New Name in an Old Location - Delicious Soul Food

Back in May I mentioned that I had seen signs of activity at the old Frayser Maid building on Thomas and that I was hoping another soul food place would be moving into the place. I first discovered the Frayser Maid over a decade ago thanks to a Southern-food-loving co-worker who was a loyal patron of the decades-old restaurant.

The always-fascinating Memphis Barbecue Restaurant Ghost Pit Chronicles blog has some pictures from when the building was still the Frayser Maid. I would love to meet whoever is behind that blog, especially since they apparently live in my neighborhood in Vollentine-Evergreen.

On my first visit to the Frayser Maid I got an order of meatloaf with greens and yams. Everything was good and the side portions were huge. It is one of a very small number of soul food lunches I've been unable to finish.

That isn't a tiny serving of meatloaf. Those are big bowls of greens and yams.

One of the reasons I love eating in places like Delicious Soul Food is open conversations you experience between the staff and the customers. Everyone talks to everyone in a way that would seem downright bizarre in a typical chain restaurant. In little family-operated barbecue and soul food places there is generally a welcoming sense of community that makes you want to come back. It's something I've witnessed countless time in restaurants in both the city and in rural areas with both mostly white and mostly black crowds.

In fact, at Delicious Soul Food all the friendly servers are family and friends of the owner who are just pitching in to help out and enjoy the sense of community at the restaurant. If you go, tip accordingly. Your meal will still be cheap. During my first visit conversation ranged from the Tigers and Grizzlies to a woman talking about charitable giving in the city and how "they can talk bad about Memphis but when push comes to shove Memphis has heart." It was an address to the entire restaurant that I wish I had recorded.

On my second visit I had pork chops with buttered corn and green beans. The plate came with two large chops and as soon as the plate was in front of me I knew that they were going to be good. When fried pork chops are really seasoned and cooked right the smell alone is enough to tell you. Once again the side portions were big enough that I wasn't able to finish them. This time there were several kids in the restaurant so the staff set up a TV for them to watch cartoons while the adults chatted. One of the biggest benefits of my barbecue and soul food quest, besides all the great food I've enjoyed, is the opportunities I've had to enjoy the character of the city I love.

I've made numerous return visits to my favorite finds along the way and Delicious Soul Food is another place I'll be visiting when I find myself nearby and hungry. Not every time, since I'll still have to get the occasional giant barbecue sandwich from Kelvin's down the street from them. Kelvin's and Delicious are only a couple blocks apart with a McDonald's, a Taco Bell, a Wendy's and a Church's Fried Chicken in between them. But when you open your eyes to all the great little independent eateries in town the fast food chains quickly just become an almost invisible part of the background scenery.

Guns and Drugs - The United States of America

Last Thursday I mentioned the failing drug war and how physically and mentally unhealthy modern U.S. suburban life is in a post about a trip to Sayulita, Mexico. The next morning Memphis police officer Martoiya Lang was murdered while trying to serve a marijuana-related "no-knock" warrant search, making her yet another senseless casualty in a futile war against a plant.

The entire city was still reeling from that news when reports began coming in of the horrific school shooting in Newton, CT, that left 20 first-graders and six school employees dead. Coming shortly after the movie theater shooting in Aurora, CO, where 12 people were murdered, the tragedy left a grieving nation searching for answers. And as H.L. Menken once noted, "for every complicated problem there is a solution that is simple, direct, understandable and wrong."

In this instance there were actually plenty of simple, direct and wrong solutions being offered up ranging from more prayer in schools to more corporal punishment of bad behaviour in young people. Apparently some people believe that severe mental illness is something that can be beaten out of a person. But most of the media and politicians in this country ultimately decided to center their attention on the type of rifle used in the two shootings. You rarely hear any mention of the prescribed psychotropic drugs, which commonly list suicidal tendencies and violent outbursts as major side effects, that are a common factor in pretty much all mass shootings.

 

The book Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker thoroughly examines the widespread increase in mental illness rates, and the severity of mental illness, that has coincided with the widespread use of psychotropic drugs. What is amazing is that, like with the statin drugs used to lower cholesterol, some of the most damning evidence against modern psychotropic drugs can be found in the studies used as supposed evidence of their effectiveness.

