Shad roe

During the shad’s annual run up the James River, Richmond, Virginia residents have historically indulged in shad roe the way many of us celebrate the return of asparagus. One longtime resident told me she used to eat the roe sacs wrapped in wax paper seasoned only with a little butter. The shad population, indescribably dense in colonial times, has suffered the way most fish species have in our polluted, over-developed waterways, and smaller runs have been the norm for ages. Indeed, several people I asked in Richmond had no idea of the shad run, while one said, “I know someone who’ll know." One phone call uncovered a supplier of them and I quickly found a restaurant serving them.

 Edo’s Squid, a nice little restaurant off Broad Street in Richmond, posts its Italian-derived menu on just two sheets of paper hung on the exposed brick wall: choices today included skate wing, shad roe, quail, fried squid and several pasta dishes. The restaurant occupies the second floor of an old brick building and the lunchtime ambience was sunny and comfortable.
Shad roe are about the size of flying fish roe, perhaps a little bigger. The lobes are taken from the females and the two lobes weigh about three ounces apiece. The eggs are kept together in the sac, a thin membrane with several veins running along the bottom side of the sac. They’re usually served together as a main course or a single lobe for an appetizer.

Deep-fried bread, a lobe gently poached and sautéed, melted mozzarella cheese with a caper sauce on top, and a flourish a fresh, sweet and tart greens dancing on the other side of the plate, a green springiness to delight the shad’s return. The roe was cooked through, and I wonder if the quality of shad roe is high enough to eat raw; no one I spoke with had eaten it raw. The roe had a nutty, slightly salty taste, a pleasing texture up against the fried bread and mozzarella. The caper sauce was beautiful, and the capers themselves were the smallest I’ve seen – BB-sized, perhaps scaled to match the mass of eggs underneath my fork.

Earlier in the month I ate avgotaraho – cured and preserved roe from the grey mullet – a Greek specialty, and today I ate shad roe. I live in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, and I wonder if anyone eats the eggs of any of our local fish. Does anyone out there have any experience with the freshwater roe of our local fish? Are there any laws covering the harvesting of fish roe in Minnesota? Let me know if you have any experience with roe in Minnesota.

The Loveless Cafe

On a dark highway on the far edge of Nashville’s influence, next to a gas station, sits the Loveless Café. Its old neon sign reminds us of the days when travel lacked the chain store monotony of today’s restaurants and lodging. People used to cook and serve food to people. No promotions from corporate headquarters and no market-research-tested food – just food. A sign on the door said they were closing at 6:15 for a staff party and when I looked at the clock just inside the door it was almost 630. The hostess looked up at the clock – just tilted her head a bit – looked at me, shrugged her shoulders and said “Just one?” She sat me at a square table in a corner, out of the way of the few remaining tables with customers, giving the bus staff and others space to clean up and be done.
There’s no need to gush over the food, but it’s necessary to commend the restaurant for continuing to serve traditional, unadorned southern food, almost untouched by the recent decades of bad food offered up by chain restaurants. I don’t know if it’s the burden of health department regulations or the staggering cost of insurance, but it seems difficult to open up a restaurant that serves good, plain, inexpensive good. The entrepreneurial spirit has been largely squelched by the fear of litigation, the threat of a food-borne illness, and the prohibitive cost of addressing those two concerns. One of the things I love about traveling to Asia is seeing the vigorous entrepreneurial spirit surrounding food. If someone wants to open a noodle shop in Vietnam, they do it. Put out a few low, plastic chairs and hang a sign. It was a lot easier to do that in the USA fifty years ago, and the Loveless Café is an enduring legacy of one’s ability to “serve food to travelers.” Maybe it’s easier for an enterprising young couple to take jobs managing a chain restaurant these days. How many banks are will to loan money to a restaurant that plans on serving fried chicken and good biscuits? And will private equity put its money into a place selling baked ham for $9.95?
Macaroni and cheese, green beans, creamed corn, hush puppies, sweet potatoes, cole slaw, baked beans, stewed tomatoes – these are the sides of old that ensured a diner would leave a meal full and content. And biscuits, good, plain biscuits. And when I ate my biscuits with gusto, spreading thick preserves and sorghum molasses on them, the waitress brought a few more. The biscuits were small, hot, and light, less flaky and a little more billowy than a hand-rolled one I’d make, and they were fresh and good. The fried chicken dinner (choice between light or dark meat – I chose dark) was hot, crispy, and juicy on the inside. Good fried chicken doesn’t taste greasy – it’s a delicate combination of texture and taste, held together by the coating on the chicken. Dinner came with two sides – the fried okra was hot, crisp on the outside, and fresh with a light batter coating, fried in oil, and heaped in a small bowl. The sweet potatoes were okay, but not as good as my lunchtime serving earlier in the day at Vanderbilt’s University Club, where the brown sugar, butter and salt were in such perfect proportion that I had to go back for seconds. The pie selection was broad, but I settled on blackberry cobbler. Southern desserts are a bit sweet for me, but this delicious blackberry cobbler was balanced with a depth of flavor that seemed to be a combination of orange zest and ground clove. Served in a ramekin with a shortcake topping, the cobbler was stained and thick with whole fruit, sweet to a point that nearly sent me into a sugar coma, but the small scoop of vanilla ice cream luckily prevented that!
I ate quicker than I normally would when dining alone, knowing that when the last few tables cleared out the restaurant staff would begin their holiday party. I left the restaurant in a good mood, content after a nice Southern dinner. The old neon sign still shined in the night, beckoning travelers to stop and refresh themselves with old fashioned food and hospitality.

