I sailed into Charleston Harbor hot and tired. I'd been three months on my boat in the Bahamas, one month of which was spent with a major infection inside my foot. I didn't know what was going on; all I knew was that my left foot was red, swollen, and pretty damn hot. I’d thought I’d broken it, maybe had a stray bone fragment.
The didgeridoo playing, catamaran-sailing, crazy-ass wolf pelt hat-wearing, kite-surfing anesthesiologist on a nearby boat stuffed some forceps into the hole between my pinky toe and the next one and fished around. It hurt bad. He didn't find anything. Probably because the splinter was so big that it felt like a tarsal bone. Or maybe because he'd been smoking a joint the size of a snorkel.
I spent that month stuck on anchor, half-feverish while eating antibiotics like Skittles, my foot all messed up. After four weeks of this, friends in the anchorage finally decided to make me see a Bahamian doctor in Marsh Harbour. The doctor talked as he examined me, telling me about his time in the ER in Nassau, pulling bullets and knives and other stuff out of people every night. Gang violence, back then.
He also diagnosed a woman's herpes via Zoom or Skype or whatever it was while sterilizing my foot. She was on one of the outer islands, he said. It's common. Then he flipped his laptop closed, sliced my foot open, and wrenched out a chunk of wood the size of a dog tooth. It was a crazy feeling of removal when the stick exited; my body instantly relaxed, and I felt better than I had since the moment the wood penetrated the skin.
The doctor held the chunk of wood in the air and blurted, "Holy shit!"
I paid a hundred and twenty in cash. Problem solved. There's a lot to appreciate about a third world medical system.
Afterward, I splurged on a cheeseburger and beer at a fancy marina in Treasure Cay, then sailed south across the Northeast Providence Channel and on down to Eleuthera. It was a quick run south, and in a couple weeks I returned north and crossed the Stream back to the States in a single hard push. When I hit Florida, the roller furler (the unit that holds the head sail and allows it to roll and unroll) on my boat broke, which would cost thousands and be a difficult project--but it was also the project that led me to Bluffton, South Carolina, for the first time. There, I spent time with friends George and Lillian, and met what, years later, would become my boat, Polaris Jack.
By the time all of that happened, I was in a rush to reach Charleston in order to host a visiting chef. Chef Josh Drage was--and is--the executive chef at the Ranch at Rock Creek in Montana. It's both a Relais & Chateau and Forbes Five Star luxury guest ranch; the first joint to have received those accolades. Translated, that means spare-no-expense everything--most importantly, food. Top-notch chefs leave New York and Seattle to work for Chef Drage. It's a hush-hush getaway for the rich and famous. And for those employed by the rich and famous, like our politicians.
Chef Drage was coming to Charleston on reconnaissance--he intended to seek out the best food the small city had to offer. He had four days, a golden credit card, and Charleston at his fingertips.
The purpose, of course, being that a top-tier chef in Montana needs to stay up-to-date on what's going on in the food world, and Charleston was known for its food.
Me, I was there as the reporter; my job was to join Chef Drage on a food tour of the city and, afterward, write a piece about the trip for a relevant publication—some high end magazine that might garner media attention. See, I had credentials: years earlier, I'd been a regular contributor to the Fisherman's Voice, which is a free monthly rag concerned with the commercial fishing industry--it can be found in most gas staions in coastal Maine, right beside the rubber gloves.
Plus, I could eat and drink pretty good.
I believe that sums-up my CV. That and some clams.
I'd committed to hosting Chef Drage aboard my boat, Jade. Meaning, he'd be sleeping aboard. What else would a purist chef from Montana do when visiting a maritime city in South Carolina? Call it cultural immersion. The intersection of place and cuisine. He could stay at a shwank hotel anytime he wanted, and that might be the thing to do in Dallas or Los Angeles. But here, in maritime Charleston, he was going to sleep aboard a boat in the famous, historic harbor.
I splurged and reserved a slip at the city marina. But when I arrived, they'd stationed me nearly beneath the bridge, which was not only a bad spot aesthetically, it was also deep within a tangled maze of slips. I'd planned to take the chef on a sail or two around the harbor, and being stuffed back in a corridor filled with million dollar yachts wouldn't make for easy access; my boat was made to sail, not pilot close-quarter situations.
