Haute Potato

Well, it's finally happened. After years and years of attempts at becoming a REAL city, Nashville finally steps up to the plate with the addition of Spudz, a hole-in-the-wall shitbox out on Charlotte Avenue that serves nothing but giant-assed baked potatoes filled with various carcinogens. Don't talk to me about tapas bars! I don't want to hear about specialty martinis! Shut up already about wine bars with plates of cheese! I want a baked potato joint!

Sister Meg remembers places in malls back in the 80s or whenever that served various stuffed potatoes, but I don't have any memory of that, but then again I was not a mall-hanger-outter. And since I discovered this place, I have since been informed that there are two outposts of something called Tater Shack within spitting distance of town. You would think that in this carbophobic day and age, a baked potato restaurant would be a risky proposition, but I guess not.

Anyway... Spudz has about twenty different fillings for their potatoes, including Chicken Cordon Bleu, Philly Shrimp, Sloppy Joe, Chicken Teriyaki, Ham and Swiss....the list does go on a bit. Needless, to say, I've been twice in a week.

The first trip out, I ordered the "Chicken Parmesan potato" which had very little to do with the charming Italian town of Parma and a whole lot more to do with artery-clogging. One plus of this particular potato: you know exactly what it's going to look like when you throw it up later because it already looks conveniently pre-masticated. I will say: it was pretty damned good. The actual potato part was one of the best baked potatoes I've ever had; the chicken parm part was just hot and cheesy.

On my second trip, I partook of the "Philly Cheesesteak potato." In comparison to the Chicken Parmesan one, this thing was practically health food. Therefore, I discourage getting it.

One other thing: this place is REALLY cheap. I think the most expensive potato on the menu is only $4.29 and they all weigh about three pounds. That's a lot of bang for the buck, if you ask me.

Steak and Chic

So I had my friend Chicago Meg in town for the weekend. She's Chicago Meg because there's already Sister Meg and Aunt Meg and Restaurant Meg and Gallery Meg and Meg the Homeless Lady and honestly when I meet new people now and they say "Hi, I'm Meg!" I say, oh gee, thanks but no thanks, I'm out of identifiers. Chicago Meg likes fun, authentic things so when we were trying to come up with a place for dinner on Saturday, I remembered the old Cherokee Steak House over on 109 between Gallatin and Lebanon. I used to go there occasionally with my parents and back when I was a teenager I thought it was the lamest place on earth but now I think it's kind of fantastic. It's a steak house that's part of a marina; you can boat right up to it, get out, and then go in and eat ten pounds of red meat. It's BYOB (but no beer!) so it's always funny to see who's drinking what and who's wishing they had remembered that it's BYOB. And it's all normal people, you know, people who don't listen to iPods or have memberships to the gym or ever have the urge to talk about the subtext of, well, anything. Just normal steak-eaters.

Anyway, we drove up listening to the new Porter Wagoner record and that was fun and then when we got there, we waited an hour and a half outside, where it was 100+ degrees. We had stopped at the world's worst liquor store for wine and there really weren't many options, so we just picked up a bottle of Yellow Tail, along with some other options, fully expecting to be shamed by the choices we had made. Uhhh, not so much. We had the classiest wines in the joint by far. So that was funny. We sat outside and drank our rapidly-warming wine out of classy plastic cups and finally they called us just as we were actually and literally about to die.

The menu has to sort of be seen to be believed, though I have to love any menu that features the line "Order a platter of sirloins .... for 2, 3 or 4!" Or one regulation-sized DG, they should have also said. You order your steak and you also get to choose your potato option (I regret to say that French fries are still Freedom fries here, though German fries are also avaliable so I wonder exactly what the French had to do to get bumped while the Nazis got to stay on the menu). There were also fried mushrooms (contradictorily called "French-fried"; apparently Freedom doesn't apply to mushrooms.)


I selected a gigantic ribeye and a baked potato; Sister Meg chose a petite filet and Chicago Meg picked the bone-in ribeye, described as "the most flavorful steak on the menu." I think they were right; hers was the best.


We all were a little tipsy so we laughed way more than all the other people in the place but maybe they were laughing at us too because we seemed so amaaaazed at every little bit of silliness, like when the butter showed up in little packets marked "whipped spread." I ate like five of them though so I ain't complaining.

It was a great choice, the opposite of chic, so of course, the chicest thing imaginable, like Doris Duke banging around town in that beat-up station wagon. Dinner for three was seventy dollars and between us we had about fifteen pounds of meat. I'll be putting it on the list for all future Nashville visitors.

