Winter 2011
By Chef Jay Pierce, Lucky 32 Southern Kitchen
Click here to see the magazine article

“I don’t like Astronomy, it makes me feel small; that makes me feel uncomfortable” Sydney, 10

Food is a powerful thing.  It brings people together in interesting and unexpected ways.  Each and every day, I am amazed by the cultural exchanges that occur in conversations over food, its preparation and its consumption, that illustrate how much we have in common as human beings, as opposed to pointing out our differences.

I am a chef with kitchens in Greensboro and Cary and our restaurant has set out to recreate the cuisine of the North Carolina Piedmont (with a few nods to my travels and the restaurant’s own history) that would be recognizable in concept and presentation to denizens from hereabouts one hundred fifty years ago; food that your great-grandparents would recognize, had they lived in the Piedmont.  The curious twist of course, is that only three folks among the fifty person strong kitchen brigade are even from this area; we are honored to have ladies and gentlemen from different states in Mexico, a couple of guys from Niger, a curmudgeonly Cajun and a ringleader of Korean extraction. Working in a kitchen you see folks from pretty much every kind of background and with more stories than Boccaccio.

Moving here from Orlando, Florida, a melting pot of a geographical area in more ways than one, and having previously  lived in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Eugene, Oregon, both crossroads for wayward souls, I expected the Piedmont to be generically Southern, with people tracing their geneology to Scots-Irish immigrants or West African slave ships.  As a parent of two young children, one concern I had about my relocation was that I couldn’t fathom how the Piedmont could be such a culturally diverse place.  I didn’t take the time to research the fact that Greensboro is home to several agencies that relocate more refugees from around the globe than any other comparable area, and that Yankees out-number Tarheels in Cary by a considerable margin. 

The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis was my guide star for what was seasonal here and what preparations folks were accustomed to.  Visiting every mom and pop meat-and-three I came across helped me to understand what people expected to encounter in a “Southern” restaurant.  My background in the high-dollar, high-volume kitchens of the Emeril’s empire would help me to cast these concoctions in a new light.

The wild card in this game of chance was the young (and not so young) men and women who earn their living working in kitchens across this state.  I had trouble finding culinary-obsessed, career-minded cooks with classical chops, what I had a plethora of was hard-working, salt-of-the-Earth types who just wanted to put in a hard day’s work.  Turns out, that’s what subsistence cuisine is all about: folks who cook what they have and eat what they cook and don’t give too much thought to what fancy variations or permutation are possible.

As we started recreating Piedmont classics, such as stew beef & rice, chicken & dumplings, meatloaf, pulled pork, and chicken pot pie, the folks in the kitchen from Guerrero, Zacatecas, Oaxaca, San Diego, CA, Tulsa, OK, and Westchester County, NY, began to develop a palate for what we were doing.  They understood the rules of being true to the flavors and ingredients of the place that we find ourselves.  Our guys from Niger, all practicing Muslims, cheerfully would ask someone else to taste the collard greens or red wine gravy that they were prepping on any given day.  So, although we do not cook from memory or from a shared background, we tug at heartstrings and kindle reveries in our patrons who are reminded of Granny each time they bite into our skillet-fried chicken cooked in locally-rendered lard.  How could we possibly recreate that experience for them, if we did not live it ourselves? By listening to the feedback of the diners, and genuinely endeavoring to be of service to our community.  Folks respond to the passion that the food is made with, evident in every bite.

The love of food brought us together in those kitchens; despite our differences, we find common ground in ingredients and preparations, and we rally around the notion of reestablishing a cultural culinary touchstone that we now feel part of.  We even incorporate some of our own travels into the menu in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, like jambalaya, pulled pork tamales, poutine, and boiled peanut succotash.  We celebrate with food that is dear to us.  For my birthday recently, a few of the kitchen staff took me out to eat at a new Korean restaurant; guys from Guerrero eating bibimbap, galbi, and bulgogoi.  That love, that openness is what enables them to cook giblet gravy and country ham cream sauce that resonates with folks who’ve never left the Piedmont..

How are we to make sense of the increasingly fragmenting world that we live in?  Food is the answer.  The consumption and appreciation of food is a universal truth.  This “second family,” that we come to cultivate in the workplace, is truly a Southern one, not by birth, but by virtue of the food we love.