Two for the Road: Our Love Affair With American Food - Hardcover

1 Two for the Road

Our first date was over a white clam pizza at Pepe’s Pizzeria on Wooster Square in New Haven, Connecticut, and it was instantly apparent as we gazed into each other’s eyes across the thin-crusted Neapolitan pie, speckled with tiny, tender clams and frosted with olive oil, that we shared a passion for garlic. Our initial lust for each other was fueled by an orgy of lobster rolls, split hot dogs, Yankee Doodle Double Dandy Doodle Burger cheeseburgers, calzones, and cannolis.
Michael had won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at Yale, where we had both gone to study art, so we had plenty of money to spend exploring restaurants up and down the Yankee shore. Compared to the average grad student, he was a high roller with a monthly stipend to squander. He also possessed what was, to Jane’s New York City sensibility, an amazing status symbol: a car. At twenty-one, Jane had not yet learned how to drive. The car was our ticket to romance and to eating adventures.
The fellowship money was diverted from expensive textbooks and art museum field trips to fund a comparative study of the differences among pizzas as made by Pepe’s, Sally’s, and the Spot in the old Italian neighborhood, as well as the Greek-style pizzas at Pizza House, which was less than fifty yards from our apartment. If pizza was our major interest,we minored in fried dough at summertime fairs, clams and chowder and lobsters all along the coast, and Yorkshire pudding at Mory’s, the Yalie dining club, where it was still possible to have a completely gelatinized meal, from aspic to Jell-O. Nearly every day, Michael had a choice to face: a seminar in medieval imagery in a dank basement lecture room in New Haven or a trip to the Rhode Island beaches with Jane for a shore dinner and a hot fudge sundae on ginger ice cream? Our passion for each other, and for finding things to eat, won out every time.
We were married in 1970, and a year later we got our degrees, which meant that the fellowship-subsidized grad school eating bonanza was coming to an end. It was the worst of times and the best of times. We moved to a little shack in the woods of Guilford, Connecticut, where we didn’t even have a telephone. We were hiding out from life. Jane’s mother and father died of cancer within a year of each other. Her stepfather disinherited her. Her two favorite cousins died, and her aunt was institutionalized. In despair, Jane made the fifteen mile drive into New Haven three times a week to stare at the index cards in the Yale Employment Center. Michael spent his time cultivating and smoking cannabis. After tens of thousands of dollars were spent on our highfalutin educations, we realized we had little interest in pursuing what we had studied.
And so we did what generations of writers have done before us. We hit the road. The difference is that when we did so, we had no idea that we were to become writers. We just wanted to get away from everything.
We proposed a book about truck-stop dining to a young editor, who thought it was a cute idea and gave us the princely advance of $2,500.We thought we had won the lottery. But after signing the contract to write the book, we froze. Who were we to write about food, even truck-stop food? Where did we come off, telling people what was good to eat? Our shared mental image of a restaurant critic was gleaned from old movies: a patrician fellow with a silk ascot, his pinkie in the air and a sneer on his face. Somebody like Vincent Price but soured with indigestion. Restaurant critics were gourmets, and gourmets ate such grotesque things as creamed snails, sick-looking liver pâtés, cheeses that smelled like feet, and odd organs from inside unusual animals. In our mind’s eye, gourmet food was joke food, like what you might be forced to ingest during a fraternity hazing. We preferred hamburgers, mashed potatoes, and apple cobbler.
The notion that we had promised our publisher to write a coast-to- coast guidebook was overwhelming. We had pretty much not gone anywhere at all. We had no knowledge of exactly where these marvelous truck stops were, scant experience writing, and no money beyond the first half of our advance.
We sat together at the kitchen table of our $99-per-month cabin trying to figure out what to do. The one-room shack where we lived might seem romantic if you saw it in the movies, but in real life it was hideously uncomfortable. After living there for nearly a year, we discovered a case of decomposing dynamite in the crawlspace above the ceiling, left behind by a 1960s radical who was a former tenant. The gas stove was so old and decrepit that it once combusted and singed Jane’s eyebrows off as she checked on a roasting chicken. This home off ours was a good incentive for getting on the road.
We agreed on a plan: we would review every restaurant in America. This seemed nooooot the slightest bit of a stretch to us. Not having traveled much, we looked at the Rand McNally map spread out on the kitchen table and could plainly see that America was a manageable place, no more than a foot and a half in length, composed of pretty pastel-colored states balanced on one another like building blocks.
