Cornbread Nation 7: The Best of Southern Food Writing

By Daniel Patterson, Susan Orlean, Sara Roahen and 44 more

How does Southern food look from the outside? The form is caught in constantly dueling stereotypes: It’s so often imagined as either the touchingly down-home feast or the heartstopping health scourge of a nation. But as any Southern transplant will tell you once they’ve spent time in the region, Southerners share their lives in food, with a complex mix of stories of belonging and not belonging and of traditions that form identities of many kinds.


Cornbread Nation 7, edited by Francis Lam, brings together the best Southern food writing from recent years, including well-known food writers such as Sara Roahen and Brett Anderson, a couple of classic writers such as Langston Hughes, and some newcomers. The collection, divided into five sections (“Come In and Stay Awhile,” “Provisions and Providers,” “Five Ways of Looking at Southern Food,” “The South, Stepping Out,” and “Southerners Going Home”), tells the stories both of Southerners as they move through the world and of those who ended up in the South. It explores from where and from whom food comes, and it looks at what food means to culture and how it relates to home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: May 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780820346953

Book preview

Introduction

Francis Lam

In my younger, more offensive years, I used to say that Michigan was the South’s northernmost state, on account of the popularity of pickup trucks and country music. I also thought any state that started with a vowel was probably dispensable, and for proof, I would start with Alabama, Arkansas.

What enabled me to such opinions? A privileged, cosmopoli-vincial upbringing in … New Jersey.

We were, of course, normal. And our normalness was modern, urban, and worldly. By the 1980s, our shopping malls had Japanese sushi! (Made by Chinese people.) And Greek gyros! (Made by machines.) I thought then that the South was backward and closed minded and in love with Billy Ray Cyrus.

I lived in my actively ignorant state for years, blithely casting aspersions on places and people I knew nothing about. I grew up some, eventually, and did the equally-abstract-180 thing: Wait, I don’t know anything about the South. How can I hate it? Um … now I should love it! I fetishized soul food and barbecue; I talked about the greatness of rock-and-roll bands from Chapel Hill. I went around self-righteously shaming anyone who talked disparagingly of rednecks before I had met anyone who could have reasonably been called one.

And here I am, many more years after that, welcoming you to an anthology of Southern food writing. Past editions of Cornbread Nation have been edited by the likes of John Egerton, Lolis Elie, Ronni Lundy—Southerners of consequence—so this is a responsibility that is deep and serious.

My own words were included in the last edition of Cornbread Nation. It was a story about meeting a retired Cajun shrimper in Mississippi, who confessed that he resented the Vietnamese people working the waters he grew up on, but who also offered me, an Asian stranger, a standing invitation to come over for crawfish. He was generous and tough, lovely and complicated, and I met him, Mr. Leroy, while I was living on and off in his hometown of Biloxi, Mississippi.

I was brought there by recovery work after the storm, which we all called Hurricane Katrina, and I stayed because I’d fallen in love. With a woman, in particular, but also with a community, a place with a sense of its own place. My neighbors, like Mr. Leroy, or like Sue Nguyen, or like Fofo Gilich, or like Lucille Bennett were Cajun, Croatian, Caribbean, white, brown, black, yellow; they were all Biloxians.

I once asked Miz Loren, who sold vegetables under the highway overpass, how a Barbadian like herself ended up in Biloxi. "I didn’t end up in Biloxi, she said. You end up somewhere when you try to go somewhere else and find you’re not welcomed there. I came to Biloxi."

I tell that story about Loren all the time. It makes me think of her, but just as much, it makes me think of how schooled I have been by the South, how my old ideas of what the South was stopped mattering when I started actually getting to know Southerners. It makes me think of the richness I’ve found once I started becoming an honorary Southerner: richness of character, richness of spirit. Richness of story, richness of place.

That richness is generous and tough, lovely and complicated. There is beauty, but not always. Outsiders’ assumptions usually don’t play out, changing our field of vision. But sometimes they do, solidifying stereotypes. I know my share of Southerners who now live here in New York City. When Southerners leave the South, they bring their identities along, but the South they bring with them bobs and weaves, bends and melts, sometimes turning into something altogether different than what they knew back home.

This collection of stories, essays, and reportage comes from those shifting perspectives (and through the tireless work of Sara Camp Arnold, John T. Edge, and Amy Evans). I originally thought I would concentrate the collection on stories of outsiders coming to the South. But soon, because the South isn’t some hermetically sealed bubble that may or may not include Kentucky, I saw that it needed to include stories of Southerners as they move through the world, changing it as it changes them. (And, honestly, some pieces we included just because we loved reading them—forty-something selections in, you’ve got to let your hair down a little bit.)

