Yes, I’m getting around to trip updates from the Charleston excursion.

If there’s ever a mecca for wing eaters, it’d be the Wild Wing Cafe.  At any given moment, Wild Wing has over 30 different types of wings, ranging from five or six different heat levels of your standard buffalo wing, to alternate flavors such as Thai, Lemon Pepper, or Garlic.

Coming to Wild Wing immediately after checking in at the hotel, we were fortunate to find ourselves arriving on Wild Wednesday, which is their way of saying ‘2 for 1′ on the wings.  Charleston is, after all, a college town, so there’s lots of deals to be found that are appropriate for a college student’s budget.  We each ordered a dozen, with two varieties per order for a total of four flavors.  The hardest thing about coming to Wild Wing is figuring out which kinds you want.  We ended up getting Gold Rush, Garlic! Garlic! Garlic!, Lemon Pepper, and CHINA SYNDROME.

We had a fairly solid plan for breakfast on the morning following the Big Pig Gig.  Since we only had a couple of overnight guests, we figured we would whip up some crepes on Sunday morning, something quick and easy that doesn’t require a lot of thought.

Then, Drink-O happened.  Plus we went to bed at 3:30am.  And I forgot to make the crepe batter ahead of time, and in the morning I discovered that a crucial element for the batter, milk, was nowhere to be found in the fridge.  We also felt like a truck hit us.

So, crepes never happened on Sunday, and we ended up at a Bob Evans on Sunday afternoon, which is the best place to grab a meal of breakfast food after a night of BBQ and booze-fueled debauchery.  After a couple of days, when everything was cleaned up and put away and the house returned to normal, I picked up some milk and went about implementing my crepe plan, two days late and for dinner instead of breakfast.

Hardware-wise, it’s nice to have a crepe pan.  It’s not absolutely essential, and if you don’t have one you can always use a non-stick saute pan.  I’m very idiosynchratic about my crepe-making process - I always use my same crepe pan, and I have to always use my wooden spoon that measures out exactly the 1/4 cup of batter that I need for each crepe.  But, at minimum, you need a nonstick pan, a ladle or other means of providing a consistent measure of batter, a nonstick spatula, and a nonstick pair of tongs.

The batter recipe that I use is from the site Chocolate and Zucchini, and you can get the recipe there by clicking on the link.  You’ll find most crepe recipes don’t vary much in their ingredients - flour, eggs, water, milk - as long as you end up with a thin batter, you should do just fine.

Like my other favorite quick meal, omelettes, crepes are more about technique than anything else.  You need to get your fillings in order before you start cooking, so chop whatever needs chopping (in this case, smoked salmon and chives) and have them close at hand.  Open up your container of creme fraiche (sour cream is a good substitute) and put two spoons in there (one to scoop, one to push off the creme fraiche onto the crepe).

Now comes the fun part.  Take your pan and set it over high heat, and put a drop or two of water in the center of the pan.  Take some butter out, and get a pat of butter ready (for each crepe, about half a tablespoon, maybe even less, depending on the size of your pan).  When your water droplets sizzle and boil away, the pan’s hot and ready - put your butter in, and use your spatula to spread a thin layer of butter across the pan’s surface.

Using your left hand, hold the pan above the stove at a 45 degree angle (handle pointed down towards you - and if you’re left-handed, reverse whatever I’m saying here).  With your right hand, equip your ladle, and ladle about 1/4 cup of crepe batter into the pan, keeping the ladle at the same position while swirling the pan to allow the batter to coat the surface and form a circle.  Don’t worry if your circle isn’t perfect, it’ll be hidden when you fold it.  Set the pan back down on the burner and cook the crepe for about 30 seconds until the top is dry and the edges begin to curl.

Equip your spatula, and shimmy it underneath the crepe, lift it, and flip it over to cook the other side.  After you flip, start laying your filling ingredients in one quadrant of the circle (not a full half, since you’ll be folding this).  By the time you’re finished, it’s time to flip and fold - use your tongs to grab the edge of the crepe, drag it over the filling, and fold again to form a little wedge.  Shove this off onto a plate and start on the next crepe, adding more butter to the pan and letting it melt completely before ladling more batter.

Repeat as necessary.  You’ll find that you have more than enough batter, so it can keep for a day or two in your refrigerator.  We like to make a batch of dessert crepes, using things like Nutella, peanut butter, marshmallows, and/or bananas and chocolate.  Really, anything you can get your hands on would work just fine.  There are no crepe police.

