A Good Meal Doesn’t Need to Be Important

by Christopher Spencer

I trained as a chef in college, which taught me to take food seriously. I learned technique, preparation, timing, ingredients, and the difference between cooking something adequately and cooking it well. It also gave me a lifelong curiosity about food. Wherever I travel, I want to know what people eat there, where they eat it, and why they prepare it the way they do. I have eaten some excellent meals in expensive restaurants over the years, and I can appreciate the considerable work that goes into creating them. But when I think about the meals I actually remember, an odd thing happens. Many of the restaurants disappear.

What remains are tables.

There was one beside a river in the Huasteca Potosina in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí. A friend and I had gone there in 2012 to stay at a secluded resort owned by a friend of my companion's. It was closed for the season, which meant we had the entire place to ourselves. Getting there required crossing the river, and recent rains had made that crossing considerably more adventurous than usual. Once across, though, the place felt like a small private paradise tucked into the mountain jungle, with an infinity-edge pool perched high above a second river and seemingly nothing much beyond us except water, vegetation and hills.

Because the resort was closed, we had hauled in our own provisions. We had brought good food and more than a few bottles of wine, prepared to spend several days eating rather well in our temporary private kingdom. The owner had arranged for a friend of his who lived along the river to keep an eye on us, particularly because of the conditions created by the rain. He also offered to take us fishing.

We launched from his property in a long wooden boat and worked our way along the river, finding quiet pockets where the water was calm enough to fish. Using open-faced casting rigs, the three of us caught perhaps a dozen fish. It was a good day on the water, but there was nothing particularly unusual about the plan. We had gone fishing. We caught fish. We headed back.

Then our guide invited us to a meal.

His home stood along the river, an old two-story stone house in the Spanish colonial style, with columns and arches and the wonderful accumulation of things that makes a house unmistakably someone's own. Nobody else was there that day. He cleaned and prepared the fish himself, simply enough that the flavor of fish pulled from the river only hours earlier wasn't buried beneath anything unnecessary. He added large river prawns he already had, along with rice, salad, guacamole, limes, tortillas and fries. Cold beers came from his refrigerator. At some point, tequila appeared.

     

Lunch after a day of fishing in the Huasteca Potosina, San Luis Potosí, Mexico. Photographs from the author's collection.

There had been no reservation. No menu. No expectation that lunch was going to become part of the trip worth remembering.

We ate while he told us about the area and about his life along the river, the adventures and stories accumulated by someone who had spent his lifetime in a place we were only briefly passing through. We talked about the resort and the country around us. The fish was very good. So were the prawns. But fourteen years later, what I remember isn't a particular seasoning or some clever preparation. I remember being invited to his table.

There is something food can do when we allow it to stop being the point of the occasion.

I have occasionally wondered whether expensive restaurants can make that more difficult. Not because there is anything wrong with expensive restaurants. There isn't. Great cooking deserves respect, and genuine culinary talent can produce experiences that are remarkable in their own right. But an important restaurant arrives with expectations attached. You know what the reservation took to get. You know the reputation of the chef. You certainly know what dinner is costing. You begin paying attention to whether the room, service, wine and food live up to everything you have heard about them. Without intending to, you can spend so much time experiencing the restaurant that you experience less of the people sitting across the table.

Some of my favorite meals have never carried that burden.

Growing up in Texas, chicken-fried steak occupies a culinary category considerably more important than outsiders might reasonably understand. A Texas road trip provides ample justification for seeking out cafés reputed to make a good one. I also spent a period of my life traveling around Texas with friends who were immersed in cowboy culture. Some had horses and chuck wagons, and we became involved in chuck-wagon cooking competitions. Chicken-fried steak was one of the standards by which a cook could be judged, so collectively we had eaten enough of it to know when someone got it right.

One Sunday morning, after a late night following a western rodeo event near Abilene, we found ourselves at Perini Ranch. The place is nationally known for its upscale interpretation of cowboy cooking, but its Sunday brunch leaned directly into chuck-wagon tradition. There were eggs and barbecue, but the star was chicken-fried steak.

What surprised us was how it was cooked.

Most restaurants solve the logistical problem of producing chicken-fried steak in volume by using a deep fryer. Perini's version was prepared the old way, in a cast-iron skillet, closer to how a chuck-wagon cook would have made it for cattle hands back in the day. That distinction mattered to a table full of people who had cooked and eaten their fair share of the dish. It also made us wonder how a restaurant serving hundreds of people could possibly pull it off consistently.

Then the plates arrived.

For perhaps ten minutes, nobody said much of anything.