In Come In and Stay Awhile we hear from and about adventurers, wanderers, immigrants, and, yes, some people who ended up in the South. Sara Roahen, originally a woman of Wisconsin with delicate Californian produce sensibilities, struggles with the hock-fisted pummeling that vegetables get in her adopted home of New Orleans. Daniel Patterson—a writer so brilliant it seems almost a shame he insists on being a world-class chef—shows us a sepia Miami of Jewish settlers. Susan Orlean paints a different Miami for us, this one of a community weaving itself around an unforgotten past in Cuba. We hear from chef and cultural critic Eddie Huang on the awkwardness and anger of the immigrant, and about the Houston chef Chris Shepherd, whose mission is to make people see and taste the gifts of those immigrants.

From Chilton County peaches to Vidalia onions, perhaps no area of the country is more attuned to the regional provenance of its food than the South. In Provisions and Providers we take looks at whence, and from whom, that food comes. Besha Rodell spends time with the closest thing to a superstar the shepherd world has, and Barry Estabrook and Gabriel Thompson show us the world of the migrant workers who keep tomatoes and chickens cheap. Meanwhile, Burkhard Bilger follows a cult devoted to bacteria so fascinating that after reading about them, you will either want to unplug your refrigerator or fumigate your home and seal it in plastic.

There follow Five Ways of Looking at Southern Food, a series of pieces that pose theories and questions about what food means to culture. Julia Reed starts with a whirlwind of regional culinary pride, befitting the fact that Southern cooking has become, paradoxically, our national regional cuisine. Kevin Young digs poetically into the pain of our tastes, and Robert Moss asks whether Southern cooking has turned from an alliance of local cuisines to an amalgamation of clichés.

In The South, Stepping Out, we gather expats, both human and conceptual. We see Sarah Hepola declaring her Texan identity in Ro-Tel and Velveeta while stranded, queso-less, in New York. We see the Peninsula Grill’s 28,000-calorie coconut cake as an ambassador for Southern baking. And we see a whole lot of soul food, which, maybe more than any other Southern cuisine, is so loaded with struggle and pride and issues of culture, race, and class that it’s impossible to imagine America without it.

Finally, there is Southerners Going Home. Some of these stories are literal, like Brett Anderson’s story of the New Orleans chef Donald Link opening a branch of Cochon, his Cajun-style restaurant, back in his own Cajun country. Courtney Balestier and Monique Truong grapple with what home means after being away. We include, too, remembrances of a pitmaster and a wordsmith who have passed on.

This book is a continuing education for me on what it means to be Southern. I recognize my odd position as a guide to the South, and I hope that my ignorances and curiosities don’t get too much in the way. I hope, instead, that my unfamiliarity helps to fill this book with ideas that you know well, but that you will be inspired to look at them again, or anew.

The other day, someone asked me, How do I become a food writer? I imagined that the question wasn’t actually, How do I make enough money to not starve while writing about food? and was something more literal. Almost by instinct, words came from my mouth. You eat, you read, you write, I said. You look, you taste, you chew. You think, you write. But most important, you talk with people. You share with them. You listen to them. You write. You ask them their stories. You write. You try to deserve their stories, you try to do right by them and their stories by remembering them, writing them down, and sharing them.

I am grateful for all the stories here, the people they are by and about, and how they have been shared with us. I hope you enjoy them.

Come In and Stay Awhile

We Waited as Long as We Could

Daniel Patterson

The first restaurant I ever loved was a deli in Miami called Wolfie Cohen’s Rascal House. A short drive away from the apartment where my grandparents lived during the winter, it opened in 1954, and maintained from then on the midcentury look of the kind of place where Frank Sinatra would eat after a show (which he did). Part New York-style deli, part diner, it had red vinyl booths, fluorescent lights, and Formica tabletops. They served Russian-Jewish food—pastrami, chicken soup, and chopped liver. Everything was good, but I didn’t love it for the food. I loved it because I went there with my grandfather.

It was my grandfather who taught me what’s important about restaurants: that they are places in which to escape from the world, places where people can feel brighter, wealthier, happier than they really are. For cooks, I would later discover, they are a kind of shelter, obliterating everything outside of them and replacing the void with a reality of their own. For me, even now, the front door of a restaurant is a looking glass, and on the other side lies the promise of a better life.