Well, that was all flavors of awesome.

First, let me get some much-deserved thanks handed out.  Big thank-you to Ray of Bathtub Brewery, who, in response to the emailed question “Can you draw a pig playing a guitar?” was instrumental (hah!) in creating the illustration that serves as this year’s Big Pig Gig logo.  Whenever you are bored, try going to Hindrances to Progress, read Ray’s comic, and then weep quietly at the premature retirement of one of the greatest comic geniuses of Web 2.0.  Then go to his other site and check out what he’s doing now.  It could be worse, it could be stand-up, and homebrew beer benefits everyone.  So, thanks to Ray for the pig drawing.  It’s a special flavor of awesome.

And, speaking of homebrew beer, a huge round of applause to Tim and Steph of brew.cook.pair.joy for brewing a special batch of American Pale Ale just for our barbecue.  It was a fantastic brew, an instant classic from the moment I tasted it, and would be my favorite drinking beer if not for the fact that I can’t get it all of the time, so I’ll settle for it being my favorite special occasion beer.  The most amazing thing about the J&D Pale Ale is that it went head to head with a Victory Festbier, and the Pale Ale keg kicked well before the Festbier did.  Overall, everything was balanced perfectly, with the kegs kicking just at the right time, so while we didn’t end up with a lot of unused beer, we also did not run out too early.  Being friends with homebrewers is loads of fun, almost as much fun as a barrel of…

Helper Monkeys! We are forever in debt (or, at least until BPG09) to the Helper Monkeys for playing our basement rock-nook.  We tried to make it as cool and comfy as possible, with rope lights and white Christmas lights strung from the rafters, old couches and folding chairs, and it was a thrill to walk into our basement and see a band playing their hearts out.  Absolutely, utterly, incomparably cool, and the basement easily fit everyone who came to the party, as well as the crowd of people who were hollering and carrying on about…

DRINK-O. Drink-O is like Pachinko, involves a bunch of ping pong balls and a board with screws in it, and hard liquor shots for the losers.  There are a lot of people in pain this morning because of Drink-O, and the jury is still out as to whether we should actually thank our neighbor Vince for constructing this monstrosity.

You’re probably wondering about the food.  Long answer short, we did not run out of food, and at the end of the night (or the early morning beginnings of the next day, if you want to be technical about it) I still had a full rack of ribs and an untouched pork shoulder left.  The crowds attacked the rib and pulled pork pile with wild abandon, which is something that I live to see, especially those folks who have never been to our thing before, and there were several contributions to the appetizer and dessert table (so much so that my beloved buttermilk pies had a total of one taker.  Thanks to whoever you are, and I hoped you liked it - but now I have one and 9/10’s of buttermilk pie to finish).  The pimento cheese was a great hit, as was the gut-killing chili that my coworker always brings every year (he actually purees the habaneros into it so you can’t pick them out, evil man).

The night was so packed with stuff that, by the time I went to bed, I had only eaten a single rib.  It’s kind of like a wedding, where you’re spending so much time walking around and talking to people that you never get a chance to sit down.  That’s what tonight is for, and as I type this, I can already smell the leftover pulled pork as it warms in the oven, along with small tins of almost everything else we served last night.

It’s time for us to eat, so I’ll end this here.  Thanks to everyone for coming and making this such a special night.

I knew there was a reason why I wanted a top-bottom refrigerator instead of a side-by-side.

43 pounds of charcoal.  Check.

28.6 pounds of pork shoulder.  Check.

24.5 pounds of ribs.  Check.

53 pounds of barbecue, coming right up.  We’re gonna need a bigger boat.

We forgot to ask if anyone was a vegetarian.  Maybe I should pick up a head of lettuce.

The road to the Big Pig Gig is paved with test recipes.  This past weekend, we stayed in and beta-tested three of the recipes that we were planning on serving next week.  One is an appetizer, one’s a side, and one’s a dessert.  All three turned out amazingly well and are a go for starring roles at the Big Pig Gig.

The unofficial theme for this year (at least in my head) is True South, and, as such, there’s more of a Southern bent to the menu than in previous years.  One true Southern staple, and a delicacy that I had a lot of while in South Carolina, is pimento cheese.  The people who I’ve spoken with around these parts all have expressed some degree of unfamiliarity with pimento cheese, so maybe it deserves a little explanation here.

