24/07/2025
Hello hello,
First thing's first, we really appreciate the fact that folks have taken the time to reach out to see how we're doing and to enquire as to what we'll be up to down the track.
While we didn't have uprooting our business and our home on our 2025 bingo card, we will forever be immensely proud of what it is that we've accomplished over the last few years. Is there more to do? Of course. But in the meantime, we're grateful to have been something of a gateway to real Southern food in a place that's just about as far from Appalachia as a person can get.
Mostly, we've been trying to adjust to civilian life. It's funny, you can spend 4 years or so rolling out of bed at stupid o'clock and trying to juggle a job and a family with a restaurant where some damned fool refuses to buy premade buns or chips, and after awhile the absurd seems perfectly normal. But if I'm being honest, I reckon the borderline absurd is what makes it all worthwhile.
If you told someone that you wanted to make a cheeseburger, but first you needed to get a sourdough starter going, and then spend hours making some lard for your buns and then a couple of days making said buns, they'd start to worry. If you then told that someone that you'd need to take some time to smoke some onions, tomatoes and garlic so that you could follow-up by spending a few hours making your BBQ sauce, they'd worry that perhaps they weren't worried enough. If you then told them that on the day you'd be grinding a mixture of chuck and brisket so that you could form a big 'ol patty and smoke it for a bit before vacuum sealing it and putting it into a sous-vide for a couple of hours, they'd likely start voicing their concerns in the hopes that you'd come back to the land of the lackadaisically sane. If you were to tell them that you'd be flashing your ground in-house, smoked and sous-vided patty in an unhealthy amount of beef tallow that you had also rendered in-house, before serving it up on your homemade bun with mayo, mustard, gherkins, thinly sliced onions and that BBQ sauce that anyone reading this has already forgotten, well I reckon you'd have someone telling you that your cheese has done slipped off your cracker.
Now, do it again and again while looking after a menu full of items that are treated with the same level of respect.
That's what we did, and for anyone wondering, that's what we'll be doing down the track.
No doubt it would be easier to find a space where we could serve up 'food' by plating up a bunch of mass-produced, soulless sludge. Or, we could try to convince ourselves that a fried egg on a store-bought roll with some badly cooked bacon, wilted rocket and a sauce that's as natural as motor oil is the bestest best thing that you'll ever have.
That's not what we're about.
So, where to from here?
Our son has recently learned that the fat American's name isn't "daddy go to work?" We've fried some chicken, tinkered with veal piccata and I've currently got a meat sauce on the stove that's hours in the making in preparation for a lasagne that's hours away from being done. All of that is to say that for the time being, we're going to enjoy living like normal folks. But rest assured that we'll be up to something sooner or later. Watch this space.
In the meantime, we'll try to update y'all with our random cooking experiments and whatever else we feel like yammering on about. As always, we hope y'all are looking after one another.
As an aside, how great is it to embrace good food that looks bad? lol In a world full of filter-savvy Instagram monsters, I reckon there's no shame in a badly taken photo of poorly plated deliciousness
Fried chicken with mac & cheese with a side of chicken gravy, livers, greens + ham hock and corn.
Veal piccata/scallopini/stuff from my head (onions, mushrooms, garlic, lemon zest & juice, olives, capers, parsley, white wine a bit of chili cream and a touch of stock) with some Heston style roasted potatoes and corn.
Now, go cook something!