There’s much I don’t remember about my childhood, but I still dream about breakfast at the Rascal House. On those mornings, already eager with anticipation, I’d open my eyes to see my grandfather standing next to the folding door that separated our sleeping area from the rest of the living room, as if he had materialized out of thin air. I would slip out of bed quietly, and we would walk to the car in near darkness, the already-warm air sweet with the scent of gardenias. We would drive through nondescript suburban sprawl under a brightening sky, toward the wide causeways of northern Miami.

The sign would appear first, towering over the low-slung building, with the Rascal, a glowing, eerily disembodied head, perched on top. No matter how early we were, there would be a line. If we were lucky, it would only be about twenty feet out the door and around the corner. If we weren’t, it would stretch for a city block. And every time, my grandfather, whom we called Papa, would sigh. He was not a terribly patient person, eternally fidgeting, shifting his weight from one foot to another and jingling the change in his pocket. I never minded the wait, though, because it gave us more time together. How’s my favorite grandson? he used to ask me, with his big smile and eyes that glittered and danced. I’d shrug and look away, but still I’d hold that moment close, like a treasure.

Inside the restaurant there were more lines, organized by party size and separated by waist-high stainless-steel chutes. Regulars struck up conversations as they waited—about the weather, their arthritis, their wayward children. Tourists listening and occasionally chiming in. It was a rare day when Papa didn’t see someone he knew.

The large dining-room space beyond, when we finally made it that far, was filled with booths and tables on one side and a diner-style counter on the other, where we often sat. The walls were covered with pictures of celebrities who had eaten at the restaurant, and cheeky aphorisms: As I see it, there are two kinds of people in this world: people who love delis and people you shouldn’t associate with.

At the Rascal House, portions were generous and flavors big. At breakfast the tables were set with baskets of Danish and rolls to snack on; at lunch, the sweets morphed into jars of pickles. The menu, bright yellow and huge, could have served as a caution flag on a raceway. There were endless choices: matzo brei, pickled herring, borscht, latkes fried in chicken fat and butter. It was peasant food, earthy and visceral. To me, it was the taste of home.

My mother’s family were Russian Jews who fled the pogroms at the beginning of the twentieth century. People like them came to America by the thousands in those days, escaping the violence in Odessa and Minsk and the little towns that dotted the countryside. Waves of refugees washed onto the shores of Manhattan and dispersed in clusters along the East Coast. My great-grandparents arrived in 1909, settled in Massachusetts, and gradually assimilated into American society. They had kids. Made some money. The kids grew up, got a little too comfortable, and, when they inevitably wearied of the harsh New England winters, turned their gazes south.

The city was barely born when the snowbirds, as they came to be called, began to arrive. Slowly at first, and then faster after the First World War, East Coast Jews and others developed the beachfront, and Miami became a winter hangout for well-heeled New Yorkers. Though the NO DOGS OR JEWS ALLOWED signs stayed up for many years, the diaspora of aging first-generation refugees, whose memories were still fresh with the horrors that they had left behind, were able to make a community for themselves. They built hotels and businesses, synagogues in which to worship, and delis that reminded them of the food they had grown up with.

The Rascal House, probably the most famous of these, occupied a one-story building designed in Miami Modern style, with an awning that stretched above two long, windowed walls. Founded by Wolfie Cohen, a onetime busboy who moved to Miami and started a string of successful restaurants, the Rascal House played to a big audience. It was a home away from home for the locals who came regularly to eat and catch up, many of whom lived in boardinghouses with no kitchens. The elderly on fixed incomes came for the early-bird breakfasts and dinners, and the tourists came for sandwiches piled high with pastrami and corned beef. It was a showy place, with an open kitchen and glass display cases always filled with lavish spreads of salads and desserts. Open twenty-four hours, it became a late-night dinner and cocktail hangout for celebrities and hipsters. It was a success from the moment it opened, and when my grandfather started taking me, it was still at the height of its popularity, feeding thousands of people a day.

We went to the Rascal House often for lunch, sometimes for dinner, usually with the whole family. It was Americanized ethnic food, full of big gestures, its forms distorted and grandiose. The sandwiches bordered on the grotesque: thick pieces of bread packed with a fist of cooked meat. It was there that I learned to order the meat sliced from the fattiest section of the muscle, and to add a piece of tongue for extra richness. I loaded my sandwiches with grainy mustard and pickled cabbage to cut through the mouthful of hot animal fat, the toasted bread and caraway drifting on top like a perfume. I still crave that intensity, the balance built on concentration, fat, and whiplash acidity, delivered like a gut punch.