Strategy well in place, we launched into part two of the plan: buying a suitable car for the journey. Just as buying a new handbag has always been Jane’s favorite antidote for whatever ails her, buying a car is Michael’s solution to just about any problem. Even Sigmund Freud would blush at the patent sexual symbolism of both objects, but we were too young and dumb to notice or care.
At a nearby car dealership, we met a salesman whose necktie we remember to this day, more than a quarter century later. Somehow this guy had managed to knot it absolutely flat, so that its front apron cascaded directly from his collar with no lump whatsoever, sort of like a sheet of molten polyester. As we told the salesman our needs and he touted the glories of the new ’75 Chevy line, we paid far more attention to his neckwear than to vehicular statistics. When we finally stopped marveling at it and told him our budget, he became significantly less chummy, got up from his desk, and led us around to the back lot, where the less alluring and less expensive used vehicles were kept, out of sight of new-car shoppers. He pointed to a pre- owned Chevrolet Suburban. It was vomit green the barf of someone who lived on frozen peas. Several body panels had been painted in a shop that didn’t worry too much about matching the factory-original metallic color, so it had become a kind of rolling ode to all possible avocado hues, including even black (the hood). It was huge and it was ugly, something like a cross between a World War II tank and an over-the- hill Brady Bunch station wagon.
Jane grimaced at the sight of it. Michael tried to convince her that it had a rugged look, befitting the intrepid travelers we wanted to be. He lifted the hood and looked at the engine, pretending to know what he was inspecting. And just to show the salesman that we were no patsies when it came to purchasing a roadworthy vehicle, we both walked around and kicked all four tires. They didn’t pop on impact, but neither did any of them appear to have a lot of tread.
One thing the car had in its favor was vast amounts of room inside. To save money in our travels, we planned to camp out in it, forgoing motel rooms. I’ll sew curtains and we can hang them on the back windows for privacy,” Jane said optimistically, never having sewn anything in her life.
And it does have two air conditioners,” Michael noted. We won’t be hot!” By the time we wrote the check, we were convinced that this heap would be a rather deluxe residence on wheels for the next two years.
The following morning, on the way to the grocery store, the left rear tire blew. And that summer gas prices doubled. We faced the first big gas crisis in a vehicle that got approximately eight miles to the gallon.
Jane had plenty of time to sew curtains for the back windows, because five months into the research for Roadfood, we had not yet left Connecticut. In fact, we hadn’t even left New Haven County.
Yale had trained us to be meticulous in our research, and, ever the diligent academics, we commenced work on the guidebook by picking up the local Yellow Pages and opening to Restaurant.” We began with those starting with the letter A. We ate at the Acropolis Diner and made notes about the good souvlaki. We went to Addie’s Café, where we didn’t much care for the hash browns, then on to Angela’s Pizzeria, where we thought the pepperoni pie was better then the sausage, and Archie Moore’s tavern, where the beer inevitably distracted us from our mission of sampling the menu.
At the end of five months we had gotten to Donat’s, an overreaching French restaurant where rich professors ate, and had yet to travel more than twelve miles from home. We envisioned the millennia that stretched out before we began reviewing restaurants in, say, Kansas.
Something was wrong with our plan.
People will not take us seriously if we haven’t eaten everywhere,” moaned Jane, who, like so many writers, lives in constant fear that someone will discover she doesn’t know everything or anything at all.
Tough shit,” Michael responded. Jane thought he had a point.
We sat down at the kitchen table again, scrutinized the map, and came up with a new plan.
With a Magic Marker we drew a squiggly continuous line through forty-eight states. It would take a full two years and countless tanks of gas to travel this route, but at least we would finally get on the road. We would see all the pretty pastel states and eat in every one of them.
The new plan in place, we went shopping for supplies. We loaded the cavernous green Suburban with inflatable mattresses, sleeping bags, mosquito netting, snakebite kits, and everything else two urban Jews who had never slept anywhere but in a bed figured they would need to camp out.
No!” Michael railed as Jane insisted on buying tin plates, a small Coleman stove, and a stack of collapsible cutlery. We are going to be eating in a dozen restaurants every day,” he said. The last thing we’re going to want to do when we make camp is cook another meal.” Jane added a portable oxygen tank to the stash of material, because she was convinced that she would not be able to breathe in mountainous states like Colorado.
We were good to go. We spent a whole day packing the Suburban with supplies to take us across the country and through all seasons. The lumpy calico curtains Jane had sewn for the back-seat area made the car even uglier, if that was possible. We turned the skeleton key in the lock of our cabin door and drove away.
