The Southern Road: The Perks Of Gas Station Food

by Micheline Maynard on

The South has its highways, but in order to get to some places, you have to take four-lane or two-lane roads. That’s where you’ll find gas stations. And in many gas stations, you’ll find food.

Up north, hardly anybody I know eats food from a gas station, unless they’re starving and it has a Subway attached. Down south, gas station food is its own form of cuisine. If you’re fortunate, you can score breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks in a good gas station, which may also have its own booths and dining tables.

At bare minimum, a gas station worth its salt (or fat) will serve breakfast – primarily a biscuit. This is usually a chicken, country ham or sausage biscuit. It is as far from Grape-Nuts as breakfast can get. I had resisted the biscuit breakfast until I was on the road from Birmingham, Alabama, to West Point, Georgia.

I passed a gas station that offered “Hot Biscuits & Full Breakfast, Live Bait, Hunting and Fishing Supplies.” Inside, I bought plain biscuits. They were fine, and flaky, and filled my mid-morning needs. But I knew there was more out there.

I found gas stations that featured barbecue, gas stations with fried catfish (many proudly displaying a “raised in the USA sign”) and gas stations with fried chicken. I found gas stations with a head-spinning, rainbow variety of frozen drinks that actually scared me.

I really struck gold at the Dodge’s Chicken Store in Lexington, Tennessee. It isn’t technically a gas station, but a restaurant with an adjacent gas station. The signs offered the trinity: chicken, barbecue and catfish.

Inside, people were jostling each other to get up to the counter. The variety was enormous and the prices divine: $2.99 for a pulled pork sandwich, $5.99 a pound for barbecue, $2.59 for a slab of catfish. There was corn on the cob, fried corn on the cob, hush puppies, mac and cheese. And, there were fried hand pies, a little bigger than a McDonald’s pie.

Since I knew I’d be eating a big lunch, I asked for a small piece of catfish and a sweet potato pie. The counter girl looked disappointed: “Aren’t you going to have any sides?” she asked. It was a perfect snack, and a terrific example of gas station food.

6 Boston Bars That Transport You To Other Places

by Jessica Festa on




There are myriad bars you can go to if you just want a decent atmosphere and drinks. On a recent trip to Boston, however, I learned there are many bars that are more than they appear on the outside. On your next trip to the city, make sure to check out some of these bars and restaurants that transport you to other places.

The Hawthorne
500A Commonwealth Avenue, Boston

The Hotel Commonwealth is a great home base for bar hopping, as it houses three of the best classic cocktail bars in the city. However, its newest venue, The Hawthorne, takes this one step further by creating an ambiance of sophisticated comfort. As you walk in, you’ll immediately be transported to an upscale urban apartment. Oversized couches, wingback chairs, highly curated art and photography and jam-packed bookshelves transform this cocktail lounge into feeling like a classy cocktail party. Look closer at one of the bookcases, and you’ll notice it’s not just books in there, but some of Bar Manager Jackson Cannon’s favorite things, like his favorite spirits line and personal glassware. You can tell they pay attention to detail at The Hawthorne, and this continues to the bar, where Head Bartender Nicole Lebedevitch and staff craft classic cocktails with the precision of a scientist. Expect international and hard-to-find spirits and ingredients.

What To Drink: A “Phil Collins,” which has cucumber vodka, lime juice, simple syrup, yellow chartreuse and dash of cranberry bitters, or a “Dutch Oven,” made with Barrel Aged Bols Genever, 2 sugar cubes, 3 dashes regans orange bitters and soda water.




Island Creek Oyster Bar
500 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston

Also located at the Hotel Commwealth is Island Creek Oyster Bar (ICOB), which is a “collaboration joining farmer, chef, and diner in one space.” The restaurant brings elements of the Island Creek Oyster Farm in Duxbury to restaurant guests, without any mess. In fact, ICOB is designed in a pristine white, with Gabion cages filled with tens of thousands of oyster shells making the three-dimensional walls. Additionally, reclaimed Wyoming snow fence is used to create the shutters, and wood from a restored Vermont farmhouse has been refurbished to build the wainscoting. When ordering from the menu, you’ll notice the names of small farms, each specializing in aquaculture, carefully listed next to each dish. This bar also takes a classic cocktail way of thinking, but with a local and seasonally inspired twist.

What To Drink: A “Snug Harbor Mash,” featuring crushed lime, Rich Demerara and ICOB’s house 4 Rum Blend, or an “ICOB Pilsner,” an exclusive pilsner brewed with jasmine and orange peel, and designed to be the ideal accompaniment to fried fare and shellfish.