I recognized many of those big gestures, that showmanship and charisma, in Papa. At a proud five feet, four inches, the guy could really command a room, always entering in a flurry of kisses, handshakes. He was a patriarch who led with charm rather than power, and the reason that his offspring all lived within a thirty-minute radius of my grandparents’ apartment in Massachusetts when I was growing up. He was constantly on the phone, settling feuds and patching over rough spots among his brood. I can still hear him saying, That’s not nice! His voice rose at the end to punctuate the admonition. He always seemed surprised that there was so much not-niceness in the world, and especially within his family. But he did what he could. My grandparents, who married at eighteen and nineteen years old, managed to stay together for seventy-five years, in large part because of his good nature.

That generosity of spirit was palpable. One time I made an offhand comment about liking a certain kind of cookie that my grandparents had. I for got all about it until the next time I visited. When I arrived, Papa took me immediately to a cupboard and opened the door, behind which were shelves stacked high with boxes of those cookies, far more than I could ever eat. This tendency toward excess led him in other directions as well, like the vodka that went into his orange juice in the morning, and his steady diet of steaks and fully loaded baked potatoes that landed him in the hospital at age seventy-five for six heart bypasses. He lived almost twenty years after that, without ever changing his diet.

His appetites largely drove the choices of restaurants we went to. If it wasn’t the Rascal House, then it was certain we would find ourselves at a place that served steak, potatoes, and whiskey. It was equally certain that there would be an early-bird special. At 5 p.m. sharp—he was never late—we would arrive at whatever restaurant he’d picked, usually a once-swank place with worn carpets, paintings of whaling ships on the walls, and a quality of light that might be compared unfavorably to a mausoleum’s. None of it dampened my enthusiasm. Papa sat at the head of the table, and I sat next to him. The first thing he would do was order a Manhattan, and he always gave me the cherries—at least three, sometimes more. It was part of our ritual, and I grew to crave their plasticine texture and manufactured cherry taste, like bourbon-flavored cough syrup. I usually ordered the steak and baked potato, like he did. He taught me how to season the potato by slashing across the flesh to score it, mashing it with a fork, and then mixing in butter, salt, and pepper. Only when the potato was properly seasoned would I add the sour cream on top.

For every year as far back as I can remember, we visited my grandparents in Florida. By the time we stepped off the plane, into air the temperature and viscosity of bathwater, Papa was already waiting at the curb. With the air-conditioning cranked and Lawrence Welk playing softly on the radio, he would drive us to their little apartment in a tall building full of other apartments. It had floral wallpaper and pink terrycloth toilet-seat covers. We swam in the pool and the ocean. We played miniature golf, shuffleboard, and long games of Scrabble. We went out to dinner often, and we’d always visit the Rascal House at least once.

In truth, I spent much of my time in Miami bored, my head stuck in a book. I never understood the attraction—the languid energy and constant feeling of retirement pressing in, of too much empty space. As if to drive home the point, Papa would read the obituaries while we sat together at breakfast. I told him once that it seemed morbid to me, and he looked surprised. How else will I know if one of my friends has died? he asked.

He did have an astonishing number of friends, and he outlasted almost all of them. He also outlasted his savings. My grandparents lived well—es pecially later in life—because of my great-grandmother, Sarah Katz. Sarah never learned to read or write English, but she came to understand American business quite well. She started as a janitor when she arrived in the country, while her husband opened a cabinetry shop. She invested their earnings in real estate, and by the 1960s she owned several apartment buildings in downtown Cambridge, the value of which today would support the entire extended family quite nicely.

Of course, those buildings and the fortune she amassed are long gone. Papa’s generosity was equaled only by his talent for squandering money. In the decades after Sarah’s death, he kept spending. He paid for vacations and summer camp for the kids and grandkids, and sent checks to every family member on every birthday. He flew us down to Miami and bought our meals. He lent money to friends and invested in businesses that quickly failed, including his own. And then, one day, it was gone. My grandparents sold their condo in Florida and moved back to Massachusetts, where the kids wondered what to do with their aging and now destitute parents.

I lost track of them for a while. By the time I graduated high school, my parents had long since divorced, and family trips of any kind had become awkward. After an abortive attempt at college, I moved as far away as I could, to California. I got married and then unmarried. I kept in touch with the family, more or less, but I was already deep in the cooking game and getting deeper, which relieved me (at least in my mind) of the obligation to pay much attention to anything or anyone else. Restaurants, which had started as an escape from the discomfort of the world, became my entire existence.