I tied up at the fuel dock and made the long walk to the offices, where, in my dirty, ragged, sweaty state, I explained to an apparently 14 year old girl that I was a reporter in town to host a visiting chef. She poker-faced me until I looked at my feet. She was used to dealing with some seriously fancy boats and theoretically important people. Some fry cook from Montana sleeping aboard an old boat wasn't very impressive. Neither, apparently, was I.
Unimportant, unimpressive, sure; but I was persistent. When she found out that I had almost no reverse and seriously limited maneuverability, she began to understand that a redneck chef and sailor could together wreak some havoc at their nice marina, so she gave me a berth on the outer dock, which was a perfect spot. A famously long walk to the restrooms and town, so not super desirable to some, but perfect for Jade.
The slip was, in fact, across from a massive, ultra-fancy black sailboat that had the Rolling Stone's lips insignia both on the stern of the boat and on the doormat they set on the dock. The boat’s name was Satisfaction.
Chef Drage met me at the marina, and we quickly went to a small French joint for some cold rosé and snacks. He spent most of the time on his phone, googling restaurants that he'd heard of or hadn't yet heard of, planning our next days. Several times, he asked me what I wanted to eat, as if this were my deal. When all I could say was that I wanted fried chicken and red wine, and maybe some barbeque--or perhaps we should check out that famous place, Husk--he went back to his phone. He didn’t want to eat at the famous places, and he didn’t want some crap barbeque. He wanted food cooked by young, earnest, exciting chefs. People who were doing some new things, experimenting, maybe failing, maybe succeeding. Even the famous Husk was old news, left by its celebrity chef, Sean Brock, to tread water.
The rosé we had sitting in a bucket of ice, though, was killer; I'd never had rosé before, and had thought the chef had been kidding when he ordered a bottle. I'd always thought it was the cheap wine you got at a gas station. But this stuff was delicious, and just thinking about it pivots me back to that place, that moment.
After leaving the little French cafe, we walked around the city and ate oysters and drank more rosé, then we walked around the city some more and ate more oysters and drank more rosé. All of which may have been a factor in me not ever being able to come up with a publishable article about Chef Drage's trip to Charleston.
In my defense, I had emailed the editor of the high-end, hip Southern magazine, Garden & Gun, and told him that we'd be in town. He hadn't responded. Apparently, he'd never read my piece on fish quotas in the Fishermen's Voice. The slouch.
Or maybe he thought the name of the newspaper was too corny to be of concern.
Back aboard the boat, the lights of the harbor did what they were supposed to do, danced and twinkled over the waters. The city's noises were new to us, but as we sat in the cockpit feeling the gentle watery motion, all was good.
We both, with such different reasons for our exhaustion, were able to relax—strange as that need sounds coming from two guys who were ostensibly living the dream: me, sailing around. Him, a top-level chef living in the mountains of Montana. But I couldn't find a way to make a living, and he couldn’t find a way to work less than 70 hours a week.
I slept in the V-berth, and put Chef Drage in the big main salon berth. Cool sea air descended on the harbor.
My sleep, though, was restless. I'd been dividing my time between my old sailboat—I’d gotten her super cheap because she’d survived an explosion—and a cabin in Maine that’s under 100 square feet. It had been years since I'd had running water. So I felt a bit out of place eating so much expensive food and drinking such good wine.
Which isn't to say that I don't love and cherish it; only that the food scene can be shocking when one first comes face to face with its opulence.
Now, I’ve read my Jim Harrison, Anthony Bourdain, Bill Buford, MFK Fischer, that stuff; and I’ve eaten some pretty good food—most of it, granted, with Chef Drage. Other than a comparable food tour of Portland, Maine, those meals have primarily been cooked over fires in wild places, on rivers or mountains or deserts, not in good restaurants.
He and I had gone to college together, were housemates for a spell, and have canoed many of Montana’s waterways, eating our way down the rivers. I drove with him from Missoula through Southern Utah to Scottsdale when he went to culinary school, and I watched from the sidelines as he climbed the food-world ranks, eventually carving out a special niche.
(That's not entirely true; I wasn't always on the sideline. I worked for him for a single night, then quit the following morning. It was awesome.)