If you take two people with the same risk factors for heart disease and give one a statin drug to lower their cholesterol and the other a placebo, the person taking the statin is more likely to end up dead, as Harvard Medical School educator Dr. John Abramson noted in his book Overdosed America. This is on top of all the other negative side effects statin drugs have.

Studies on drugs are generally paid for by the pharmaceutical industry, which frequently leads to studies with conclusions that make no sensel based on the actual data obtained in the study. That is how we end up with anti-anxiety medications that cause chronic anxiety, antidepressants that prolong depression and significantly increase the risk of suicide, and ADHD medications that greatly increase the odds that a child will end up bipolar.

Please note that I am absolutely NOT recommending that anyone taking psychotropic meds suddenly  stop taking them. These drugs rewire the brain and create chemical imbalances in a way that makes getting off of them very difficult. When someone on psychiatric meds quits cold turkey the results can be horrifying. Getting off of them needs to be done with counseling and under the supervision of a doctor. And there are some people who are genuinely helped by psychiatric drugs. The medical industry just seems to ignore the fact that there are also millions of people whose lives are made much worse by them.

Ironically, the fact that patients have so much trouble when they stop taking the drugs is used as evidence of their effectiveness even though people who go off the drugs end up with drastically worse symptoms than patients who never took them. It is like if a researcher gave someone heroin every day for a couple months, suddenly made them quit cold turkey, and used the resulting pain and sickness as evidence that the person had been suffering an "opium deficiency" before ever starting to use heroin.

Beyond the chronic overmedication of our population, there is plenty of evidence that our current way of life is as bad for our mental health as it is for our physical health. Corporate welfare and other government subsidies have caused us to design our communities and our food supply around the wants and needs of big businesses instead of individuals.

We are recommended a diet based on taking care of grain cartels and processed food manufacturers instead of our bodies. The human brain is made up almost entirely of saturated fat and cholesterol. Cutting fat from the diet, and getting an increasing amount of the fat someone does eat from refined vegetable oils, is going to have a negative impact on mental function. Even worse, expectant mothers will try to avoid animal fat and cholesterol at a time when their body is forming an entire new central nervous system for their child. This would be viewed as insane in most traditional cultures. 

A huge portion of Americans are chronically deficient in magnesium and vitamin D. Anxiety, lack of energy and depression are major symptoms of magnesium and vitamin D deficiency. How many times do you hear about a person complaining of depression or anxiety having their magnesium and vitamin D levels checked before being put on a constantly changing roller coaster of anti-anxiety and antidepressant meds? Vitamin D is cheap and you can't patent it. Therefore there aren't any pretty, high-paid vitamin D reps taking doctors out to dinner or flying them to vitamin D seminars in exotic locations.

In blaming society for things like mass shootings people are generally far too quick to point their fingers at things like violent video games or music. A sick mind may harbor obsessions, but blaming the focus of that obsession is confusing cause and effect. In other words, millions of people read A Catcher in the Rye, but only one of them used it as an explanation for shooting John Lennon. Or as comedian Sam Kinison bluntly pointed out, if Charles Manson never heard the Beatles' White Album, he would have still been insane.

Mass shootings are a near uniformly young, white, male, suburban middle-class phenomenon. But that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of other demographics grappling with crippling mental illness in this country. Different people express pyschosis in different ways. If a 60-year-old woman commits suicide by herself with sleeping pills it is still a tragedy that represents the end of the world for that individual.

Instead of focusing on mental health the official line seems to be that these tragedies are occurring because people suddenly have access to weapons like the AR-15s used in Newton and Aurora, and that these tragedies can be averted by firearm restrictions.
 
The AR-15 is a semi-automatic rifle that fires a .223 caliber bullet. It has been around since the 1950s when Eugene Stoner developed it for the company Armalite. That is where the AR in its name came from. It is not an abbreviation for  "assault rifle" as some people claim.

In military terms an assault rifle is a relatively small, lightweight rifle with a detachable magazine that is capable of full-auto fire like the U.S. Military's M-16, which the AR-15 design is based on. Fully automatic weapons are so expensive and heavily restricted for civilian use in the U.S. that they can effectively be referred to as illegal. When politicians or the press talk about fully-automatic weapons being readily available to civilians they are either being willfully ignorant or intentionally deceitful. 