We sped west out of Connecticut over the Hudson River and into New Jersey. First stop: early lunch in a diner. Ahh yes, a New Jersey diner! What could be a more excellent start to our adventure? Sadly, the food was mediocre; the mashed potatoes were made from a powdered mix. When we asked the waitress what kind of pie there was, she answered, Red.” Sure enough, the slice we got was sweet translucent red mucilage without even a hint of fruit. We got off the Jersey Turnpike a few exits farther south and found a place called Nature’s Cupboard. It was a vegetarian restaurant run by Woodstock alumni, and it smelled more like Nature’s Locker Room. We didn’t bother to order, just turned around and headed south again. After three more unproductive stops at highway exit ramps, where we found rubbery chicken croquettes, a desiccated Philly cheese steak, and cardboard- crusted pizza, our enthusiasm was waning. By the time we got to Maryland, it was suppertime.
We decided to spend our first night on the road at a place called Jellystone Park, one of a national chain of campgrounds that feature a goofy image of Yogi Bear to welcome visitors. For a few bucks paid to a lady at the gatehouse, we were directed to a small plot of turf where we were told to park and set up.
The gatekeeper knew of no restaurants anywhere near the park, but she did direct us to a convenience store, where we bought readymade ham sandwiches on white bread, bags of potato chips, and cans of soda, which we ate sitting in the front seat of our car in the store parking lot. We drove to our spot at Jellystone Park to bed down for the night.
The place was filled with families in oversized motor homes with small cars attached to the back. Their immense recreational vehicles sprouted TV antennas and had golf carts and lawn chairs lashed to the roof. Many of them were plastered with decals proclaiming their owners’membership in the Good Sam club, meaning they were certifiably nice people good Samaritans who would pull alongside a wounded or disabled fellow traveler to offer help. On the backs of some of the big rolling homes, the owners had their names painted in florid script, generally using the errant apostrophe so common on mailboxes everywhere: The Smith’s: Bill and Edna.” The RV community took one look at our overgrown station wagon and turned their backs on us. They may have been Good Sams to one another, but we were clearly not in their league. We didn’t have a real motor home with a television and kitchen and wall-to-wall carpeting, and besides, the curtains Jane had stitched were flagrantly homemade. They hated us. We hated them.
Don’t you just know those stupid Winnebagos are going to be clogging every superhighway from here to California,” Michael groused, imagining us at the end of a long line of motor homes traveling at thirty miles an hour from coast to coast, staring for weeks at the ass end of The Smith’s: Bill and Edna.” It was at that moment that we vowed to travel only on back roads a spur-of-the-moment decision that determined the path for our eating career.
The RV camp-out was the longest night of our lives. We tossed and turned on the clammy rubber air mattresses. The Suburban, which had seemed so big when it was empty, came to feel as claustrophobic as a mummy’s sarcophagus. Despite the mosquito netting, which had a habit of getting tangled around our legs, we were soon swatting at bugs the size of velociraptors, and when we had to pee in the middle of the night, we were too afraid to make the trek to the Jellystone restrooms, lest a bear eat us. Despite all our snakebite kits and collapsible silverware, we had forgotten to take along a flashlight.
We left at dawn in despair and sold all the camping junk at the first pawnshop we saw. Back in our newly roomy car, we drove away from that first unpleasant night on the road with our culinary dreams dashed. We meandered south along back roads, finding nothing notable to eat. At twilight we were so tired that we pulled into the first roadside motel that didn’t look as if Norman Bates was the proprietor.
Entering our unit, as the motel-keeper referred to the room, we blinked in awe at the modernity of a television set and a tiled shower stall, feeling a little like Ishi, the Stone Age tribesman wandering out of the woods into civilization for the first time. We slept wonderfully, and when the sun rose in the morning, we were so happy not to be surrounded by huge, hostile motor homes, we even thought our Suburban looked rather sleek and handsome.
We pushed an eight-track Merle Haggard tape into the slot, and as Merle serenaded us with songs of workin’ men, we cruised in the direction of the nearest little town on the map, at least ten miles away from the interstate.
It was a pretty south Virginia hamlet of clapboard houses with broad front porches. The rising sun cast the long shadows of ancient oak trees across tidy front lawns. An old man wearing overalls sat on a wooden chair and waved at us as we drove by his porch. We passed children riding their bikes in what we assumed was the direction of the schoolyard. We were trave...