were never truer than in that moment.
I knew that there would never be a bite as good as the first bite. It was in that moment that I understood what “chasing the high” meant. I’d always heard that heroin users always wanted each experience with the drug to be as good as their first time, but could never get there. Those ribs would be the pale horse I would chase, food-wise, for the rest of my life. They set the bar then, and nothing has topped them since.
Nick came out. I didn’t say anything. He bit into his rib, dropped it, and yelled “Oh my God!” We both devoured our helpings, devoured the link potato, and sat back in the sort of content you can only achieve after you have eaten way too much meat.
We got up and paid our bill. We promptly tipped our waitress with a twenty dollar bill, well over a 100% tip. We aren’t high rollers by any means, and she had been nothing but rude the entire time we were there, but she deserved it.
Just last night, I saw Nick online. Within two minutes, we were talking about the Williams Smoke House. We are contemplating driving from New York to Houston, eating ribs, and driving straight back. It will never be as good as the first time, but I simply can’t live in a world where I will never taste those ribs again. I just can’t.
ADDENDUM:
Apparently, I have to. Four months after writing this essay (last night for you Hump Day Stories readers), I went online and checked the food message boards only to find that the Williams Smoke House burned down in December of 2007.
This is basically the equivalent of The Princess Bride, if, when Wesley found the Princess and freed her from the evil Prince, after he has spent his whole life climbing mountains, climbing ropes, and fighting Andre the Giant, just as he was finally able to take his one true love into his arms again, she had a fucking aneurysm and dropped dead in his arms.
That’s exactly what it’s like.
posted by Geth at 2:24 AM
3 Comments:
is it better to have loved and lost?
Had you not stopped in Houston, what would this essay have been about?
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! this is too awful. i grew up in austin and have had some of the best bbq that there is in the world for sure. you and my dad should go on a tour through southeast texas and he will rip your tast buds a new one.
Haha you make Houston sound much scarier than it is. Though you got the barbecue description just right.
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