The Back Deck
2 West Street, Boston

At the Back Deck, guests are transported to a backyard barbeque, although with more polish than sitting at a splintered picnic table. The design of the venue brings the outdoors inside, featuring three distinct backyard-inspired deck spaces bordered by walls of sliding floor-to-ceiling windows. Chefs employ the use of three high quality grills, The Woodshow Broiler, the restaurant’s biggest grill, The Montague Charcoal Broiler, used for “low and slow” cooked items and Mt. St. Helens Shallow-Box Charbroiler, the professional version of the charcoal grill. Only Hardwood charcoal is used, as it gives the cuisine a rich, smoky flavor and also allows food to sear better and stick less. At the bar, refreshing punches and coolers will transport you to summer, no matter what season it is.

What To Drink: A “West St. Cooler,” which contains watermelon, Ragged Mountain Rum, a hint of Aperol and a splash of soda, or a “Ginger Arnold Palmer,” made with lemonade and iced tea spiked with Berkshire Bourbon and a touch of Canton ginger.




Uni Sashimi Bar
370 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston

While most sushi restaurants can help give you a quick Japanese experience, Uni Sashimi Bar will immerse you in all the country has to offer and more. In an intimate space, guests can enjoy innovative sashimi, a range of traditional Asian street food items and late-night Ramen. In fact, their fresh seafood is shipped overnight from Tokyo’s Tskuji market. Diners can sample famous street food items like pork belly steam buns and vegetable tempura. While you can order typical Japanese dishes and chefs incorporate traditional sushi practices, they also put an avant-garde twist on many of the selections, like combining salmon with fermented black beans and ginger, or Japanese Striped Bass with chestnut ash, roasted Brussel sprout leaves and pickled kumquats. At the bar, expect an extensive Sake menu, with headings like “traditional,” “seasonal,” “rich” and “fragrant.” Sake cocktails, Asian-inspired drinks and fusion libations are also on the menu.

What To Drink: “Sun Rising,” a mixture of Yamazaki 12 whiskey, plum sake, pear sake, Cherry Heering, orange juice and lemon juice, or “Young’s Sangria,” made with plum sake, pear sake, Churchill white port, lime juice and orange juice.




Union Oyster House
41 Union Street, Boston

While you’ll still be in a restaurant, Union Oyster House leaves guests overwhelmed with nostalgia as they dine in America’s oldest restaurant in continuous service. Established in 1826 as a restaurant, the building itself has stood as an iconic Boston landmark for over 250 years. Diners can still enjoy Union Oyster House‘s heritage, and take a peek back in time with old-fashioned tavern decor, dim lighting, weathered wood, old newspaper clippings and photographs, timeless portraits and antique furnishings. You’ll get cornbread with every meal, lobsters right from the tank, heaping bowls of chowder and fresh seafood cooked just as it was years ago, without any fancy fusion or modern spinning. At the bar, they have an impressive selection of beers, which you can sip in a laid-back atmosphere while slurping back some oysters. This is where you’ll get the best service, and where you can watch shuckers in action while hearing their stories about life in Boston and the history of the restaurant.

What To Drink: The “Sam Adams Colonial Ale.” This American Amber beer has a malty flavor, notes of caramel and pairs well with seafood.




PARK Restaurant & Bar
59 JFK Street, Cambridge

Located in the Greater Boston Area, PARK Restaurant & Bar will make you believe you’re in an antique parlor. With vintage curios like antique typewriters, artwork and photography from the ’60s and ’70s, first edition books and local maps from the turn of the century, their cocktail den retains the atmosphere of your eccentric uncle’s sophisticated parlor room. The menu is comprised of “spirited interpretations of New American classics” like the “Meat Pie of the Day” and the “PARK Patty Melt.” To compliment the theme, the bar operates under a classic cocktail philosophy, using homemade syrups, infusions, tonics and bitters to make new and old favorites.

What To Drink: “The Fireside Poet,” which is a blend of Bulleit Bourbon, Creole Shrubb, Santa Maria del Monte and Marasche Syrup or the “Old Cuban,” which has Barbancourt 5 Star Rum, Lime, Simple, Angostura Bitters, Mint and Cava.

Do you have a favorite bar in Boston that transports you to another place?

Maui’s Hana Airport Open To Commuters Again

by Kyle Ellison on

Stretching for 52 miles, across 59 bridges, and around 620 curves, Maui’s famous and historic “Road To Hana” is not for the weak of stomach. Despite being listed on The National Register of Historic Places and as one of the Top 10 Scenic Drives in America by Lonely Planet, for many Maui visitors, the thought of enduring the switchbacking, nearly three-hour drive is simply too much too handle.

In a nutshell, they would rather pass up seeing the entire east end of the island than get behind a wheel on that road.