Nocturnal Omissions

It seems my list of things not to do to the host of a restaurant was a bit incomplete. So here are a few more tips to prevent me from paying the valet to slash your tires:


1. Incomplete parties. If you are a party of more than, say, one, I am not going to seat you until your compatriots arrive. Every empty chair represents money and you and your invisible party of eleven are costing us money. I know they're "on the way," everyone's on the way. To somewhere. I suggest in your case that the "somewhere" is the Cheesecake Factory.


2. I'm sorry you're in a wheelchair. I am! I totally sympathize with the fact that you drove drunk and had a car wreck and now your legs work like flippers! I swear I get it! But tell me that when you call so that I don't schedule you for the table on the platform. Because lemme tell ya: this is your problem, not mine. Pop a wheelie and get up those stairs already.

3. If we have an item on the menu that costs less than fifteen dollars, the chances of us having a computer screen at the front door that tells us everything from what time a table came in to the blood pressure of the alcoholic on table 41 are pretty slim. I am working off of a yellow legal pad. That's how fancy the system is. So give me a break when I can't tell you if your table will be available within the second. Also? I hate you. I just had your tires slashed.


4. If you are drunk, congratulations! But I wonder if you're as drunk as me?! Probably not. So! Here's the arrangement: I will seat you and be nice to you as long as you don't give me any grief. If you perhaps get the wild idea that you are in charge of me...or god forbid that you are superior to me in any way...oh dear, I hope you enjoy dealing with all the prank calls later this evening. Remember: I have your number from when you made the reservation. I hope you have Prince Albert in a can!

5. I apologize that we are serving a fish you have never heard of. If that makes you nervous, don't order it. If you have never heard of it and you do order it and you dislike it, it occurs to me that this is YOUR problem, not mine. SO I ain't paying for it. That's what I'm saying.

Other than that, you're all perfectly lovely, and we appreciate your business.

Executive Privilege

Well after three lovely months working from home at my new design job, I decided to start working out of an office again, at least a couple of days a week. We now have an intern so he needs some supervision and I admit that I do like getting out of the house a bit. I do NOT like giving up my 2 o'clock nap but then again, it's not every day I'll be doing it.



One exciting thing is that I really love the view from my office, where you can see the Tennessee State Capitol peeking out from behind that white ribbed monstrosity. It's a nice view of part of downtown and I can ride the scooter in to work, so that keeps me from having to pay for parking. I just park it on the sidewalk. And still: everyone wants to yap yap yap about the scooter. It's kind of wearing me out, actually.

I rode it to work all week, when it was over a hundred degrees four of the days. I don't know if that was a great decision as I didn't really get that wind-through-my-hair feeling that I usually do when I ride it; more like somebody had turned a hair dryer on and was holding it three inches from my face. I told someone I felt like an air-cured country ham riding it this week.



The new office also has the world's fanciest bathroom. It has mood lighting and the sound the bathroom makes is the exact same sound you hear in Blue Velvet when the camera starts to go into that severed ear. It's not really an "executive washroom" with a key or anything, though I'm going to start telling people that's what it is. That lady isn't normally standing in it.

To Bugtussle and Back

Today I was thrilled to be invited to the farm where my vegetables are grown. For twenty weeks each year, I get a CSA delivery from Bugtussle Farm, a biodynamic farm about seventy-five miles from Nashville, just across the Kentucky border. And once or twice a year, the farmers - Eric and Cher - invite the families they provide for up for a wildflower tour or a swimming hole party or a farm tour or whatever. The land that they own is amazing. Seriously amazing. Jealousy-inducing amazing. Until I remember that they don't have electricity and then I'm all "Yeah, good luck with that..."

The drive up from Nashville is largely interstate-free, especially after the first ten miles. Then it's two-lane blacktop, through gorgeous countryside and don't-blink towns like Rocky Mound and Frog Pond and Pumpkintown. You also go through some larger ones, like the county seat of Sumner County, Gallatin. I lived outside of Gallatin for a few brief months before going off to college, so it was fun to go through it again and see how little small towns like this change. I was happy to see that the storefront for The Corn Crib was still there, though it's been out of business for over twenty years. I don't know what you bought through that window - popcorn? Roasted corn on the cob? I have no idea, but I've always loved this little narrow storefront.