Pimento cheese is a concoction of cheddar and cream cheese, mixed with pimentos and a pinch of this, a dash of that.  If I had to classify it, it’s kind of a spread of sorts, although it is very common for people to make pimento cheese sandwiches as a quick and cheap lunch.  Every family in the South has a particular recipe for pimento cheese, but often times people will just skip tradition and buy it from the grocery store.  Having had some homemade stuff down in South Carolina last week, I can tell you there’s no beating a pimento cheese made with dedication and personal pride.

Which brings me to the pimento cheese recipe that made the cut.  I came across this recipe in the book Frank Stitt’s Southern Table: Recipes and Gracious Traditions from Highlands Bar and Grill, which I picked up at an outlet store for eight bucks, but is well worth every penny even at full price.  Having flipped from cover to cover, I love this book so much I’m putting it into the sidebar for this site.

I won’t give away Mr. Stitt’s recipe here, but I can tell you that it does stick to the common pimento cheese template of cheddar and cream cheese, and is amazingly quick to whip up in a food processor in all of five minutes and provides a damn fine classic example of pimento cheese.  We’ll be serving it alongside a stack of saltines and Ritz crackers - the first batch is nearly gone, and it’s only been two days.

Act Two was a brand new recipe for cornbread.  I’ve been a creature of habit for years now, having found a recipe for cornbread and sticking with it every year for the barbecue.  That was true until we went to Charleston, and ate at the Hominy Grill, where they served a cornbread that was so light and airy, I would have given my right arm for the recipe.  As it turns out, I just needed to buy their cookbook for $12, and whoop, there it is.  By Grapthar’s Hammer, what a savings.

So, about this cornbread - my previous cornbread recipe, that which held the title of “my” cornbread for going on about five years now, was made from stone ground cornmeal, was fairly thick and dense, and had about two cob’s worth of corn kernels mixed into every batch of batter.  I thought I would never leave it.  The Hominy Grill cornbread, though, was a revelation - presented as a wedge, it was unlike any other cornbread I had ever tasted, almost cakelike in its crumb, collapsing easily into an almost creamy texture, but still retaining that Southern quality of not being too sweet.

I was hopeful that I would be able to replicate the same qualities that we had so enjoyed in the restaurant.  I found that the key to the lightness was a greater amount of baking powder than I had seen in a cornbread recipe prior - when wet, the batter was almost foamy as I poured it into the pan.  Some 30 minutes later, after taking it out of the oven, I had a sense that I had gotten it right.  After letting it cool a bit, and cutting into it, we knew that we had found our new cornbread recipe.  We whipped up an impromptu dish of honey butter and attacked the thing like it had insulted our mamas.

The last test recipe was for buttermilk pie, another dish that we had tried at the Hominy Grill and another recipe that was included in the small booklet that we had bought from the restaurant.  Made from a simple batter of buttermilk, eggs, sugar, and a little bit of lemon juice, the pie presents a light ending to what presumably will be a very heavy meal of barbecued pork (and chili, and mac and cheese, and cornbread, and red rice…) for most people attending our bash.  The recipe was easy to follow, and turned out tasting exactly like the version that was served to us in the restaurant.  So, we have our dessert, or at least our contribution to dessert, along with whatever anyone else decides to bring.

Oh yes, that, and a little something called Jack Daniels Chocolate Ice Cream.  More on that later.

I’ve only recently discovered the joy of drinking beer.  About fifteen months ago, I enjoyed my first glass of Yuengling, and a large part of that experience is due to the wonderful mess that you see pictured here.

This, my friends, is the roast pork sandwich at Nick’s Original Roast Beef in Springfield, PA.  If you’re wondering about the roast beef, it looks largely the same and is just as addictive.

Nick’s is the place we always go to for lunch when we are on our way to the airport, whether to fly out or to pick someone up from out of town.  Located about five minutes off of I-476, it’s about 20 minutes away from Philadelphia International Airport, and where else can you get a decent quick lunch with that degree of convenience?  Not Center City, that’s for sure.

Nick’s has been around for over 60 years, with the original location still in operation in South Philly and the Springfield spot open for 10 years.  We’ve been to both, and the experience is identical - go to whichever is closest for you.

As with most institutions, there’s a way of ordering your food at Nick’s that makes it possible for any one person to order a pork or beef sandwich that’s a good variation on the one being eaten at the next table.

