I Couldn't Eat the Sausages

People are always telling me where to go. Once-in-a-while they’re talking about a restaurant. When two of my colleagues individually recommended the Thunderbird in Florence, I decided the next time I was down there I would give it a try. My chance came a few weeks ago. The Thunderbird is actually a trio of businesses sitting just off I-95. Included are a motel, a bar and grill, and a “country buffet.”
First the good part: for about $10.00 you can gorge yourself with a wide variety of food. The day I was there, entrees included fried chicken, ham, turkey and dressing stewed beef, and some rather lewd-looking fried sausages. Sides included macaroni and cheese, green beans, collard greens, and candied yams, among others.
The salad bar was pretty extensive and the vegetables were all either shredded or coarsely chopped making them easy to handle. There was a wide variety of desserts including two or three cobblers and banana pudding and a menagerie of cake and pie slices.
However, what the buffet offers in quantity, it lacks in quality. The ham was full of gristle. The collards and many of the other vegetables seemed to have been dumped directly from cans, with little or no seasoning. Much of the food was bland. Some of it tasted downright strange. Three saving graces were the fried chicken, the salad bar and the apple cobbler.
I couldn’t bring myself to eat the sausage.
The tea is served in small 12 ounce glasses, which get emptied pretty quickly, though the servers are attentive most of the time. Soft drinks aren’t on the menu.
The place was busy with an early supper crowd and most of the customers seemed satisfied with their meals, but I didn’t see a lot of people returning to the bar for a second pass.
At the Thunderbird you can shovel in food until you throw up. Just don’t let it spend a lot of time around your tongue.
Diner rating: 3
Next up: How to spot a good barbecue joint.

Luck of the Draw

Lake High stands in the middle of about fifty people huddling in the shade of the small canopy on the football field of Myrtle Beach’s Market Commons.
“One thing I can assure you new people is that every event after this will be better,” he says, in his typical manner of trying to put everything in a positive light.
We are at the Myrtle Beach, Boogie and Barbeque festival on the grounds of the former Myrtle Beach Air Force base.
High has had a frustrating morning. As marshal of the judging for the South Carolina Barbecue Association, (SCBA) he is responsible for making sure the event runs smoothly for both the judges and the cookers.
This year the Beach Boogie and Barbecue organizers threw him a curve. They invited another set of judges from the rival Kansas City Barbecue Society to judge the event, and let cookers choose which group would judge their barbecue. It was apparently a bid to increase interest, but the accompanying hike in the entrance fee may have had the opposite effect. This year the entries are down by a third, and the competition between judging organizations means that there will be only about a dozen teams for SCBA to judge.
The two judging groups were supposed to share a large tent, but we arrive onsite to find that SCBA has been banished to the other end of a football field. We trudge the 150 or so yards to the other tent, consoled by the fact that we have to walk through the cooking area where we savor the aroma of smoked pork which must be what it’s like to walk into Heaven’s dining hall.
We arrive at the other tent, but after only a few minutes, a golf cart pulls up and an event manager tells us we are in the wrong tent and points us back across the field to a small canopy near the opposite goal post. The canopy is about half the size needed and there is not enough equipment. Some of us will be sitting out in the September sun for the entire event. Calls go out tables, chairs and sunscreen.
On top of it all, Lake has about 20 “newbies” to contend with, including this reporter. These novice judges must be shepherded through the judging process, and their scores won’t count. Usually each novice table has a trainer, but today only one trainer Greg Gladney, is available, and he has the unenviable task of guiding 18 or 20 novice judges through the event.
Each of us is given a blotter; an 11 x 17 sheet of heavy paper divided into 8 equal sections on which to put our samples. Score sheets are passed out and we are given our preliminary instructions. Greg, a rotund, gregarious, bearded fellow who looks to be in his late thirties, sporting his “Master Judge” straw hat explains that each box will be passed around the table twice. The first time is for judging aroma and appearance. On the second pass we are to get a few ounces of barbecue and place it on our mats to complete the judging.
At the appointed time, High steps away from the tent and fires off one of those compressed air horns that boaters use in emergencies and drunks annoy people with at sporting events. It’s a signal that the cookers have only 20 minutes to present their product to the check-in table.
This is “blind box” judging, where we don’t see the cookers, or their pits. The plain, Styrofoam boxes containing the barbecue are identified only by a numbered ticket taped to the top of the box. One big difference between SCBA and KCBS is that the KC guys do onsite judging, where they go out and visit the cook teams and judge the meat, as well as the organization and cleanliness of the site. Some say that onsite judging is more subjective, and it’s easy to see how cookers might try to influence the judging.
Earlier as we walked through cookers row, A man ran out from his pit and greeted us enthusiastically. “Are you guys judges?” he asked.
“Were SCBA.” I say.
“Oh,” he mutters and unceremoniously turns and trundles back to his tent.
But as one KCBS judge confided, “You get some really good barbecue.”