After Gallatin, there's Westmoreland and then Lafayette ("luh-FAY-et"), where I saw this old theatre. It's not as sad as it looks; it was in the middle of showing Harry Freaking Potter, so there were a thousand cars around and I had to do some careful croppoing to get this Last Picture Show vibe. Then it was just a few more miles to Bugtussle, jsut past the state line. A closed general store and a dog in the road. I couldn't have made it up if I tried. The driveway is a glorious, glorious driveway, the driveway of my dreams: a gravel road that crosses three bridgeless creeks and up and around curves and through glades and wooded valleys.

Then you park and stroll another couple hundred yards and there it is, the house. It's like something out of Dwell, all handmade and tiny with a loft accesible by a tree trunk with wooden pegs jammed into it in a spiral fashion and then an arched bridge from the loft to an even higher loft, which I assume is for their son Ira. As I said, there's no electricity, though I'm sure the wood stove keeps the whole space warm in the winter. they do have a generator of some sort, but I think all it does is power a small refrigerator. It might even be a car battery; I was too crazy with jealousy to take notes or pictures during this part.

There's also an outdoor kitchen, a giant gazebo Eric built (using a chainsaw!) that houses a restaurant-style double sink and a gas stove powered by a big white tank of gas that sits away from the prettiness. It's really beautiful and I'd never leave it. We had a nutty crazy vegan-voodoo -vegetarian lunch with things like raw carrot chewy stuff and uncooked tomato something or other and egg rolls made from soysage and blueberry scones made out of blueberries and, oh, I dunno, sawdust. It was potluck, so I can criticize. I also forgot to bring anything so I should shut right up about that. One interesting thing: there were a lot of children there, belonging to other CSA subscribers, and a lot of them have allergy issues of one sort or another - eggs or wheat or nuts or blah blah and I kept trying to figure out...is it the crazy icky-food diet that makes them this way or are they this way first and this is the diet that works for them? Whatever, the interesting thing was that almost every kid ignored the labored food items (egg rolls, I am looking at you) and just went straight for the just picked tomatoes and watermelon. I know it'll make people leave "au contraire" comments but I think a lot of the allergy stuff is baloney. So the kid pukes. La la la, what kids don't? Anyway.

Then there was swimming in the creek - it was cold in parts and there were fish and crawdads in it so I'm glad Sister Meg didn't come because that would have been the end of that. It was funny to watch the parents who were so cuh-razy about their kids even saying the word "egg" in case they broke out in hives just let their babies float around this creek.

Then the farm tour: a long stroll through the garden where my vegetables come from and I'm glad I've seen it. Eric and Cher provide food for I think 70 families and it all comes from such an amazing small space. Then up to the top of the hill to see the livestock.

The chicken coop was amazing and also the cleanest chicken coop I've ever seen - it's on plastic gliders and Eric hooks the laying house and the sleeping house up to the tractor and drags them to a new spot in the pasture every day. The chickens love this; the movement of the structure stirs up the bugs so all the chickens crowd around while he's moving it. He also moves the livestock paddock every day so that the grass stays healthy and the animals get fresh pasture every day. When he starts to move the fence, all the cows and sheep line up to go through the narrow passage and it's funny, when they get on the other side, you can almost hear them saying I TOLD YOU IT WAS GREENER OVER HERE! They jump around and act crazy. I meant to select the lamb I want for the upcoming butchering but I forgot. Oh well, they all looked delicious.


Then back down the hill and a drowsy hour and a half home. A lovely day.

Dear Diner

First off, I am not a tipped employee, so this won't be some rant about how cheap you are, though let's face it: you are cheap. I work for a (shockingly low) wage one night a week as a host at an "upscale casual" restaurant. As far as I can tell, "upscale casual" means "better than an Applebee's but still not adventurous enough to scare your elderly parents." Plus, Caesar salad.

Lately, there have been some egregious crimes committed at the door...so many that I wonder if perhaps some book has been issued to the diners of America, a book perhaps called How to Look Like in Amateur Diner in Three Steps or Less. So let's correct this behavior now, before it gets out of hand and I have to contact the police regarding your behavior. Feel free to print this handy list out; I recommend lamination.

1. If it is Friday night at 7 o'clock, do not call to make a reservation for Saturday night. I am already busy and harried and two glasses of wine into my shift. I do not care that you forgot to make a reservation earlier in the week for you and your eight - oh wait, maybe seven or no, perhaps fourteen - friends. Wait until tomorrow.