About ten years ago, I brought my then-girlfriend Alexandra to meet my grandparents. They were still living in their own apartment, each of them a spry ninety-something years old. I took them to a restaurant that I remembered from when I was a kid, a place on the water in Marblehead, which looked largely the same as it had twenty years earlier. Papa sat at the head of the table and ordered a steak and a Manhattan. When the drink arrived, I waited. I was, at age thirty-three, still completely certain of what was going to happen next. When he pulled the cherry out of his drink in midsentence and popped it into his mouth, my jaw must have dropped. Aaach! he said when he realized what had happened. We need more cherries! He flagged down the nearest server, and when she arrived, Papa didn’t just take one. He grabbed a fistful out of the glass on her tray and shoved them at me expectantly, a familiar gesture of absolution mingled with love.

When their health started to fail, my grandparents moved into an assisted-living home. I was in between restaurants that summer, with plenty of time on my hands, so I went to see them one last time. It was perfectly nice, as those places go, with manicured lawns and freshly painted walls. Their minds were still sharp, but they seemed depressed. I helped Papa into his wheelchair; he squirmed, frustrated by his immobility. We sat in the room for a few hours and they told me stories of their childhood and mine until they eventually grew tired. I left feeling sad and helpless.

My grandmother went first, but not by much. I flew out for the funeral. I remember walking into the synagogue for the first time in decades, shaking off the rain that came down the entire time I was there. The family was all present, but I was there to see Papa. I sat near the front and watched him during the service, with his little black hat and an embroidered prayer shawl covering his thinning shoulders. His eyes were still, lifeless. Afterward he held me close when we embraced, but I could tell that he was already gone. He died within a few weeks.

The Rascal House passed a few years later. Death by condominium development was the official cause, but it had been a long time coming. The old delis and the way of life that they represented had been on the wane for many years. The first-generation immigrants from Russia had died off, replaced by American Jews who felt less and less connected to their ancestry. Meanwhile, starting in the fifties, Cuban immigrants escaping their country’s communist regime began to reshape the city. As the population turned toward Central and South America, Spanish began to supplant English as Yiddish once had, and the language of restaurants changed as well.

Their food is unhealthy, many people now say of the old delis. It’s of middling quality. But that misses the point: it was never cuisine as art. It was food to assuage hungers both physical and spiritual, to buffer and embrace a group of people who were trying to find their place in the world. It spoke in earthy timbres of sustenance and survival. As the snowbirds passed on, they were replaced by a new generation, Americans at heart, with little use for the past.

I found out about the Rascal House’s closing through a newspaper article. We waited as long as we could, said the new owners. They dismantled the place, selling the décor as mementos. The restaurant was stripped bare, its pieces carted off and shipped around the country. I imagine platters and saltshakers sitting in cabinets and closets, gradually chipping or gathering dust; the pictures and signs arranged on dressers in spare rooms, propped on mantelpieces or packed carefully in boxes. Perhaps, somewhere, the Rascal still lives, in some basement, behind a pool table covered in boxes of out-of-date magazines, its neon quietly flickering in an empty room.

The Homesick Restaurant

Susan Orlean

In Havana, the restaurant called Centro Vasco is on a street that Fidel Castro likes to drive down on his way home from the office. In Little Havana, in Miami, there is another Centro Vasco, on Southwest Eighth—a street that starts east of the Blue Lagoon and runs straight into the bay. The exterior of Miami’s Centro Vasco is a hodgepodge of wind-scoured limestone chunks and flat tablets of PermaStone set in arches and at angles, all topped with a scalloped red shingle roof. Out front are a gigantic round fountain, a fence made from a ship’s anchor chain, and a snarl of hibiscus bushes and lacy palm trees. The building has had a few past lives. It was a speakeasy in the 1920s, and for years afterward it was an Austrian restaurant called The Garden. The owners of The Garden were nostalgic Austrians, who, in 1965, finally got so nostalgic that they sold the place to a Cuban refugee named Juan Saizarbitoria and went back to Austria. Saizarbitoria had grown up in the Basque region of Spain, and he had made his way to Cuba in the late 1930s by sneaking onto a boat and stowing away inside a barrel of sardines. When he first arrived in Havana, he pretended to be a world-famous jai-alai player, and then he became a cook at the jai-alai club. In 1940, he opened Centro Vasco, and he made it into one of the most popular restaurants in Havana. Having lost the restaurant to Castro, in 1962, Saizarbitoria moved to Miami and set up Centro Vasco in exile. Along with a couple of funeral homes, it was one of the few big Cuban businesses to come to the United States virtually unchanged.