The first sample is passed around. I get the box first, and find it almost empty. The sample was puny to begin with and the official judges table took most of it. I look at the sample, and flap the lid like I saw a master judge do a few seconds earlier to get a good whiff of the aroma. The pork is coarsely chopped and has good color, but the smell is a little off, as if the meat is not fresh. I put my numbers down in the boxes on the score sheet. On the second pass, I get a few scraps of meat. Greg has told us to get our hands in the meat, to pull at it to check for tenderness—The easier it pulls apart the more done it is. This sample is pretty tender but the flavor is just a little off. I fill out the rest of the boxes on my score sheet and tally them up. The sore is 10.5.
The samples come around quickly. The next two are finely chopped; almost minced. When I total up the scores, I find even though I have carried out the scores to two decimal places, (some nerds will go to three) the second and third samples are tied at 10.86. Not wanting to have a tie score, I go back and forth in each category between the two samples. My concentration is interrupted by the receipt of my fourth and last sample. It is not in the running. Pale and underdone, it has almost no flavor at all (after the judging I gave some to my wife, who thought it was chicken). I scored it a scant 7.9.
After going back and forth again between the two tied samples, I finally decide that sample three is over-spiced, and shave a few points which allows sample two to eek out the win.
After the judging, Greg interviews our table.
“Which sample was the best?” he asks.
To my relief, the consensus was sample two.
He polls the table to see what every one’s score was. The scores were all in the 10-12 range, with one person scoring a thirteen.
Greg points out that the average score is usually between 13 and 17. He makes no comment about our lower scores, leaving us to sort that out ourselves. Rookie mistake? Harsh standards?
I decide that, for me at least, it was neither. I feel the overall quality of the
product to be lower than I had expected. Despite the talk of good barbecue at these events, I find these offerings to be of lower quality than I could have gotten at, say, Bucky’s in Greenville, or Belly’s in Lexington, SC.
I have no explanation for this except that, since I only tasted a small number of the samples prepared for the event, it could have been just the luck of the draw.
Up next: The Thunderbird, Florence, SC.

Photo courtesy of Lora Garrett

Hunt'n for the Good Stuff

The Gospel Travelers serenade customers on the big front porch of Hunt'n' Camp

The night I visited Hunt ‘n' Camp, on U.S Highway 25 North of Travelers Rest, SC, a bluegrass gospel band was belting out old favorites on the restaurant’s big wrap-around porch. The porch was lined with large rocking chairs for the adults and small ones for the kids and they were all full of people listening to the music while waiting for their names to be called.
Inside, the décor is enough to scare the beJesus out of you average PETA sympathizer as the walls are lined with menagerie representing a good portion of the fauna of the upstate of South Carolina, including--and this is by no means an exhaustive list-- a boar’s head, a bobcat, and the heads of four deer. The one above my table, --a nice eight pointer-- had an arrow, presumably the one that brought it down-- resting in its antlers. But I wasn’t there to admire animal carcasses, I was there to eat them.
They have a pretty good menu, but for around nine bucks, you can get that wonderful invention that has kept heart surgeons in BMW’s for many years, the all-you –can- eat bar. The bar features barbecue, and barbecued chicken, rice and hash as well as vegetables, including green and barbecue beans, slaw, potato salad with new potatoes, and that mainstay of menus in South Carolina barbecue joints, sweet potato crunch.
I dove in. It wasn’t pretty. From the first bite I fell into in a self imposed feeding frenzy spurred on by brain chemicals triggered by the deadly combination of sugar fat and salt that, according to Dr. David Kessler’s new book The End of Over-Eating has led to the obesity epidemic in America.
The barbecue was tender and succulent with good smoke and a slightly sweet finish. They had a variety of home made sauces to choose from. The hot sauce, a light tomato mixture, had just the right amount of sting. By the time I got to the sweet potato crunch, the thought of remaining ambulatory had shrunk to the deeper recesses of my pork-poisoned brain.
Hash, made from what Anthony Bourdain might call the “nasty bits” -ground up chunks of left-over of barbecue- is a rarity in this part of SC; it’s more common below the fall line. Several people in line with me were heard to say; “I’m just not a hash person.” They missed out on a treat.
Since barbecue this good should easily place highly in just about any cook off, I looked around to see if I could spot a trophy, but none were visible. Either the owner doesn’t compete, which, if true, is a loss to the barbecue community, or he stores his trophies elsewhere.
The efficient and attentive wait staff kept our glasses filled the whole time. I left vowing to return and hoping my arteries would some day find it in their heart to forgive me.
Diner rating: 5

Come for the Biscuits, Stay for the Meal

The Moose Cafe is always busy

Visitors to the North Carolina Farmer’s Market at Ashville enjoy walking down the long promenade between stalls filled with fresh produce, sourwood honey, country ham and Amish baked goods. They often visit the huge garden center across the road, and if they are in the know, their visit often includes a stop at Moose Café. The café is almost always crowded, so there is usually a short wait. While hanging out and waiting for a table diners can read the glowing reviews from prestigious magazines such as Southern Living, browse the various Moose-related items, or just chill in one of the ample rocking chairs.
Once their name is called diners are likely to be escorted to a table near the huge windows overlooking the pastoral Biltmore Estate. The menu is sparse, just one page front and back, plus a few daily specials written on a white board near the lobby. Their specialty is home style country cooking of the meat and three variety and the prices are very reasonable. The restaurant is owned by the farmer’s market which is next door, so the food is almost guaranteed to be fresh. Tea and sodas are served in one pint canning jars. Once you place your order the waitress disappears into the kitchen and returns in a few minutes with a plate of hot biscuits. These are no ordinary biscuits. These steaming fist-sized wads of perfectly baked dough are the kind that grandmas all over the South are remembered for. Slathered with butter and baptized with the readily available honey, sorghum or he moose Café’s signature home made apple butter, they bring back memories of Sunday dinners long past; a childhood fondly remembered. The food at Moose Café is simple, appetizing and well done. (It's here I learned by eavesdropping on a watress, that the secret to the great flavor of their pinto beans is a timely addition of a dollop of peanut butter. Try it.) But ask anyone who has visited the place and more often than not, the first thing they will mention is the biscuits. Often their eyes will glaze over and they will get that far away look, as if recalling their first date, their wedding, or a favorite vacation of long ago. Yes, the biscuits are that good.
Diner rating: 5