The Federal "Assault Weapons Ban" that the U.S. had from 1994 until 2004 didn't apply to actual assault weapons. And it didn't stop anybody from owning any weapons. It merely banned the sale of semi-automatic weapons, and their magazines, manufactured after the ban went into effect based on cosmetic features like pistol grips, flash suppressors and collapsible stocks. Semi-automatic weapons that didn't look like assault weapons weren't affected by the ban.

 

Being semi-automatic means the gun will chamber a new round each time the trigger is pulled until its magazine is empty instead of requiring the shooter to perform some action to chamber a new round. The Winchester Model 1894 is named after the year it was introduced. If you are unfamiliar with guns it probably looks significantly less menacing than the AR-15 underneath it. But it can be fired as quickly as you can rack the lever with your hand. And the tubular magazine underneath its barrel can have ammunition fed steadily into it without ever disabling it like a magazine-fed gun with the magazine removed.  

The press frequently refers to the AR-15 as a "high-powered rifle." But it's .223 caliber ammunition, pictured at right, has considerably less power than the .30-30 round, pictured at left, fired by the old lever gun. The .30-30 is still the most common round for deer hunting in Tennessee, while hunters mainly view the .223 as a varmint round. 

If access to to high-powered rifles that can be fired quickly is what drives mass shootings, why wasn't there an epidemic of them when lever guns became wildly popular in the late 1800s? There were Tommy Gun shootings in the 1920s, when there weren't modern restrictions on civilian ownership of automatic weapons, but that was gang violence caused by alcohol prohibition the same way drug prohibition drives gang violence today.

Mass shootings first really entered the public consciousness with the Columbine High School shooting in 1998. The Columbine attack was planned around the anniversary of the 1995 Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing that killed 168 people. The assailants in the Columbine massacre planted large bombs made out of propane tanks in the school cafeteria and parking lot planning to blow up the cafeteria during the busiest period of the day, shoot any fleeing survivors, then blow up the parking lot after police, fire fighters, medical personnel and the media arrived. The pair went on a shooting spree after the bombs failed to go off, killing 12 students and one teachers before turning their guns on themselves.

While Columbine was an enormous tragedy, it would have been far worse if the two waves of bombs had detonated. There is a good chance it also would have made later mass killings much worse too. Because it was remembered as a mass shooting, later copycat attacks were also mass shootings. If it had succeeded as a copycat of the Oklahoma City bombing it would have shifted the media narrative to a situation where subsequent copycat attacks would have been centered around explosives.

The Oklahoma City Bombing was carried out with fertilizer and diesel fuel in a rented truck. The only mass murder on U.S. soil with a higher death count occurred when nearly 3,000 were killed on September 11, 2001. The only weapons the assailants had in that attack were box cutters. And the bumbling TSA response to that attack has shown just how pointless  the results can be when government officials starting changing policies and demanding new powers just to be seen "doing something about the problem."

Banning a handful of guns based on their appearance isn't going to solve anything. And removing guns from our society is an impossible pipe dream. Guns are very simple devices. I built the AR-15 pictured above myself. Granted I bought all the parts for it, but that is because the AR-15 is manufactured from materials like CNC-machined billet aluminium and injection-molded plastic. It was designed for an industrialized, first-world nation.

The world's most commonly used assault weapon; the preferred firearm of illiterate rag-tag armies, rebel forces, pirates, war lords and poachers throughout the entire world; is the AK-47. The AR-15 was designed to be light and highly accurate. The Soviet AK-47 was designed to be cheap, ultra-reliable, and so simple that a child soldier can learn how it is put together and how to use it with a few minutes of instruction. 

Keep in mind how completely the war on drugs has failed at stopping anybody who wants illegal drugs from having access to them. Then realize that you can easily go online and read about making a completely functional semi-automatic version of the AK-47 out of a shovel. As long as there is a demand for semi-automatic rifles in this country among people who don't care about laws the firearm genie can't be put back in its bottle. But mass shootings didn't start with widespread ownership of semi-auto firearms anyway. They do strongly coincide with widespread use, decades later, of psychiatric drugs by an increasingly alienated and unhealthy society.

Big Game, Big Beers, Big Portions - Kooky Canuck

On Saturday I had an old friend roll into town with lower level tickets to the Memphis vs. Louisville game at the Forum. This friend, who I attended college with in the late 90s, is one of those human forces of nature who turns up and you know you've just got to just go along and enjoy the whirlwind and live with the epic hangover when he is gone. 

