It should surprise no one that, committed as I am to the consumption of smoked animal fat, I found little time to actually write about the tour while I was on it. Those intersticial periods between barbecues were spent either in productive slumber, or recumbent on an air-conditioned easy chair in my Hill Country headquarters. But having now returned, I feel the need to get the first of these four essays done. Today's post is hymn to the greatness of Kreuz Market; tomorrow a summary of the also-rans; then, an open-pit barbecue done collaboratively by myself, meat-master Zak Palaccio, and Robbie Richter, New York City's most decorated competition barbecuer; and lastly, I'll do my best to answer the questions with which I began this adventure (not that anybody cares.)

KREUZ MARKET

There is a special poignant paradox about starting at the top. Orson Welles spent a lifetime constructing the postscript to Citizen Kane; David knocked out Goliath with a single shot, and the next thing he knew, he was setting up Uriah the Hittite. My trip followed a similar path. The very first stop on our tour was Kreuz Market, the Bayreuth of Beef. Kreuz's isn't much to look at; it's a new building, unpleasing to the eye, offering no hint of the magic within. A story comes with it.

"The influence of meat on the brain-stem" might be a paper, submitted by myself, to the Royal College of Physicians -- if I wasn't too fried to write it. There has been a lot of meat going into the Ozersky system in recent weeks. Half a dozen episodes were worthy of Slashfood chronicles, and would have been, had they not been succeeded within days by other, equally meat-tastic adventures. I had meant to tell you about my Steak Symposium In a Strip Club; A Visit By the Baron of Bacon, a tale of pigs and madness; What The Pit-Man Told Me, a romance; and other meat-related narratives. I still might. But now something is around the corner that's so big that I will have to blog it over several days.

I'm going to Texas tomorrow. To eat barbecue in the Hill Country.

The Steakhouse of My Dreams is a special place -- but you can't go get a reservation.   It is my secret sanctuary. I repair there when the world is too much. Let the buxom belles of Avenue B ignore me; let editors repulse my pitches, and copy crones mangle my best phrases. I see what my life is like. I know that my Cadillac has a broken grill, and a big crack in the windshield. Indian boys pelt my windows with durian. I don't care. I just close my eyes, and I see that place of my most fevered meat-dreams.

Here is what it is like.

Steakhouses, as a rule, all used to market themselves the same way. The place was presented as a sanctum sanctorum, an all-male preserve where men could drink whiskey, eat charred beef, and revel in their temporary liberation from the tyranny of women.

But times have changed; and the New York steakhouse has changed with them, giving yesteryear's cultural baggage the heave-ho. A few classic exemplars of the old school persist, and are rightly celebrated as temples of meat-worship; but now they compete with a new generation of steakhouses, all of whom bring a new, metrosexual take to the most primal of all restaurant concepts.

Typical of this breed is Quality Meats, a tarted-up meatery from the corporate group that brought you 78 different Smith and Wollensky restaurants, not to mention Cite, Maloney and Porcelli, and the Post House.

 My adopted religion, or at least the ultra-liberal version to which I adhere, requires certain sacrifices. But I just don’t like to make them. In a way, that makes the rare fasting days, like Good Friday, a good test case for Catholic Spirituality. A more pious person would welcome the chance to deny himself something. A less credulous one would dispense with hardship entirely. My own solution, perfected after many years of not trying, is to embrace the letter of the observance, while violating its spirit in every way. This works pretty well for me.

Your old pal Mr. Cutlets, New York’s most corpulent carnivore, has been on quite a tear lately, writing at a white-hot frenzy. Thanks to a daily cocktail of bacon, pork roll, and methamphetimines, I’ve been able to write restaurant reviews, book reviews, travel guides, blog posts, a visit to a pudding factory, media criticism, a love letter to my cast iron pan, a huge feature on specialty meats for the NY Law Journal, and a book on the history of hamburgers, in addition to a big mutlimedia project that is still "in development."  But even Mr. Cutlets can’t be on the job all the time. So here’s a quick roundup of recent adventures.