2. If you must bring your children - and really, I don't get why you must; this is what lockable closets are for - do not make a reservation for "four and a half. Hee hee." Unless you actually have half of a child, like in a jar or something, the child will need a chair of some sort or another. So five. But if you do have that jarred thing, by all means bring it in; I'd like to see that.

3. Congratulations on your birthday. Seriously. I'm as shocked as you are that someone hasn't shot you yet. But don't ask me to give you something for free just because you haven't died yet. A lot of us haven't died but we're not running around demanding a free creme brulee. And really, if you want free cake, just go to Chuck E. Cheese and put up with that animatronic bear; it's totally worth it, especially if you're a little tipsy.

4. If you are making a reservation at a restaurant famous for its "view," well, you are obviously an idiot. If you'd like to sightsee, by all means get on a bus and loop around the city dozens and dozens of times. If you'd like to dine, please join us. And don't call five times to reiterate your need for a view. I will seat you by the restrooms and you will say "I asked for a view" and I will reply "yes dear, but you didn't say of what." And I will walk off. Host: 01. You: 00.

5. I do apologize that your table isn't ready when you have arrived fifteen minutes early. But I only apologize once, so don't bring it up it again. Or you will be seated next to those non-specific view-requesters I just put by the bathrooms.

6. On a related note, if your reservation is for 7:00, do not show up at 7:00 and say "we'll have a drink at the bar first" and then sit at the bar for an hour. I will not hold your table and in fact, I will go out of my way to give it away and then at 8:00 when you have finished drinking your Jack and coke, I will seat you, yes, near the non-specific view-requesters near the restrooms. Or the half-baby in a jar.

7. If you are an old person, congratulations. You made it this far! I think you can make it up the three more steps to the platform seating. Consider it a challenge.


8. If you have a reservation for an early hour, do not come in and peer at the half-empty dining room and say "good thing we called! Hardy har har!" because I am privy to information you are not and I will seat the party of fifteen screaming margarita-drinking Red Hat Society ladies due in ten minutes next to you so fast your head will spin.

9. I'm sorry that you are lost. Really, I am. But we have specific directions on the website - and a printable map! - so if you call me and say "I'm facing the city and it's on my right" I am going to laugh at you silently and also I am going to send you the wrong way just for fun. Make sure you take in the view while you sightsee, because you'll be back by the bathrooms.

10. I know it's loud in here. Yes, we are working on it. One idea we have is that if everyone complaining about the noise level would just shut the fuck up, it'd be ever so much quieter. How's that plan work for you?

Scooter Powers, Activate!

After a long long winter and a short short spring, summer is here. And you know what THAT means! Scooter time! After my contractor knocked my scooter over in the basement, I had a devil of a time getting her started. She has a little auto-start feature but I couldn't get that to work. After consulting the manual - which makes IKEA bookshelf-assembly instructions look like the Encyclopedia Brittanica (seriously, the translated Chinese instructions say to "poke the metal stick with a feet," which I finally deciphered as "kick-start.") - I did finally get Dolores started yesterday. Yes, that's her name, Dolores. Dolores. What's the problem with that? And I duct-taped her little broken mirror back on, which is why her name is Dolores. As in "sad." Dolorous.

So today and yesterday I rode her all over Creation, and I did it at thirty-miles an hour, suckas! I rode Dolores to a party! I rode Dolores to the new ice cream shop, Pied Piper Creamery that only makes homemade ice cream (I had toasted coconut and roasted pecan ice cream, if you must know)...they even have a used book trade program. I rode her to the new coffee shop, Sip. I rode her to the vegetarian roach coach and had a Tuscan Wrap. I rode her to the grocery store and to the liquor store (under the seat there is enough room for one bag of groceries and two bottles of wine; I've tested). And I did a full-day's work! Three hours!

Lemme tell you - if you are shy or don't have your hair done the way you like it, don't get a scooter. People will TALK TO YOU. And they ask questions. How many ccs does it have? Does it have blah blah blah torque? Does it get good gas mileage? I have no clue; do I look like The Fonz? No! I do NOT look like The Fonz! I look CUTE on it! Cute cute cute. HOT even. And I get waves from other motorcyclists, yes I do. They give me the down wave, that's what I call it, where they point out at the ground to their side. Wait! Perhaps they are not waving. They are pointing to the place on the pavement where I am about to have a wreck. Oh well, ç'est la vie! Or as they say in France, "Aaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyy..."