This was not a quiet group. Yet conversation simply stopped while everyone ate. Eventually someone broke the silence and said, essentially, what we had all been thinking: this is fantastic. That was all it took. Everyone started talking at once about the crust, the steak and especially the peppery cream gravy that accompanied it. Here was one of the most familiar foods in our collective experience, prepared without reinvention or unnecessary cleverness, and it had stopped the table cold.

Sometimes expertise isn't knowing what to add. It is knowing what to leave alone.

I was reminded of that in a very different way on my first trip to Cairo.

My closest travel companion Sonia and I were traveling with some of her Canadian friends, and one September day we ventured into the Khan el-Khalili market, particularly the area between Al-Azhar and El-Ghouriyya where spice and dye vendors crowd the market. Cairo can overwhelm the senses under almost any circumstances. In September heat, surrounded by spices, colored powders, vendors, traffic, food, people and noise, the effect can become almost physical. After enough hours of it, the comparative quiet of the resort where we were staying outside Giza began to seem very appealing.

We stopped for lunch at a small open-air restaurant at the edge of the market. Out front were several crates of live chickens, presumably recently delivered to the restaurant. Shortly after we sat down, a bicycle taxi crossed paths with a pickup truck. The truck swerved to avoid the taxi and instead drove over one of the chicken crates.

It was not an appetizing development.

I grew up on a working ranch and have hunted and fished most of my life, so I am neither unfamiliar with nor particularly squeamish about where food comes from. Still, watching a collection of chickens meet an unexpectedly violent end immediately before lunch is enough to give anyone a moment of reflection.

Nevertheless, I ordered chicken.

What eventually arrived bore little resemblance to the rotisserie-style half chicken I had imagined. This bird had been flattened almost completely, probably cooked beneath a brick or heavy stone on the grill. Bones and all, it couldn't have been much more than an inch thick.

Considering what we had just witnessed outside, the resemblance was unfortunate.

I made a joke that perhaps they had simply picked up one of the victims of the traffic accident, and from then on the dish became known as “Taxi Chicken.”

It tasted good, though.

I couldn't tell you whether it was one of the best chickens I've ever eaten. Almost certainly it wasn't. But I can still picture that lunch. I can remember the heat, the market, the colors, the commotion and the absurdity of watching chickens get run over shortly before being presented with the flattest chicken I had ever seen. “Taxi Chicken” became shorthand for the whole experience. Like so many of the best travel stories, the food and the place became impossible to separate.

Perhaps that is why I have never been particularly starry-eyed about celebrity chefs or famous restaurants. I love good food too much to believe that good food belongs exclusively to important places. My culinary training probably reinforced that rather than diminished it. Technique matters. Ingredients matter. Knowing what you're doing matters. But none of those things determine what a meal will eventually mean to you.

The people around the table have considerably more influence over that.

I like conversation, including the kind that wanders. I enjoy sitting with people whose experiences are completely different from mine and discovering where our thinking intersects. The conversation can be intellectual or ridiculous, serious or profane. It can happen over an expensive bottle of wine or beers pulled from somebody's refrigerator. The food gives everyone a reason to remain at the table long enough for something else to happen.

And sometimes the most enduring meals happen at a table you've known almost your entire life.

When I was growing up, my mother made a beef-and-noodle skillet dish that became one of my favorites. Somewhere along the way, our family started calling it “Noodle George.” I no longer remember why. I am not entirely certain anyone ever knew why. Family language works that way. A name gets attached to something, everyone understands what it means, and eventually the origin disappears while the name survives.

I still make Noodle George.

But birthdays came with another tradition.

My mother didn't make me a birthday cake. She made pudding. It was constructed much like a traditional banana pudding, with Nilla wafers, except the bananas were replaced with pineapple. Nobody else ever seemed to understand why this peculiar pineapple pudding was the thing I wanted for my birthday.

They didn't need to.

My mother made it in the same bowl every year, beginning sometime in my childhood. Year after year, birthday after birthday, the pudding appeared in that bowl. There was nothing sophisticated about it. No rare ingredients, no difficult technique, no presentation designed to impress anyone. It wouldn't earn a paragraph in a restaurant review.

To me, it was Momma's love in a bowl.

I still have Noodle George and that pudding for my birthday.

Maybe that's what I've learned after years of caring about food. We often talk about memorable meals as though the food must have been extraordinary. Sometimes it is. But memory seems to have its own rating system. It awards its stars differently.

A fish eaten with a man who had spent his life beside a Mexican river. A chicken-fried steak that silenced a table of people who knew exactly how one should taste. A comically flattened chicken in the heat and chaos of Cairo. A noodle dish with a name nobody remembers how it acquired. Pineapple pudding in the same bowl, year after year.

None of them needed to be important.

They just needed someone else at the table.