Lying in my bunk, my gut churning like a cement mixer filled with oysters and wine and half the food in Charleston, I had another restless night. The chef, occupying the main salon berth--and the other half of Charleston's food--didn't fair much better. But after showers and coffee, we were goodish to go.
Mid-afternoon, we met a guy named Ned who'd just cannonballed in from Ashville for lunch at a classic Spanish place called Málaga. We sat at the bar behind a row of Ibérico hams and drank cold white wine. Back in Montana, Ned had been Chef Drage's cocktail guy at the Ranch at Rock Creek, but he'd moved to North Carolina with his wife or girlfriend or whatever. Now, he'd come down to join us for a couple of nights.
Before turning to cocktails, Ned had been a Montana tree feller and bar bouncer.
It was late for lunch, and Málaga was empty, save for workers prepping for dinner. We sat at the bar. The sun glinted through the Ibéricos, and the light pooled in our wine.
Chef Drage and Ned hadn't seen each other in a couple of years, and they had a lot of catching up to do--the bulk of which seemed to concern bourbon and caviar. I stuffed my face while they were occupied. Fresh anchovies. Serrano ham, bread, croquetas. A cured tuna belly called mojama.
Between bites, I was able to get the gyst of their conversation. They'd teamed-up with a guy named Trey from Jefferson’s Bourbon and put a couple oak casks to age atop the mountains at the Ranch at Rock Creek. The idea being that the cold windy winters would shake and chill the barrel, and the crazy-hot forest fire summers would heat the bourbon while immersing it in wood smoke. The barrels were scheduled to be opened that fall, and Ned couldn't make it.
He looked pained and switched the conversation to caviar. He needed to know what Chef Drage was using, and where he got it.
It was Black River. Sturgeon, not paddlefish.
I refilled my wine, grabbed more tuna belly, idly wondered what the caviar trade was all about because it appeared that Ned had a “caviar hookup” he wanted the chef to consider. They spoke in hushed tones, as if Ned's connection were some oligarch.
The chef laughed and asked who this hookup was.
It was Ned's Missoula tenant, somehow connected to the boutique caviar world.
SItting there slurping wine and eating tuna belly like an orca, I couldn't help but picture a guy in a stained white t-shirt living in a trailer somewhere in Montana. Maybe a dog or two tied to an old dump truck tire. A guy who might be burying ammo and candy corn in his backyard but instead was selling Yellowstone River caviar.
“It’s good shit,” Ned said.
That evening, we found our way back to Xiao Bao Biscuit, where Chef Josh and I had quickly eaten through the entire lunch menu the previous day. Our talk of the Japanese-style cabbage pancake (okonomiyaki) had Ned curious—plus, the dinner menu was different than the lunch menu, so we figured we’d give it another try. We sat inside this time, at a corner table, and sipped cold beers as we snacked on an endless stream of plates.
Afterward, we walked. The streets were crowded with throngs of partying college kids, and we suddenly felt very old—and so we did what white guys do; we sought to compensate. We swung into the Ordinary, where the chef and I had eaten oysters on our first night in town, and downed several platters of the brinys. The place wasn’t our favorite, and was no doubt a tourist trap, but there was something about it we liked—it was a cool old building, and the oysters were spot-on fresh. Feeling much younger after downing a dozen each, we sat back and nursed coffee and rum drinks called Ordinary Joes. They were better than the name indicates.
We didn't feel so young that we wanted to stay out past 10, so we wandered our way back to the marina. Ned slept in the back of his beat-up Montana truck in the parking lot, together with a huge axe and a metal flashlight the size of a baseball bat.
I slept well up there in the V-berth, my stomach smoldering like a wood stove stuffed full of green wood, and the next morning Ned arrived on the boat with huge cups of gas station coffee. We lingered in the cool morning sun, watching the boats and folks about the harbor.