First, let me lay down the basics.  At their essence, a sandwich at Nick’s is a stack of meat on a kaiser roll, with gravy.  Ordering it as a ‘combo’ just means slapping a slice of provolone on it.  Then it gets more complicated from there.

Overboard, which is how we like it, is with extra gravy.  Not just a small dollop, mind you.  I’m talking a sandwich that is so literally soaked in gravy that the bun just barely holds together.  Yes, it sounds disgusting until you try it.  The opposite of Overboard is Wet, which means less gravy (but, why?).

Operation means digging out the excess bread from the bun so that it doesn’t interfere with the meat, cheese, and gravy.

On the Outs means the inclusion of the crusty bits of beef from the outside of the roast, in other words, the best part, where the vitamins are, etc.

A Topper is a small portion of sauteed broccoli rabe, which, if you’re eating roast pork, is probably required by law.

The last bit of advice I have to give is this - get the gravy fries.  They’re perfect fries to begin with, but you throw some meaty gravy on them, and they become something else entirely.  What’s happening in my mouth?  Something wonderful.

And, as you may expect, all of this pairs brilliantly with beer.  We had tried a few beers here and there in the past, but it was this one singular moment last year, with this one beautiful mess of a sandwich, where everything clicked and beer suddenly made sense.

And, once I get around to offloading the camera, I’ve got a slideshow where beer is making a lot of sense to me.  Lots and lots of sense.  As you can tell, I’ve started my Charleston trip recap, starting with the place we ate right before leaving town.

I’m going to take the unconventional route here and start my updates with the end of our trip.  I’ve got lots of pictures that need to be loaded from the camera, and lots of words that need to be loaded from my head.  It’s going to take some time to sort through.  Please bear with me.

It’s absolutely wonderful to be back home after five nights away.  Last night was the first “normal” night that we’ve had since last Tuesday (and maybe Tuesday doesn’t count, either, because we were packing).  The fridge and cupboard are fairly bare, but I was able to put together something resembling dinner - a sauteed chicken breast, some barley, and a bag of peas that I found in the freezer.  It’s welcome relief from vacation food.

Speaking of which, you’re probably curious about our Southern Culinary Adventure.  All will be revealed in due time, but off the top of my head I can tell you that it involves wings, ribs, barbecue, fried pickles, fried shrimp, hush puppies, boiled peanuts, ham, beer, beer and more beer, and the best cornbread recipe we’ve ever had, so good it’s bumped my tried-and-true recipe from our barbecue lineup. 

And, oh yes, pimento cheese.

So, I’ve got all of that to talk about, plus the continuation of the Talulah’s Table series coming up, plus preparations for the Big Pig Gig 2008.  Stay tuned.  Stuff’s happening.

I met my wife for the first time in Charleston, South Carolina fourteen years ago.  We loved the town so much that, two years after that, we held our wedding there and made everyone fly in for the ceremony (we were, after all, in a long distance relationship and not only was Charleston beautiful, it was also neutral territory).

Since that time, we’ve only been back to Charleston once, and that was several years ago.  Even then, we could see the town beginning to change - at its heart, Charleston is a college town filled with small, independently owned shops that compete for space with majestic homes and hotels.  But on that visit, we saw that some of the shops on King Street were starting to yield to nationally recognized franchises like Starbucks.

We’ve got a small list of spots that we want to hit, some of them old standbys and others that have cropped up in the intervening years of our absence.  The very first thing on the list is the Wild Wing Cafe, which takes the concept of a college town buffalo wing joint and turns it up to 11.  Then there’s Jestine’s Kitchen, a small soul food restaurant that serves up killer chicken, fried green tomatoes, and Coca Cola cake.

As it turns out, Robert Stehling, this year’s winner of the James Beard award for Best Chef in the Southeast region, is in Charleston, cooking at Hominy Grill.  I spent yesterday afternoon studying the menu, and it all looks awesome.  Reservations were easy to come by.

So, we’re getting on the plane tomorrow and won’t be back until Monday.  If I have internet access in the hotel, I’ll try to post content from the road.  Otherwise, it’ll just stockpile on my hard drive and updates will resume a week from today.  Given that I can’t do many of these places justice without pictures, I may decide to wait anyway.

If I’m really motivated, I’ll create a Twitter account for The Best Food Blog Ever and give quick updates with my greasy buffalo wing and fried chicken coated fingers.

