December/January 2024

Garden & Gun

Soul of the South

Garden & Gun2 min readLeadership
Garden & Gun
David DiBenedettoSenior Vice President & Editor in Chief Creative Director Marshall McKinney / Photography and Visuals Director Maggie Brett Kennedy Executive Editor Amanda Heckert / Deputy Editor David Mezz Art Director Julia Knetzer / Photo Editor
Garden & Gun1 min read
What’s Online
★ GARDENANDGUN.COM Bandit, the 2023 Good Dog Photo Contest winner. GOOD DOG PHOTO CONTEST IN PARTNERSHIP WITH Take one look at Bandit, and it’s obvious: This pup knows how to have fun. Snapped by a dog-sitting friend in the backyard of Bandit’s Col
Garden & Gun4 min read
Contributors
WRITER “The details of how and why someone chooses to prepare food a certain way are infinitely interesting and surprising—and deeply relatable,” says Von Diaz, a documentarian, writer, and food historian based in Durham, North Carolina. “Food become
Garden & Gun3 min read
Cool Nights, Warm Cobbler
Follow me on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) @davedibenedetto My family and I often like to rank our favorite seasons here in the South Carolina Lowcountry, and while my kids’ choices shift like the wind, I always lead with fall and winter. Aside
Garden & Gun4 min read
The Shape-Shifting Sarah Paulson
The Emmy-winning actress Sarah Paulson immerses herself soul deep into every role, to the point of nearly vanishing. The forty-eight-year-old brushes away vanity like lint, preferring to inhabit and occupy the roles of women who some (most) might lab
Garden & Gun5 min read
“I Never Mix Dressing With A Spoon; You Have To Roll Up Your Sleeves And Use Your Hands”
Find us on Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok @gardenandgun THE RITE OF SPRINGERS I had a black-and-white English springer spaniel (Cover, October/November 2023), and his name was Bentley. They sure are extra special dogs. As I was
Garden & Gun3 min read
Banded Together
On a dewy summer morning in West Texas, I gaze over a table outfitted with Q-tips, pliers, calipers, and scales. A black-chinned hummingbird, retrieved from a nearby trap, lies swaddled in a nylon stocking toe, ready to be aged, weighed, measured, an
Garden & Gun3 min read
Pocket Pieces
There’s so much that can go wrong. Building a folding knife involves the fabrication of multiple moving parts, at least one hinge, a handle composed of separately worked materials, and more than a yeoman’s grasp of geometry and materials science. Tha
Garden & Gun2 min read
What’s The Best Gift To Give To A Holiday Party Host?
If you’re the person who gave me a bearded lady ornament for our Under the Big Top–themed Christmas party, please let me know. I treasure it. It’s one of the best hostess gifts I’ve ever received. Others include: coasters that look like Scrabble tile
Garden & Gun4 min read
Folks’ Tale
The Bullet Swallower, Simon & Schuster, $27 Twirl a radio dial in much of Mexico, and eventually you’ll happen upon a corrido. Centuries old and nationally cherished, corridos are narrative folk ballads relaying stories of bandits, smugglers, rebels,
Garden & Gun3 min read
Playing with Fire
On a Friday night at the Loud, a club in downtown Huntington, West Virginia, the happy-hour crowd is ready to keep partying. After tuning up, Daniel Donato and his band launch into a cover of Gene Watson’s 1981 chart topper “Fourteen Carat Mind” that
Garden & Gun6 min read
Becoming Santa Claus
Santa Claus didn’t use the chimney that Christmas Eve, and he didn’t wait until we all went to sleep. It was 1973 and St. Nicholas was standing in front of me in my grandmother’s house in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. I was three years old. Mamaw’s house
Garden & Gun4 min read
Steak Night
Soon after a Man o’ War and a martini land on the pressed white tablecloth, my friend David leans over. “This place feels like a fancy cruise ship,” he says of the baroque Atlanta steak house Marcel, set on the grounds of a reimagined meatpacking com
Garden & Gun4 min read
Sly Dogs
Sam Fore is an unlikely evangelist for Sri Lankan food. Born in Lexington, Kentucky, to Sri Lankan parents, she grew up in North Carolina and went to college in Boston, planning to become a doctor like her father. That idea then morphed into a market
Garden & Gun2 min read
Go For The Gold
When Darian Hernandez was seven, his grandmother brought home a small paper bag filled with what appeared to be baby oranges. “She handed my brother and me these two little fruits,” says Hernandez, now the executive chef at Brother Fox in his hometow
Garden & Gun2 min readDiet & Nutrition
Small but Mighty
You’ve most likely noticed a surge of low- (and no-) alcohol cocktails on bar menus of late. Yet how a bartender achieves that lower alcohol content can be tricky. By using vermouth or liqueur as the base spirit, say. Or one may simply reduce the siz
Garden & Gun2 min read
Barbecue Bridge Builders
Comfort food: Shuai: “We’re just trying to open restaurants that we want to eat at, and one of the biggest things I miss about growing up in Queens [New York] is the old-school Chinese barbecue—roast duck, ribs, and crispy skin roast pork.” Common gr
Garden & Gun3 min read
Special Delivery
No Southern terrain is too tough to traverse aboard the retro-cool Honda Trail125. The low-slung design handles effortlessly (and relatively quietly) on and off road—thanks to a suspension that smooths bumps—the raised muffler stays clear of mud and