The day started out perfect with great seats, an electrifying atmosphere for the 1:30 tip-off and a nice early lead before the game fell apart in a mess of epically one-sided officiating.

By the time the game ended we'd had several beers apiece and ended up at the Flying Saucer for additional drinks while planning our next move. We found out our mutual friend Jamie, one of the owners over at the Blind Bear on Main Street, had put together a pub crawl down Main for that evening. We knew we needed food if we were going to make it to the end of the night so we headed to the Kooky Canuck, which is right down the block from the Saucer on Second Street.

The unfortunately-named Kooky Canuck used to be called the Big Foot Lodge before a lawsuit from another Bigfoot Lodge on the West Coast forced a name change. Despite the awkward name on the outside of the building the restaurant and bar is still as devoted to big drinks and big portions of food as it was when it had the Big Foot moniker. It is most well-known as the home of the Kookamonga burger, containing four pounds of beef, which has been featured on Man Vs. Food on the Travel Channel.

The 34-ounce draft beers at the Kooky Canuck are also appropriately large. They seemed like a perfectly reasonable beverage choice for a group of people transitioning from a basketball game to a pub crawl.

While looking over the menu I noticed barbecue nachos. I'm normally pretty dismissive of barbecue nachos. In fact, if you lead off a discussion of a barbecue restaurant by praising the barbecue nachos I'll take that as a sign that I shouldn't take your barbecue opinions too seriously. It's not that barbecue nachos aren't good. It's that they are so easy to make well that they can be used to hide sub-par barbecue. Good nachos generally aren't something to brag about. Instead, if you actually manage to screw up barbecue nachos you shouldn't even be in the restaurant business.

That wasn't a problem at the Kooky Canuck. The nachos were incredibly good. They had plenty of real shredded cheese, diced tomatoes and onions, jalapenos and baked beans included with the pulled pork, sauce and chips. Those things are all expected to be considered "good" barbecue nachos. But what really elevated them to the next level was the cilantro sour cream they were topped with. And, as one would expect from the Kooky Canuck, it was a generous portion that kept hunger from being an issue on the pub crawl and later return to the Blind Bear that followed.

Beale Street is mainly for tourists, but I have a lot more fun visiting the restaurants and bars on Main Street. On a related note, in a recent post on Downtown resident Paul Ryburn's blog he mentioned the free Taxi Magic app for smart phones. It's a handy app that is simple to use and highly recommended for anyone planning foolishness like a 1:30 p.m. basketball game followed by bar hopping and an eventual  pub crawl.

Pork in Paradise - Sayulita

Last week two close friends of mine got married in Sayulita, Mexico. The beautiful little surfing village is located on the Pacific coast, south of the Baja Peninsula, in the state of Nayarit. 

My wife and I spent a week there along with a few other friends and absolutely fell in love with the place. It is a peaceful little village far removed from the cartel violence people often associate with Mexico. We stayed in a rented house and freely walked the streets, even at night by flashlight, without ever feeling any sense of danger.

As someone who loves traditional foods in general, and pork-based traditional foods in particular, finding something to eat in Sayulita was like an ongoing treasure hunt.

This taco pastor stand was only open at night and we stopped there on multiple evenings. That giant mound of pork is rotating around a cannister of smoking charcoal the same way shawarma is prepared in Middle Eastern restaurants. That is a pineapple on top that the vendor is shaving off a piece of.

Everything in Sayulita was incredibly affordable. A plate of three tacos pastor was around $30 pesos -- about $2.50 in the U.S.

One of the restaurants we tried was a place called Don Chow located near the plaza in the center of the village.

Inside Don Chow I was greeted with the familiar sight of a barrel cooker for slow smoking pork.

I ordered the Kalua pork, which was pork smoked while wrapped in banana leaves. It was served with rice, Asian slaw and pico de gallo. It was as good as it looks.

My wife had the pork ribs with Asian slaw, edamame and a spring roll. We debated which of us had a better meal with each of us wanting to declare ourselves the winner. That is a sure sign of a great restaurant experience.

 

As much as I love pork, the best part of eating in Sayulita was exploring all the places offering deliciously fresh fish tacos. I'm pretty sure we had fish tacos at least once every day we were there.

