Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [0]
Title Page
Acknowledgments
Introduction to Roadfood 2008
Notes about Using This Book
New England
Connecticut
Maine
Massachusetts
New Hampshire
Rhode Island
Vermont
Mid-Atlantic
Delaware
District of Columbia
Maryland
New Jersey
New York
Pennsylvania
Mid-South
Kentucky
North Carolina
Tennessee
Virginia
West Virginia
Deep South
Alabama
Arkansas
Florida
Georgia
Louisiana
Mississippi
South Carolina
Midwest
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Michigan
Minnesota
Missouri
Ohio
Wisconsin
Great Plains
Idaho
Montana
Nebraska
South Dakota
Wyoming
Southwest
Arizona
Colorado
Kansas
Nevada
New Mexico
Oklahoma
Texas
Utah
West Coast
California
Oregon
Washington
About the Authors
Take a Delicious Tour in Recipes Through Every State in Chili Nation
Also by Jane and Michael Stern
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Roadfood is the story of our two appetites. We ate everything in this book and wrote all the reviews. But when we travel, we are never alone. Alongside us in the car, at the diner counter, or in the hash house booth are Gourmet magazine’s Ruth Reichl, James Rodewald, John “Doc” Willoughby, and Larry Karol. When we size up a place, we do so with the inspiration of our comrades at Roadfood.com—Steve Rushmore and Stephen Rushmore, Jr., Kristin Little, Marc Bruno, Cindy Keuchle, and Bruce Bilmes and Sue Boyle. And whenever we converse with a cook, waiter, customer, butcher, baker, or farmer, we think of our friends at public radio’s The Splendid Table—Sally Swift, Lynne Rosetto Kasper, and Jen Russell.
Our editor, Jennifer Josephy, along with Kristen Green and Stephanie Bowen, has graciously shepherded this book through from manuscript to completion, and our literary agent, Doe Coover, enables us to spend the vast majority of our time eating and writing rather than worrying about the intricacies of publishing.
Finally, it is crucial that we acknowledge the fact that these pages would be blank if it weren’t for all the thousands of good people who keep Roadfood restaurants thriving across the country: cooks and proprietors and customers, too, who make traveling as much about meeting great people as eating good meals. It has been a joy of our lives to spend some time with these people all around the country. To do justice to their achievements has been a guiding principle all along.
Introduction to Roadfood 2008
It is torture writing a new edition of Roadfood with over 175 restaurants that weren’t in the last one. Because we need this book to be wieldy, we had to cut out nearly that many old favorites. If a place included in a previous edition of Roadfood is not here, you should not assume we no longer like it. Yes, it may have gone out of business or hit the skids and thus deserved its excision; but it may have been removed only to make space for new discoveries that we believe merit your attention.
Foremost among criteria for inclusion in Roadfood is that a place be memorable, offering the kind of eating experience that we travelers hold dear as the highlight of a trip. We especially seek out restaurants that sing of their region and community and serve a meal that is part of locals’ sense of self and of place. There may be a fantastic Cajun restaurant in Sioux City, but it is our belief that the experience of eating gumbo in the bayous, elbow to elbow with the people who live there, listening to their music and hearing their unique way of talking, cannot be tasted in full measure anywhere else.
Roadfood is edible folk art; the cooks, pitmasters, pancake makers, and hot dog vendors who create it are not celebrity chefs. We’ve met amazingly few bloated egos in our travels around the country in search of those good folks who, whether they know it or not, are carrying on a precious cultural heritage. Like folk art, Roadfood isn’t the work of a single creative genius or television personality; it grows out of tradition and out of the brilliantly spiced ethnic, global, regional, and religious diversity that makes this nation such an eater’s adventure.