Luckily for all would-be Hana travelers out there, Mokulele Airlines and the Travaasa Hana hotel have recently partnered to bring back twice-daily service from Maui’s Kahului airport to Hana’s coastal airstrip beginning on October 1. Along the 20-minute flight passengers of the nine-seat Cessna will be privy to waterfall views and the lush rainforest, which blankets the eastern swath of the island.

With fares starting at $59 each way it’s definitely a pricier option than fueling up the rental car and tackling the hundreds of turns. As part of the partnership, however, guests who opt to book a three-night all inclusive stay at the hotel will be given the tickets for free, a nice perk of spending three days in a town regarded as one of the most beautiful and relaxing of anywhere in the entire Hawaiian island chain.

While the flight option dramatically reduces the commute time for Hana travelers, given the notorious tradewinds on the island’s eastern flank, I can only assume it’s still going to be a bumpy – yet beautiful – flight.

New York City’s (Mostly) Unfortunate $1 Pizza Slice Phenomenon

by David Farley on
There was a crash and a boom from the kitchen. I was just a teenager but from my bedroom, my friend Jay and I immediately knew what had happened. “Your dad dropped the pizza,” he said to me, seconds after the noise reverberated through the suburban Los Angeles house. Yep. That’s exactly what happened. My dad, likely liquored up after an afternoon of football watching (and inspired to imbibe more by the prospect another work week was looming around the temporal corner), was cooking his “special” pizzas. And while removing it from the oven, he dropped it. We’d have to get pizza delivered instead.

Which was a good thing. Because my dad’s pizza was the worst I’ve ever eaten in my life. About one Sunday every month, I’d stroll out into the kitchen and see stacked-up containers of flour and jars of tomato paste and I knew it was one of those dreaded Sunday pizza nights. The thin crust of dad’s pizza, set nonna style in a rectangular pan, would cook wildly uneven: the edges were brick hard and the center doughy; the sauce was so thin it was hard to see on the finished product that there were even tomatoes involved in this near-inedible orgy; and the toppings always consisted of ground beef and bell peppers.

In a way, it seems hard to screw up something so simple. Pizza is just flour and egg for the dough, tomatoes for the sauce and whatever else you want to top it with. Put it in a scalding oven for 10 or so minute and ecco la! Your pizza is done and delicious.

I’ve recently found my dad’s match for the worst pizza I’ve ever tasted. And it’s right where I live in New York City. In the last few years a recent phenomenon has emerged on the city’s dining landscape: $1 pizza slices.

The phrase, you pay for what you get, very much applies here. I talked to Adam Kuban, founding editor of the website Serious Eats and editor and founder of Slice, a blog dedicated to all things pizza. “I think the recession is the big force driving the rise of the dollar slice,” he said. “I don’t know about other folks, but for me, once a plain slice started creeping up near the $3 mark, it ceased to be an automatic transaction. Two bucks? Fine. Two-fifty? Um, OK, sure. Because even at $2.50, if you’re getting two slices, like a lot of people do, it’s still an even fiver. Once you break the $2.50 barrier, though (the average price in Manhattan seems to be holding around $2.75), you start to think about the price in terms of MORE THAN $5.”

A good point. South Brooklyn Pizza in the East Village, one of the best slices in the city, in my opinion, is a whopping $4 per slice. It’s worth it, though. But, as Kuban pointed out, with that kind of pricing it’s not automatic anymore.


The pizza slice didn’t enter the American food landscape until the middle of the 20th century. Before this pizza was largely an ethnic phenomenon with newly arrived Italian laborers eating it in places like New York, New Haven, Chicago and Boston. But when American soldiers returned from Italy after World War II, pizza was on its way to becoming “American.” After the gas pizza oven was created here, allowing pizza makers to create this once-Italian delicacy cheaply and quickly, pizza spread through the rest of the country.

And so now we come to the $1 slice. There’s an extensive write up on Kuban’s blog with an excellent analysis of the $1 pizza phenomenon, claiming it’s a different genre of pizza, as most of the places – especially the increasingly ubiquitous 2 Bros Pizza and 99¢ Fresh Pizza – use a slightly different technique.

“Most of the dollar slice places … stretch the dough on an oiled surface,” said Kuban. “This means they have to use a baking screen so the oiled dough doesn’t burn on the hearth of the oven. The cooking method gives you a less crisp crust – more spongy.”

Which brings us to Percy’s. Located on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, this pizzeria started out as an outlet of South Brooklyn Pizza. When the NYU students were balking at $4 for a slice, the owner took a different approach.

When I stopped in for a slice, longtime pizzaiolo Jack Bruli was shoveling cheese pizzas in and out of the gas-burning oven.