The first Centro Vasco in America was in a small building on the edge of Miami. After a year or so, Saizarbitoria bought The Garden from the departing Austrians. He didn’t have enough money to redecorate, so he just hung a few paintings of his Basque homeland and of the Centro Vasco he’d left behind in Havana; otherwise, the walls remained covered with murals of the Black Forest and rustic Alpine scenes. The restaurant prospered: it became a home away from home for Miami’s Cubans in exile. Soon there was money to spend, so a room was added, the parking lot was expanded, awnings were replaced. Inside, the walls were redone in a dappled buttery yellow, and the memories of Austria were lost forever under a thick coat of paint. Until then, there might have been no other place in the world so layered with different people’s pinings—no other place where you could have had a Basque dinner in a restaurant from Havana in a Cuban neighborhood of a city in Florida in a dining room decorated with yodeling hikers and little deer.

These days, Centro Vasco is an eventful place. During a week I spent there recently, I would sometimes leaf back and forth through the reservation book, which was kept on a desk in the restaurant’s foyer. The pages were rumpled, and blobbed with ink. Los Hombres Empresa, luncheon for twelve. Beatriz Baron, bridal shower. The Velgaras, the Torreses, and the Delgados, baby showers. A birthday party for Carmen Bravo and an anniversary party for Mr. and Mrs. Gerardo Capo. A paella party for an association of Cuban dentists. A fundraiser for Manny Crespo, a candidate for judge. Southern Bell, a luncheon for twenty-eight people; someone had written next to the reservation, in giant letters, and underlined, NO SANGRIA. The Little Havana Kiwanis Club cooking contest had been held in the Granada Room; the finals for Miss Cuba en Exilio had taken place on the patio. There were dinner reservations for people who wanted a bowl of caldo gallego, the white-bean soup they used to eat at Centro Vasco in Havana; lunches for executives of Bacardi rum and for an adventurous group of Pizza Hut executives from Wisconsin; hundreds of reservations for people coming on Friday and Saturday nights to hear the popular Cuban singer Albita; a twice-annual reservation for the Centauros, 1941 alumni of a medical school in Havana; a daily reservation for a group of ladies who used to play canasta together in Cuba and relocated their game to Miami thirty years ago.

Juan Saizarbitoria goes through the book with me. This is not the Juan of the sardine barrel; he died four years ago, at the age of eighty-two. This is one of his sons—Juan Jr., who now owns the restaurant with his brother, Iñaki. The Saizarbitorias are a great-looking family. Juan Jr., who is near sixty, is pewter-haired and big-nosed and pink-cheeked; his forehead is as wide as a billboard, and he holds his eyebrows high, so he always looks a little amazed. Iñaki, fifteen years younger, is rounder and darker, with an arching smile and small, bright eyes. Juan Jr.’s son, Juan III, is now an international fashion model and is nicknamed Sal. He is said to be the spitting image of sardine-barrel Juan, whom everyone called Juanito. Before Sal became a model, he used to work in the restaurant now and then. Old ladies who had had crushes on Juanito in Havana would swoon at the sight of Sal, because he looked so much like Juanito in his youth. Everyone in the family talks a million miles a minute—the blood relatives, the spouses, the kids. Juan Jr.’s wife, Totty, who helps to manage the place, once left a message on my answering machine that sounded a lot like someone running a Mix-master. She knows everybody, talks to everybody, and seems to have things to say about the things she has to say. Once, she told me she was so tired she could hardly speak, but I didn’t believe her. Juanito was not known as a talker; in fact, he spoke only Basque, could barely get along in Spanish, and never knew English at all. In Miami, he occasionally played golf with Jackie Gleason, to whom he had nothing to say. Some people remember Juanito as tough and grave but also surprisingly sentimental. He put a drawing of the Havana Centro Vasco on his Miami restaurant’s business card, and he built a twenty-foot-wide scale model of it, furnished with miniature tables and chairs. It hangs over the bar in the Miami restaurant to this day.

On a Friday, I come to the restaurant early. The morning is hot and bright, but inside the restaurant it’s dark and still. The rooms are a little old-fashioned; there

Reviews for Cornbread Nation 7

[Jethro Ira Flores · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The plot is intriguing. It keeps you on edge and is a good continuation of the first book. If you have some great stories like this one, you can publish it on Novel Star, just submit your story to [e-mail] or [e-mail]