How I ended up with James Frey's elk meat bleeding on my back seat is a long story. But it is also an instructive one. As a minor figure at best on the literary scene, I got a rare chance to see how my betters live when, on a cold Tribeca evening some weeks ago, I found myself talking meat with the disgraced A Million Little Pieces author in the latter's posh kitchen.

Frey, fresh off his show trial on Oprah, was in no mood to talk about his troubles.  Nor would I have been in any hurry to do so. A man's sorrows are his own. God Forbid I should have to answer for all the baldfaced lies I've come up with over the years -- and with far less motivation than Frey had. But meat is a subject anyone can talk about, and Frey asked me point blank if I had ever eaten elk. I lied and said that I eat it all the time.

The emotional backlash against Valentine's Day is potent and ubiquitous. Millions of people despise the holiday -- far more than hate Christmas. Every spinster is a grinch on February 14, and  "lonely men in shirt sleeves, leaning out of windows" --  they have little love for public humiliation, either. Not since Ralph Wiggum got his pity card from Lisa Simpson has anyone had a good thing to say about Valentine's Day.

It's even worse when food and love are shoehorned together for the occasion. I understand the rationale of restaurants, who seek to fill tables with big spenders, who will buy better wine than they can afford. And I can see why editors, seeking a peg to hang banal features on, will assign stories about "the most romantic restaurants." But I have to here state my opinion, in which I feel backed by the consensus of all humankind:

Food and romance don't go together.

This is part of a continuing series about what it's like for me to wait for pizza at Di Fara. Di Fara, though not the most celebrated or the oldest of New York's great pizzerias, is the object of the fiercest and most cult-like following -- a feverish sect whose veneration centers on Dom De Marco, Di Fara's cryptic, ageless owner and proprietor. The rite of worship involves standing around for measureless spans of time, waiting for him to notice you, and then for him to actually serve you a slice of pizza. It is the best pizza anywhere.

Every time I find myself standing around at Di Fara -- and it happens more and more -- I start to think about a slice limit. In any other pizzeria, of course, there would be one. But then, in any other pizzeria, there would be a dozen cold, pre-cooked pizzas, ready to be reheated. That's not the way it works at Di Fara. Here, a dozen people will stand elbow to elbow, waching a septuagenarian make pizzas in slow motion, in the patient hope that they might get a slice. They don't complain; they don't ask impertinent questions; they don't look at their watches and then exchange exasperated glances. No. They're down with Dom, and off New York time. The place is strangely hypnotic: watching the old man go through his unrushed, painstaking routine is one of the city's most pacific experiences. At least I think it is; but I also like to sit around in strip clubs, listening to the Scorpions and pretending to be invisible.

D-Day passed quickly for me, too fast for a properly heartfelt essay on the art of deep frying. But so close is this magical technique to my soul that I decided to write it, unfashionably late and apropos of nothing. In fact, there is no day that is not right for deep-frying -- whether a wriggling trout, pulled from sparkling swift water in July, or a tumble of tater-tots on a depressing December Wednesday; diaphanous zucchini fritters in May, or (say) marrow poppers under the vanilla gloamings in the garden at 5 Ninth. I like to eat deep-fried foods all the time, and need only the flimsiest of pretexts to praise them.

Of all of Nature’s gifts, nothing is dearer to the hearts of drunks and gluttons than the slider. The slider! So named because of the ease with which it enters, and exits, the gastrointestinal system. Glorified in film and in literature. The end of a thousand loveless nights, and the start of a million melancholy days. I love the slider, and can't get enough of the little fellows.

The hamburger, you see, is a paradoxical creature. It is most itself when small, so that the basic proportion of surface to interior is 1:1,  ideally with a browned coarse surface that yields to oozing interiorities within. But people like to eat hamburgers with more meat; and most restaurants are only too happen to appease them. So the hamburger, as it becomes more popular, loses its soul, like a rapper who spends so much time quaffing Cristal in nightclubs that he forgets the mean streets.