Chambers Kitchen

Except for an apocalyptic meltdown in an Indian restaurant in Iowa City when our firstborn was an infant, our three kids are excellent dining companions. We’ve been eating out since they were born, and now, with all of them in elementary school, we go everywhere with them. We eat a lot of phở in the Twin Cities, but we also try other places. Last winter (which just ended!) my wife and I went to Chambers Kitchen in downtown Minneapolis, and but for the ice bar in the center courtyard, where ice cubes weren’t needed, we didn’t know we were in Minnesota. We shared an excellent meal and, in the chic setting, had to be reminded that middle-aged parenting excludes us from the beautiful crowd.

Still, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s place is pretty swell, and it took my wife a little time to convince me that we wanted to go there after a full day in the garden, landscaping and doing early summer house chores. But, after a shower and a change into cleaner shorts, we headed up. Thankfully she convinced me – this meal was better than the first!

With kids, we typically dine at restaurants on the early side, when the crowds are thin and the kids aren’t ravenously hungry. That’s part of dining out with kids – knowing their needs and not expecting miracles – like expecting them to eat three hours later than usual.

We settled into the downstairs restaurant with its oh-so-soft leather seats; I sat for half the meal with my arm draped on the top of the seat so I could feel the leather against my skin. From the light, gallery-whiteness of the upstairs lobby and bar, the restaurant is cool, mod and post-industrial.

What we liked best is hard to say. Go there and eat the food yourself because words aren’t very filling, and rarely do they have much taste. If I could eat words that tasted like food I’d write about the slow cooked, sashimi-grade salmon with maitake mushrooms because the pages would flake like softened or melted shale and you might be in awe of the translucent red and pink of the fish flesh which swam some short time ago in waters still possibly clean, cold, and well oxygenated. Why shale? Like salmon, it’s of the earth with its own identity, and you might think shale is hard and brittle the way some people think salmon is a piece of well done crumbly flesh that tastes vaguely like fish. In this dining experience, though, the words of the fish were flesh and our forks pulled at the pieces, paying homage but savage still. We ate with restraint, tasting slowly, letting the chef’s own vision and order of things arrange our mouths and senses in a new way.

The grouper played with a Mediterranean style and Asian ingredients. The floral notes of coriander balanced a light cayenne pepper coating, and together with the napa cabbage – almost kim chee-like, cucumber and red onion, it was a summer-fresh presentation. The kids also loved the thick Berkshire pork chop sitting on a bed of crisp, juicy tender, plant-based yummy vegetables that kids love. An awesome blueberry soufflé with fresh fresh bright grapefruit and a wee bit of ice cream/mascarpone-like white cheese delight and we were really set.

What do good restaurants do? They remind of, sometimes jolt us, into recognizing the contradictions between our mammalian need for food and our ordered and structured cultural traditions that put food into a framework. The restaurants I enjoy feed me by giving me history, poetry and politics along with my meat and three. It’s easy to be dismissive and critical of restaurants that try to be great restaurants, and we sometimes get mixed up between pretentiousness and creativity. Memorable meals, like this one, give a chef the opportunity to tell a story with food, to weave together cultures and traditions, nourishing us, bringing us together - to celebrate, to eat, to remember.