"Places with lots of Jesus pictures on the wall or a plastic animal on the roof indicates good food."
Shortly after graduating from Yale in the seventies, Jane and Michael Stern embarked on their first big eating adventure. The couple had an ambitious plan: reviewing every restaurant in America. This didn’t seem like a stretch to them: “Not having traveled much, we looked at the Rand McNally map spread out on the kitchen table and could plainly see that America was a manageable place, no more than a foot and a half in length, composed of pretty pastel-colored states balanced on one another like building blocks.”
In Two For The Road, a hilarious account of almost thirty years of unveiling American roadside and small-town gems, the Sterns describe how it all started. In a time when the gastronomic focus was mainly on haute cuisine, they convinced an editor to give them a tiny advance to write a guidebook featuring the best diners, truck stops, juke joints, and grills.
They bought a used gas-guzzling, vomit-green Chevy Suburban, packed it with “survival” items like an oxygen tank (Jane thought they might need it in mountainous states), and hit the road. No car breakdown, sketchy motel or missed exit could ever discourage them. Money was scarce, “but life was a whole lot cheaper then,” says Michael Stern in a phone interview.
In those days, the predominant idea about American food was “hotdogs and hamburgers and, not even very good ones,” says Stern. The couple had a hunch there was much more to it, and their enthusiastic and curious grazing through 49 states resulted in their 1978 Roadfood guidebook.
It became an instant hit. “Roadfood came out at a time when there was a growing interest in all things American,” says Stern. “A renaissance of American food, I would almost call it.” People were rediscovering the depth and value of their regional cuisines, such as Cajun or New Mexican. When President Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline came into the White House, one of the first things they did was hire a French chef. “Nowadays I think no president would dare do that in this country,” Stern says. It shows how dramatically the gastronomical climate has changed.
“American cuisine is amazingly diverse, as is America,” Stern says. If a visitor to this country really wants to have a taste of its ethnic, regional and historical diversity, both in the literal and figurative sense, the Sterns recommend roadside restaurants. “That’s where ordinary people eat all the time and where conversations take place, across tables and at the counter, where the community comes gather every morning for breakfast.” Whether it’s a big cinnamon roll in Iowa, biscuits in the Deep South or a muffin in New England, you just can’t get the local food experience at chain restaurants or fancy restaurants.
Roadfood Sandwiches is the couple’s latest book. It includes All-American hoagies and heroes, like Elvis’s favorite Peanut Butter and Banana, but mostly subs and grinders that are completely unknown outside of their regions. From the Katz’s Deli’s Chopped Liver in New York, to a Maine lobster roll, to a New Orleans Muffuletta. Each sandwich has its own quirky anecdote, because “food on a plate without a context is of no interest to us,” says Stern. The couple eats like anthropologists, always trying to understand dishes as a part of culture. To the Sterns, road food is like folk art. A four-star meal is like a painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but an informal, inexpensive sandwich is like a beautiful quilt. “It has a terrific value of its own as an expression of the people,” says Stern, referring not only to the cooks dishing out the food, but also to the people who sink their teeth into it.
You are what you eat, is the old adage, and people identify themselves with a lot of culinary markers. “If you’re a Cajun, that means you’ll probably like gumbo or crawfish étouffée, if you’re Chicagoan, you probably grew up eating Chicago-style hotdogs. If you’re from Wisconsin you know all about custard or things with dairy products. I think that more and more people have begun to realize that food isn’t only something delicious and fun to think about when it’s mealtime, but that it’s also an important part of cultural identity.”
With corporate culture encroaching upon the American roadside, the Sterns have seen many restaurants go out of business. “Chain restaurants are not taking over, but they’re certainly endangering this type of individualistic, colorful, unique food,” says Stern. However, the couple also noticed a heartening countermovement of new restaurants that honor local cuisine and use locally grown products.
Even after almost three decades of touring, the Sterns’s appetites haven’t dwindled. They work with awe-inspiring dedication. In Two for the Road, they describe an average eating trip: “Drive, drive, drive; eat, eat, eat; drive some more; eat some more; eat again. Go to sleep. Wake up. Eat. Drive. Eat. Drive.” This rhythm makes them “slaphappy,” even to a point of food delirium causing them to misread road signs. “Dead calm,” becomes “dead clam”; “Pass by,” becomes “chess pie!”
As with any aspect of culture they investigate (the Sterns are true pop culture experts, having written about phenomena like dog shows or Elvis fans), the couple tries to become part of it. They walk unannounced into a restaurant and scrutinize the menu, looking for local specialties. They once found a “steak cooked to your likeness” in a beef palace in northern California. They place their order (“everything”), and pull out their notebooks and cameras. In foodie circles, the Sterns are quite famous now, mostly from their column in Gourmet magazine, but in many places the couple’s impressive devouring has attracted quite a few funny looks.
Michael takes pictures of everything, which helps remember every detail of the experience. “On a big eating tour, eating 8 to 12 meals a day, it’s important to remember what was what,” he says. Back on the road, Jane and Michael discuss the experience and then one of them writes up a first draft.
The couple’s attempts to rid themselves of the foulest food are downright hilarious. The hog maws they once had were “pieces of maw wallowed in a funky broth, the knobs of pinkish white flesh poking above the surface.” Jane is the pickier eater of the two (and has a phobia for condiments), but Michael has a cast-iron stomach and has tried everything from rooster fries to bovine gonads. But even he has his limits. Over the years, they dedicated a special “hall of infamy” to their bad food experiences. “What we really liked about writing Two for the Road was that it gave us a chance to write about bad food,” says Stern. When you eat 12 meals a day, chances are that 7 to 8 are quite unremarkable, he explains. However, nobody wants to read in a guidebook where not to eat.
The Sterns always bring back jars and cans of local delicacies. Once at home, they start testing and trying the recipes they gathered along the way. For some, this might sound like too much of a good thing, but not for the Sterns. “We have the best job in the world, it’s too much fun to complain about,” says Michael. Ever hungry for more, the Sterns drive on.
Dine with The Sterns at www.roadfood.com
From Two for the Road:
Over the years, the Sterns have developed a “roadfood radar,” recognizing the signs for bad food.
1. Don’t eat at the fancy place with the biggest ad in the Yellow Pages.
2. Don’t ask the desk clerk for help.
3. Don’t believe billboards on the highway.
4. Don’t eat in a place that smells like Pine-Sol.
5. Don’t eat in a place where the waitress coughs a lot and scratches her hair with her pencil.
6. Don’t eat in a restaurant that touts itself as world-famous.
7. Beware of any restaurant with too cute a name: Klem’s Kuntry Kitchen, Ye Ol’ Village Smithy, Toot ‘n’ Com-In.
On the flip side, they learned to seek out any place that:
1. Is open only for breakfast and lunch.
2. Serves no booze.
3. Has old ladies with hairnets working in the kitchen.
4. Has handmade pies proudly displayed in a glass case on the counter.
5. Has jukeboxes that still contain Hank Williams songs.
6. Is outfitted with Formica-topped tables with a boomerang pattern.
7. Has weird ways of ordering a meal, like a telephone connected to the kitchen or miniature order pads that customers fill out with a miniature pencil.