That day, I got my fried chicken. It was a long, hot walk to reach Bertha’s Kitchen, which was a greasy chicken joint with a horde of construction workers in a snaking line outside. The place had won a James Beard Award not long ago, so perhaps gentrification was knocking at its door, but the only outward sign of that was us. Which is to say, if you know the word gentrification then you're probably the problem.
The chef and I had the straight-up fried chicken, but Ned, a former regular at Charlie B’s Bar in Missoula—where Charlie’s pork chop sandwich was famous—went for the fried pork chop and lima beans. I'd not even seen it, hidden behind the grease-splattered glass.
Oil drizzled down our chins as we ate, then we endured a grueling walk back to the marina down a busy, hot street cluttered by road construction--which begs the question of how the construction workers could go back to the asphalt heat after eating that grease. Soon we turned a corner and found some shade and quiet on our way back to the marina along Charleston’s small, old side streets.
There was a nice breeze on the harbor, so we untied Jade and sailed out toward Fort Sumter—where the first shots of the Civil War were fired (April 12, 1861) when Southern militia took the fort from Union soldiers. Apparently, civilians reveled at the shots being fired, and lined the promenade to watch.
We sailed for a few hours in a vain attempt to purge the lunchtime grease. Chef Drage and Ned took turns at the tiller while I enjoyed, for the first time in a lot of miles, not being the one steering.
Once back on the dock, we lounged around the boat, watching our last night descend. When the city cooled off, we walked down King Street to a French restaurant where we had reservations but got coerced into a crowded Italian joint called Melfi’s by the doorman or owner or both; he was oldish and Italian and didn’t take no for an answer.
The place was crowded and loud. We sat at the long wooden bar, and Ned quizzed the bartender about the vermouth that would go into his Negroni. The bartender, young and hip, was a bit dismissive, as if he knew that Ned had slept in the back of his truck, snuggled with a Maglight and an axe, the night before.
Ned, who would rip your ears off if you called him a "mixologist," was both undaunted by the mixologist and disgusted by the Martini & Rossi vermouth. He held the cocktail menu curled in his big fist, and his bald head turned a dark shade of red.
He asked if they had Carpano Antica.
The bartender blinked, obviously wondering how this bald truck-sleeper would even know what Carpano Antica even was. But he nodded. Yes, they had it.
Ned turned to me and pointed to the menu’s legion of Negroni variations. “I don’t know why everyone has to fucking mess with a Negroni. It’s a perfect drink. Don’t mess with it.” He slapped the bar with a big hand, his bald head flushing even redder. “Don’t add your own twist to a Negroni. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, though I’ve never had a Negroni. I admitted this to Ned. The chef, on my other side, laughed.
“Sometimes,” Ned said, “it’s the perfect drink.”
The bartender slid the cocktail across the bar. Ned held it to the light, swirled it, smelled it, and without tasting it said, “Perfect. Thank you. That’s a goddamned Negroni.”
The bartender did a slight bow while drying his hands on the white towel that hung from his apron. Peace settled.
Ned handed the drink to me. He still hadn’t tasted it. He said, “Taste this. This is what I’m talking about.”
I took a sip and shrugged, bewildered both by the particulars of a Negroni and Ned's apparent ability to judge it by smell alone. I handed it back to Ned, who closed his eyes as he sipped, and I grabbed the bottle of wine that sat in front of the chef, poured myself a glass. I gave it a long, hearty sniff. Hints of thirst. Quaffable.
We ate a pizza from the wood-fired oven, finished our drinks, and stepped outside. It was full dark. The owner or doorman was still stationed there, keeping a sharp eye on how many empty seats were in the house in order to keep each one full.
We stepped across King Street to our original destination, a new place called Maison. Chef Drage was interested in some of the new French cooking going on out in the world (i.e. less fat and cream, less hardcore braising, more new, fresh flavors... but still based on the classic techniques).
Word was that Maison was doing something along those lines, and that it was good.