UPDATE: I was, in fact, really motivated and now have a Twitter account for The Best Food Blog Ever.  It’s over on the column to the left.  Twitter updates will show up here, and you can click on the little RSS icon to subscribe to the Twitter feed.

Is it possible for a restaurant to break your heart?

Seven years ago, or thereabouts, a tiny storefront tucked away off of Philadelphia’s eclectic South Street was transformed into Django, a BYOB that would go on to revolutionize small bistro dining in a city notorious for its ridiculous markups on wine.

Owned and operated by the husband and wife team of Bryan Sikora and Aimee Olexy, Django enchanted diners with its homey atmosphere, superb service, and Sikora’s outstanding and innovative cuisine.  Django reaped the rewards, garnering Best New Restaurant and Best Chef in Philadelphia Magazine that year, along with a mention in Gourmet magazine, which contributed to regional and national recognition of the restaurant.  The best thing about this was that none of these accolades were hype - it was all very much deserved, corroborated by Sikora’s ability to turn out excellent fare and Olexy’s masterful command of cheese selection and front-of-the-house management.  Whenever you see a cheese plate in Philadelphia today, it’s because of her influence.

As word spread and the restaurant became more and more successful, weekend reservations became harder and harder to secure, and Django instituted a 30 calendar day rule for reservations, prompting many to hover over their redial buttons at 10am each morning, waiting for the magical window to open.  Even when we were successful at getting through to a live person, by the time we had reached the reservations desk the only available openings were frequently either 5:30pm or 10:30pm, which we gladly accepted.  Despite having countless other amazing restaurants in the city to choose from, whenever we had to schedule a special occasion dinner, or had out-of-towners coming to visit, there was never a question where we would go.  Over the next few years, we racked up a nice collection of anniversary and birthday dinners at Django, and made it a point to stagger reservations across each of the four seasons, just to see what changes would come to the menu.

Then one day, Sikora and Olexy sold Django and left Philadelphia.  On the heels of the birth of their first child, they had decided to give up the daily hustle of the Philadelphia restaurant scene, cashed in their chips, and rode off into the sunset.  It was a classic Michael Jordan move, retiring at the top of your game.  Our hearts crumbled, with our remorse only magnified by a visit to the restaurant after the deal was done, when we discovered that Django the Great had, with the departure of the original owners, become Django the Very Good.  Sikora and Olexy were the heart and soul of Django, and when they left, much of that heart and soul went with them, and the establishment felt more like a business than the personal experience that it once was.  It was still a very good bistro, but there hung a very palpable void in the absence of Sikora in the kitchen and Olexy in the front of the house.  Lacking the personal touch that was the hallmark of the “old” Django, the restaurant soon faded into the rushing waters of the BYOB scene that it had originally pioneered.  Today, I’m sure that it’s still a good bistro, but in a town now filled with BYOB bistros, it no longer stands above the fray.

After their departure, months passed, and there were rumors here and there, of Sikora and Olexy relocating to New Jersey, or perhaps clear across the state to Pittsburgh.  Their absence from the Philadelphia BYOB scene was quickly filled by more and more new and upcoming bistros offering homey atmospheres served by small kitchen staff, profiting on the template that Django had originated.  Still, after having tried a few, we were still not swayed from our opinion that Django did it first, and Django did it best.  We had all but written off seeing the duo back on the food scene when, to my surprise, I heard that Sovana, a small bistro in the heart of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, mere minutes from Philadelphia, had acquired a new chef named Bryan Sikora.

So, on the occasion of my wife’s birthday two years ago, or thereabouts, we trekked through the lush valleys of the Mushroom Capital of the World, along small winding country roads and shot straight past Sovana, which is located in a small shopping center, facing inward.  Turning the car around, we managed to find it fairly quickly and arrived shortly after the 4:30 start time for the dinner service.  Sovana does not require reservations, and the outgoing voice message states that they would always honor walk-ins, although it would be possible to make a reservations request.