“Because we put love into our work here,” Bruli said when I asked why the $1 slice is so much better here. “And we’re trained. We know what we’re doing. At the other places, there are college students working there who don’t care about their product. We do. This is my job. I’ve been doing it since the ’70s.”

True or not, what also makes Percy’s so special is they still largely use the same technique as South Brooklyn and some of the better by-the-slice places in the Big Apple. Which is to say, they don’t adhere to the same pizza-making ways of the other $1-per-slice joints.

I sat down and bit into the slice. The crust was crispy all the way through, which already gives it a huge advantage to its competitors.

This was a pizza not worth dropping on the kitchen floor.

Conned By The Amish?

by Dave Seminara on

We like to believe in the inherent honesty and virtue of the Amish. They are devout people who eschew material comforts in favor of simple living. In a country where the almighty dollar is king, and the gotcha capitalist ethos of say-anything-to-sell-it rules, they stand apart, as craftsmen who sell what they make with their own hands at fair prices with no nonsense. Or do they?

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I’ve been patronizing the Amish shops in Cattaraugus County for many years and have always believed that the Amish sold quality, handmade items at great prices. But I had an experience at an Amish shop recently that led me to believe that at least some of the Amish might be no less immune to deceptive salesmanship than anyone else.Two years ago, my wife and I purchased a small, supposedly handmade Amish throw rug from the Wengerd family shop on Dredge Road in South Dayton, New York, and, although the rug was very cheap, we loved it. It’s not a beautiful rug, but every time we look at it, it reminds us of a place we love and a people we greatly respect. In July, we were back in Cattaraugus County and made another visit to the Wengerd family shop, which is located on a desolate road, deep in the Amish belt, where horses and buggies outnumber vehicular traffic, 2-1.

I asked the young man with a characteristic Amish bowl haircut if they bought the rugs or made them on premises.

“My sister makes them right here,” he said rather convincingly.

Given the low prices- $18 for a small rug or $39 for a larger one, I should have been skeptical, but it’s hard to know how an Amish teen would value their own time and labor, and I wasn’t prepared to believe that the God-fearing Amish would lie like a rug.

I bought a nice, big multicolored rug and just as we were about to get into our car, which was parked at the end of their two-buggy driveway, a FedEx truck came barreling down the lonely road.

“FedEx comes out here?” I said to my dad. “But how can the Amish even order anything without phones or Internet?”

Rather than pull out right away, I waited to see where the truck was going, and, sure enough, it pulled up right in front of the Wengerd family’s shop. The driver hopped out and began to unload long, spherically shaped bundles that looked very much like carpets. The young man who sold us the rug had retreated into the family home after we left the shop in front of the house and didn’t come out to greet the truck. We wondered if he didn’t want to come out and sign for the bundles with us in sight.

The driver must make deliveries to the shop regularly because he went right into the unlocked shop and plopped the big bundles down. When he came back out, we asked him if they were carpets.

“Sure feels like it,” he said.

I drove off, feeling a bit shaken and confused. Were the Amish ordering carpets from China and passing them off as handmade? How would they do that without phones, cars or access to the Internet? How could I be so dumb to think I could get a handmade rug for $39?

I returned home and drafted a letter to the Wengerd family to ask them to clarify where the rug was made, because I was curious to see if they’d respond. Three days later, I received the following letters in reply.

Mr. Dave Seminara,

In response to your recent letter, about the rugs, our daughter and her husband make the rugs that we sell in our shop, that is correct. The blue rolls of fabric that FedEx unload that day came from Arkansas. It is quilt lining. We do not buy rugs from China or any other place. When my wife read your letter she was laughing so hard that I asked, What is so funny? I hope this explains it all, if not feel free to come out and see for your self. I want to thank you for writing about your conserns.

Levi Wengerd

Hello,

You wrote about the rugs. I just had to laugh that you thought that we get our rugs through FedEx. The items we were getting when you were here was a wide fabric for quilt backings 118 inches wide. Our daughter Amanda makes all those rugs as our son told you. They have 2 looms and they weave these rugs through the winter and now they don’t have enough rugs for what we sell so they are busy with the looms again!

Elizabeth Wengerd

The handwritten letters immediately restored my impression of the Amish as an honest people who are unwilling to swindle people to make a buck. But why had I been so quick to assume the worst? As American consumers, we are subjected to so much false advertising and bogus sales claims that it’s easy to become cynical to the point where even the Amish are suspect.

Still, I was curious to know more about how Amish families like the Wengerd’s can do business without access to the Internet or telephones, so I sent them a reply asking to know more. Perhaps not surprisingly, they never responded. Sometimes the things that glitter really are gold but don’t expect the Amish to clue you in on all their secrets.