There were plenty of the traditional Mexican dishes you'd expect to find like this excellent  chicken with mole sauce...

...And some unexpected gems like the Italian restaurant Mangiafuoco.

Inside Mangiafuoco. A woman making handmade pasta while a man works the wood-fired pizza oven.

My wife had the shrimp pasta. Our table of four shared a pizza as an appetizer that we all declared the best pizza we'd ever had. Unfortunately it was devoured before anyone thought to get a picture of it. 

I had the mahi mahi with an incredible tomato sauce.

We were visiting Sayulita during the week-long festival for Our Lady of Guadalupe and ended up with a parade going past Mangiafuoco while we were dining.

You can get anywhere in the little village on foot in a short period of time. This blog spends a lot of time bashing suburban sprawl. But you need a little time experiencing the complete opposite of it to truly appreciate how soul-crushingly awful communities built around long commutes, strip malls, big chain businesses and cul-de-sacs really are. 

Sayulita is a perfect mix of public spaces, retail businesses, restaurants and residential buildings. Plenty of the businesses have owners living in residences on their upper floors. At night the plaza fills with locals of all ages hanging out together. Human beings are social animals and this is how we evolved to exist together. Not alienated, unhealthy and eating fistfuls of antidepressants the way far too many people end up in U.S. suburbs.  

The tranquil setting in Sayulita makes the brutal cartel violence to the north along Mexico's border with the U.S. seem even more tragic and infuriating. We will never be able to fully put a price on the misery caused by the devastating failure of the drug war.

While we haven't done ANYTHING to reduce the price or availability of illegal drugs, we have devastated communities from Mexico...

...To back home in Memphis.

Your barbecue blogger out on the Pacific on a surfboard. I wish I could teleport back there right now. After a week spent mostly in swim trunks adjusting to the weather in the 20s earlier this week in Memphis was rough.

A Little Soul Food Country Diner - Heavenly Diner

I first tried the recently-opened Heavenly Diner on W. Main Street near downtown Jackson, TN, a couple months ago. The diner is a small space with just a handful of tables. Like the Four Sisters Soul Food on Winchester in Memphis,  Heavenly Diner features a short list of specials each day that makes visiting the place similar to eating diner at someone else's home. "Here is what we cooked today, pick something."

The restaurant does offer burgers, fish sandwiches and barbecue sandwiches each day along with whatever plate meals are being offered but I was in the mood for a soul food plate lunch the first time I visited. There were two vegetable options that day; green beans and turnips; so there was no choice involved there. For my main choice I was offered either pig feet or a beef roast. I'd had a beef roast cooked in my Crock Pot for dinner the night before so I decided to give the pig feet a try.

As much as I love pork I'd never had pig feet before. I wasn't particularly impressed. They have too much skin and connective tissue, and too slimy of a texture, for even my tastes. Keep in mind that I love eating pork rinds, neckbones and chitterlings but I am still saying that. The seasoning on them tasted good so I don't think the preparation was the problem. I think I've just finally found a part of the pig that I don't care for.   

The vegetables seemed a little bland when I first tasted them. When I asked about getting some hot green pepper sauce the young man working behind the counter told me they didn't haven any. Then an older man who ran the place offered me a bottle of his homemade vinegar pepper sauce. It was red and there weren't any peppers in the bottle but the stuff was great on the vegetables.

While I was eating I overheard the older man say he is thinking about offering breakfast in the mornings. The customer he was talking to said, "Oh, you can do breakfast too?" The man responded with shocked indignation, "Of course I can cook breakfast! I've been cooking for 60 years. How could I not know how to fix breakfast?"

The two men weren't there the next time I stopped in a couple weeks later. instead there were several women working behind the counter together. This time I ordered a barbecue sandwich with baked beans so I could sample something I knew I liked when done right. The meal only cost $5 and it featured a solidly good sandwich with a generous bowl of beans in a thick, satisfying sauce.

Unless they just want a sandwich I wouldn't recommend Heavenly Diner to anyone who is a picky eater since their choices will be limited. But I like seeing a place just cooking a couple of random good things from scratch each day. If you like genuine soul food and are willing to try most any food offered to you as long as the cook seems competent stopping by the little restaurant should be a rewarding experience.