My first viewing of the menu felt like a culinary homecoming.  I saw menu items that I thought I would never see again after the end of the Sikora/Olexy era at Django.  Goat Cheese Gnocchi, Wild Boar Ragu, the best dishes that ever graced the menus of Django were now at Sovana, and largely retained the same qualities that made them such standout successes at Django.  The space, with a high-ceilinged industrial vibe, took some getting used to, but the meals that we had enjoyed with such enthusiasm were still there.  To be sure, there was definitely a different feel to Sovana than Django, as Bryan Sikora was now an employee, not an owner, Aimee Olexy was nowhere to be seen in this new endeavor, and the staff went about their duties with businesslike efficiency.  The no-reservations policy did yield some visits when we were relegated to waiting at the bar for over an hour, but overall our experience at Sovana was good, though not as good as Django.

We managed to have three meals at Sovana before the wheels of change turned again.  A subsequent call to the restaurant some months later yielded a hostess, obviously new to the position, who was unfamiliar with Sikora’s name.  She checked, and there was no “Bryan Sikora” working at Sovana, not anymore.  And the void came rushing back, although, seeing that Sovana never came close to achieving the approachability of the original Django, it hurt far less this time around.

This time, though, it was not too long after Sikora’s departure from Sovana that there were some news items regarding the next chapter of their endeavors - a small gourmet shop in downtown Kennett Square, right on Main Street, in a location that formerly housed a shoe store.  Delays and the usual hassles of opening a business meant staring at an “under construction” version of the shop’s website for weeks past the anticipated opening date.  But waiting for the shop to open was better than not having any news at all.

In 2007, on a blustery winter day when the warm rays of summer are a mere memory, and the thaws of spring not even a thought on the horizon, Bryan Sikora and Aimee Olexy debuted their new gourmet shop named after their daughter, Talulah’s Table.  Like Deadheads following the band, we just had to go and check it out, especially since the shop is only a pretty 30 minute drive through the countryside from where we live.

One of the things that’s particularly appealing about Kennett Square, and about small town centers in general, is the fact that the main drag is not a collection of franchises like Burger King and Starbucks.  Main Street in Kennett Square consists of a variety of small, independently owned shops and eateries, and makes for a nice strolling afternoon, provided it’s not 20 degrees out.  Which, on this particular afternoon, it was, and we had to hop over mounds of ice and snow to get to the front door from the car.

Talulah’s Table falls in line with the general Kennett Square aesthetic, and the first thing that you notice when you walk into the shop is that comfortable, homey feeling about the place, with a preponderance of wood floors and shelves and the smell of fresh-brewed coffee.  This effect lasts for all of about five seconds, before you dive headlong into exploring all that Sikora and Olexy have to offer in their latest spot.  In general, the merchandise is displayed on wooden shelves lining both sides of the room, with the coffee/pastry bar and register taking up the front of the rectangular space, with small coolers offering cold drinks and grab-and-go sandwiches next to it.  There are sections of the store dedicated to jarred items, chocolate, dried pasta, various oils - the typical items that you would expect to find in a gourmet shop.  It’s a place where you could stop by every so often to stock up on high end items, or find yourself there every morning grabbing a coffee and danish before heading off to work, or even every evening, picking up the components for dinner.

Things get more interesting as you head towards the back of the store.  On one side of the room are display shelves stocked with various breads and rolls, and next to that is a tap for olive oil - yes, you can bottle your own here.  A freezer case holds frozen house-made pasta and pasta sauces, and then as your eye follows the room in a counterclockwise fashion, you come upon the cheese display and your budget just flies out of the window.  I am so completely not kidding.

The display case at the back of the store, where Aimee Olexy’s hand-selected cheeses share space with her husband’s prepared food options, is the kind of display case that you would put on your desert island list, if your desert island had electricity, trees made from bread and crackers, and was surrounded by an ocean of red wine.  If she’s available, Olexy is more than happy to answer your questions about the cheeses, and will solicit your unique likes and dislikes in order to tailor her recommendations to your taste.  One of the best things we we ever did was to take the day off from work, drop by the shop, give Olexy a budget limit and just have her create a picnic basket of charcuterie and cheese.  That, and a baguette, made for one of the best lunches in the picnic area outside of Longwood Gardens.

One thing that I haven’t mentioned is the large oak table that resides in the center of the store.  When Talulah’s Table first opened, it had been announced that the table would be made available for private dinner functions, after the shop had gotten established and found its groove, and that was all that was said about that.  It would serve as an opportunity for Sikora to continue the tradition of a dinner service, but without the pressure of serving hundreds of courses each night.

Little did we know that, within a few short months, a seat at that table would be the hardest reservation to get in the United States.

Next Week: Part Two, Chasing Talulah’s Table