Back in those days, Chef Drage was a youngish long-haired Jeff Bridges sort in a white 80’s Subaru wagon piled with backcountry ski gear, cast iron pans, an old dog, and a purple battery-operated boombox. Add in a case each of good wine and cheap beer,a cooler full of primal elk cuts, veal stock, morel mushrooms, and a few skillets worth of cutthroat trout on ice, and that’s how he arrived at the Ranch at Rock Creek to cook a meal for the start-up investor who’d just dropped millions to build the place, and who’d heard of the young chef via a local logger.
The young chef cooked for the owner, and quickly became their first and only executive chef.
And that's where he's stayed, hidden out there in Montana, far from the world of conspicuous prestige—Michelin stars and James Beard Awards and so forth; out there, Chef Drage quietly and all but anonymously cooks top tier food for a mostly—but not entirely—exclusive clientele. He doesn’t talk much about the people for whom he cooks (there’s something of a code of silence in his kitchen) and when a celebrity eats in his restaurant—which is not uncommon—there is zero media. He’ll just as happily cook for Scarlett Johansson’s wedding, or Thomas Keller’s birthday, as for a group of ranchers and cowboys, although he once admitted that he can get unduly depressed when, say, Tommy Lee Jones doesn’t finish his elk meatloaf (“Dude, I finished Men in Black. And that was a good fucking meatloaf.”).
We spent the following day wandering the city, stopping in here and there for coffees and croissants then rosé and oysters. Neither of us enjoyed the heat but thought the long walks necessary to burn off the calories we were consuming. The more I thought about the food, and the more the chef talked about it, the more I came to understand that the opulence that I was so disdainful of the previous night had a legitimate flip side. Of course I knew that, but sometimes one needs to be reminded. The point here was that we were in search of young chefs who were taking food, and its trajectory, very seriously--caring for where it came from, how it was handled, and what became of it. Cooking is an art, so similar to writing--only one gets to eat it. And yes, oftentimes it's overdone, ruined. Opulent or not.
Writing a novel, Chef Drage said, must be like taking all of the food he cooks in a couple of years and storing it in the walk-in, hoping some dude from NYC will like it enough to buy it.
For lunch, we sat outside at the old gas station that had been turned into the hotspot restaurant, Xao Bao Biscuit. It was the chef’s sole concession to eating at a popular place, but since my friend Lillian from Bluffton had given it such high reviews, we felt obligated to eat every single thing on the menu. Which was no problem--reminiscent of Homer Simpson’s famous line, “I want the most expensive thing on the menu stuffed with the second most expensive thing.” Or something like that.
That afternoon, we hung around the boat and installed a new solar panel while enjoying the cool harbor breeze that the city streets lacked.
We decided on a relatively new place called Chubby Fish for dinner. Chef Drage had heard of it through the culinary grapevine. It was a small, tight, bustling place with a chalkboard menu. It felt good, walking in. The kitchen was beneath the menu, and the metallic ting of pots and pans mixed with the food smells. We sat beside a picture window facing a cozy intersection.
Needless to say, we drank rosé, downed a dozen oysters; then we began ordering and didn't stop until we'd had everything on the menu at least once. Some things, we had to double-up on. The cobia collar and the roasted bone marrow covered in trout roe weren't bad. Not bad at all.
Working on lobster boats and as a clam digger, I’m no stranger to fresh seafood. And I’d eaten my share of right-out-of-the-water fish and conch over the last few months—the highlight being a huge, super rare wahoo steak that my buddy Reggie had caught—but all of that was straight-forward cast iron seared, which is wonderful, but Chubby Fish made me recall MFK Fischer’s line, “Ah, what a pity that I do not have little taste-buds clear to the bottom of my stomach.”
That's it for now. That felt long and exhausting for me, too. Check back for Part the Second of the Charleston tour, wherein Ned, the Montana logger-gone-cocktail aficionado and black market caviar dealer, has words with a "mixologist" over a bastardized Negroni. We sail the harbor, return to Xao Bao, then eat so much at a small French place that the entire staff takes a moment to bare witness. Also, there's fried chicken in there somewhere, finally.
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Fair winds, following seas, and shitloads of oysters and rosé.