It's rare that I'm stymied when I call upon my meaty muse, but it has happened two weeks running. No cause for alarm there, I'm sure. But first I was unable to come up with anything good to do about turkey, despite knowing a guy who was cooking one in a specially-made Caja China box. And this past week, after days and days of lying around my Castle of Carnivorous Consumption, making different kinds of Siberian dumplings, I couldn't even get together to produce an emotional essay about same. So I apologize to you, Slashfood reader. You expect better free content from your browsing.

Thanksgiving is synonymous with turkey, of course -- a depressing fact no amount of boiling oil, salt water, or heritage breeding can disguise. Turkey is bad. Even as the self-appointed “majarajah of meat,” I find it impossible to work up any enthusiasm for this bland bird -- and I make a living from feigning fascination, especially during the holiday article-assigning season.

The romance of discovering something you've always known is a persistent dream. G.K. Chesterton used the image of an explorer stumbling across his own country to begin his enduring Orthodoxy; the hero of "The Pina Colada Song" found the respondant to his sybaritic personal ad to be none other than "my own loving lady." And here I am, having crowned myself "New York's Most Conspicuous Carnivore," and I had never eaten a hot dog with mustard and relish.

Like so many of my crippling, idiotic, and persistent life errors, this one isn't my fault. As an impressionable child, I received at my father's knee powerful opinions, ardent orthodoxies whose expression awed even as they instructed. Just the way he talked about certain foods was enough to make me feel guilty for liking them. Fudge was wasn't just a confection, but a vice; it wasn't even fudge -- it was invariably "disusting fudge." That was like "the disgusting Port Authority," a fixed epithets, as automatic as "wily oddysseus" in Homer. "How can you eat that disgusting fudge?" he asked me, rhetorically, when I was eight years old. "It's so sickeningly sweet."  The force of his convictions impressed my infant mind, and I took these strange proclamations at face value. Candy bars should always be frozen, pizza should never have more than two toppings, and hot dogs should only be eaten with mustard.

It's amazing to me that I didn't see through these precepts earlier, especially the ones that are so obviously wrong. He wasn't a prissy guy. He loved fried salami, Chinese spare ribs, and chocolate milk. But his tastes were weirdly austere and perverse. Grapefruit juice, dried fruit compotes -- everything bad, he liked.  I always knew this on some level.  His anathemas against American cheese, white bread, margarine, Funyons, and the like made no more impression on me than a public service announcement.

But his opinions on Jewish foods were not so easy to throw off.  These carried the weight of millennia behind them, not to mention the incomparable cultural aura of Old New York, so potent in motley, sterile South Florida.  Such was the power of tradition that, though I can't stand mustard, especially deli mustard,  I allowed myself to be imposed upon by my father's prejudices for all these years. How many thousands, nay tens of thousands of frankfurters have descended into my colon unlubricated by a trace of sweetness or savory!

I’m still not ready to write about my trip this past weekend to the Jack Daniels World Championship of BBQ.  Tempers ran high, and my entry in the Chef’s Choice category, which came in 40^th out of 47 entries, will require a full feature post of its own.  What I do feel ready to write about, though, is the torrid three-day affair I had with Waffle House.

Waffle House, as you may or may not know, is a ubiquitous chain of 24-hour coffee shops which dot the Southland.  They’re more common on southern highways than roadkill.  Rare was the exit, as I travelled across Tennessee and northern Alabama, that didn’t have a massive yellow-and-black sign hovering high nearby, beckoning me to yet another plate of hash browns.

Because, the name notwithstanding, hash browns are what to get at Waffle House.  They bill themselves as the biggest seller of T-Bone steaks in America, and have named themselves after the blandest of all breakfast foods, but the star attraction here are shredded, preserved white potatoes sauteed in margarine on a griddle.  Other things are good here, too – I had a grilled bacon and cheesesteak sandwich on white bread that still puts a hop in my step. 

 
But in the end, it’s all about the hash browns.