Garden & Gun4 min read
The Resurrection of Sparky
The dog of my childhood shared a bloodline with the finest hunting dogs of his breed. Unfortunately, the closest Sparky came to hunting involved chasing noisy cars—he had an ear for VW Beetles—and rooting through garbage cans. Both appeared to be con
Garden & Gun5 min read
A Quiet Place
Back-to-school time brought new beginnings for me: I became an assistant professor of English at Augusta University in Georgia. In the middle of August, I found myself amid a crush of eager students toting newly purchased books and searching for clas
Garden & Gun5 min read
Spiking Christmas
The philosopher John Currin Howard once said (and then continued to say), “The man who does the most with the least is the man I admire.” If you know my dad, you also know he wasn’t talking about his approach to holiday entertaining—John Howard doesn
Garden & Gun5 min read
Handpicked Holiday
I’m riding shotgun in Mary Spotswood Underwood’s four-wheel-drive John Deere Gator when we squeeze between a stubbly cornfield and a hedgerow. As the growling golf-cart-on-steroids jounces across a gully, I tighten my grip on the roll bar, and a bran
Garden & Gun9 min read
Puerto Rico’s West Coast Flavor
BLOODRED LIGHTS SPREAD ACROSS THE STREET AT the end of Sea Beach Drive on Puerto Rico’s west coast. When I park my car and step out, thick humidity and the whoosh of waves greet me. It’s late at night, so I can’t see it, but the water is undeniably t
Garden & Gun1 min read
14th Annual Made In The South Awards
PRODUCT: Courage & Conviction PX Sherry Single Cask MADE IN: Lovingston, Virginia ■
Garden & Gun4 min read
Hall of Frame
While trimming a two-hundred-year-old textured frame to fit an oil painting for a 2012 exhibition at his gallery–meets–antique store, Trace Mayer had a realization: The frame outshone the artwork. One of his assistants joined together the frame’s lef
Garden & Gun5 min read
Liquid Courage
Early Scottish settlers in the South tried their best to replicate the whisky of their homeland, to little avail. But not all was lost: If the barley needed for whisky had grown easily here, explains Gareth H. Moore, the CEO of Virginia Distillery Co
Garden & Gun3 min read
Smoke Show
New Braunfels Smokehouse began as quite the opposite of what it is today; when the building opened in 1943, it was an icehouse, where farmers stored their meat in lockers. Some locals decided to repurpose a structure out back into a smokehouse. When
Garden & Gun3 min read
Dock and Cover
Jeff Allen grew up on Tampa Bay, fishing and water-skiing before school, then showing up to first period soaking wet. “We used every moment we could to be on the water,” he says, “fishing, diving, and skiing. It was a way of life.” Years later, when
Garden & Gun3 min read
Lone Star Swagger
At a certain point we realized we were never going to be able to compete with manufacturing in India or China, so we decided to do the opposite,” says Bronte Treat, who runs Richter Goods, a small-batch San Antonio shirting company, with her husband,
Garden & Gun3 min read
Out Of The Wood(s)
Ben Balzer has worked with NASA, served as the CFO for a handful of California companies, and owned an internationally touted spice shop in San Francisco, but no matter what professional hat he put on, he never stopped woodworking. “I started when I
Garden & Gun11 min read
How A Chance Career Opportunity Turned Into An Enduring Friendship That Changed A Surfer And Aspiring Journalist’s Life
ONE FINE EARTH DAY MORNING IN 2022, my cell phone lit up with a Hawaiian phone number from a caller the device has long identified as “The Dude.” “Hello, dude,” drawled a friendly, salty voice. “I’m heading out to Folly tomorrow. You have any time to
Garden & Gun6 min read
Greenhouse Dreams
Even in the South, stepping into a greenhouse in winter is an exercise in hope and solace. As JoHannah Biang, the horticulture manager at Hills & Dales Estate in LaGrange, Georgia, says, “It’s a reminder that things are still growing and blooming and
Garden & Gun3 min read
I Brake for Biscuits
When leaving Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and heading north on Highway 17, there comes a point when you’re finally free of the traffic lights, strip malls, auto parts stores, and mattress shops. The sprawl loosens up, and the Lowcountry regains it
Garden & Gun13 min read
The Southern Agenda
For a glimpse into Deep Ellum’s 150-year-old personality, look no further than the vibrant murals painted stories high along the Dallas neighborhood’s streets and alleyways. You’ll find depictions of such local legends as the late guitarist Stevie Ra
Garden & Gun3 min read
Holy Sh*t
You know the old Christmasmorning story: A child finds that Santa has left him or her an enormous pile of manure. Under the tree somehow, I don’t know—but here’s the moral: The child, being an optimist, is delighted. Because “there must be a pony her
Garden & Gun6 min read
Back to Quebec
When I became the chef at Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the early nineties, I was immediately in the weeds. It soon became clear to me that in order to keep at this, I would need to escape the madness from time to time. I had a sm

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