We sat at a window. The server said they had a nice white Burgundy from a wine maker named Marc Soyard. Chef Drage tried it, gave his smile that’s reserved for very good food or drink, and said, “Dude, that’s good.”
We sucked the bottle dry then switched to red as we worked our way through the menu, which seemed to me to be straight-forward classic French. Paté, fois gras, escargot, salad Niçoise, steak tartare, a monkfish chop, dry-aged duck, steak frites.
The place emptied while we ate. Then it closed. Only our table and the staff left, though it took us a while to notice. Formalities disappeared; the servers became talkative. The chef sent out plates that weren’t on the menu, and our guy brought glasses of various wines for us to try, and he chatted about the food as though we were long lost gourmand friends.
Finally, exhausted, Chef Drage leaned back and closed his eyes for a moment, then said, “Food gets so much hype these days, you know? Celebrity chefs, food shows, restaurants everywhere. Every chef’s got to have their own cookbook. People make such a big deal about it. But that’s only one part of the whole thing. You never hear much about the rest, what it is we’re actually trying to do.”
Ned held his arms spread wide as if to indicate the world around him. I thought back to my trip here in my sailboat, days of movement while wondering where the food of Charleston might deliver me. What would come of it all. Where the meaning was.
And I understood then, in that closed restaurant, that all around me was the answer.
Chef Drage had a wine-infused look to his face but his gears were turning. He knew my question before I asked it.
“Indeed,” he said. “It’s about the space, the wine or whatever you’re drinking. The servers, the kitchen, the view. Who you’re with. What you did that day. Sailing today. That’s what’s so cool. You can have the best chef in the world, but if the other parts aren’t there, the meal can only be just so good. That’s a hard thing to create in a restaurant—it’s hard bring all of those pieces together. You can only control so much of it. On a river with friends, you have those things all in place, so all you have to do is cook—and bang, it’s the best meal ever, even if it’s a can of menudo in Mexican Hat, Utah.”
Ned nodded big, exaggerated nods. There was a silence among us, and suddenly from the kitchen as well, as if everything had paused. Then Chef Drage turned to me and raised his wine glass, laughed, and said, “Well, fuck it. Happy birthday, Keller.”
The stools were upside down atop the other tables by the time we got up. Chef Drage held the door open. Before I stepped outside, one of the servers stopped me and said, “The whole kitchen was talking about you guys. That was so fun.”
I grinned but had no idea what to say. I agreed, but I’m not sure why; somehow, I felt as though I’d shared something private and fundamental with this stranger.
Tomorrow, Chef Drage would fly west, Ned would drive back into the hills, and I’d sail north. The night was calm, the air comfortable, the sky black out beyond Charleston’s lights. Standing mid-street, arms still crossed, feet set as if still a Missoula bouncer as a streetlight cut him in half, Ned said, "Nightcap."
It was a declaration. We turned and walked three abreast back downtown. The ruddy-faced server at the Ordinary remembered us with a smile and a nod. We sat, and quickly found ourselves ordering two dozen oysters to top the night off.
The coffee and rum drinks were perfect, and afterward, we walked slowly back to the marina hoping to settle some of the food that churned in our guts. It’d been four days of countless restaurants, cafes, breweries, and one fried chicken shack; we hurt.
Ned crawled into the back of his truck. Chef Drage and I walked the long dock back to Jade. The big, sleek, beautiful yacht Satisfaction tugged slightly on her lines, and Mick popped his head up from down below and said that he’d read--and enjoyed--my piece on fishing quotas in the Fishermen’s Voice newspaper, which he’d grabbed at a gas station in Maine. He was as confused as I was as to why the editor from Garden & Gun had ignored my email.
The next day, we said our quick goodbyes, which we've done all over the country in the wake of various trips. I felt suddenly very alone--the tragedy of the sailor, always saying goodbye to loved ones--as I stood with Jade’s lines in my hands, watching Chef Drage and Ned walk down the dock. Then I pushed off and jumped aboard in time to grab the tiller and get out of Charleston.