by Chris Jay
stuffedandbusted@gmail.com
Here’s the short version of it: I suffer from social anxiety, a whole lot of it, and a great meal, enjoyed quietly, has always been the one narcotic that could quiet the electrical storm in my brain. I’ve never abused addictive drugs. I certainly drank too much in college (binge-drinking was the assumed norm among my peers), but things have been mostly squared away since my early 30s.
But my thing with food is ongoing.
When I am feeling low, I will sneak away like an injured dog and quietly house a Hungry Man Breakfast from the Cotton Boll Grill. I may also tuck myself into a dark table at Lucky Palace and methodically devour a duck on scallion pancake, an appetizer that is intended to be shared by at least four people. It’s not exactly the kind of well-lit, performative eating that’s cool to share on Instagram Stories. Maybe it’s self-harm. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Recently, during a work trip to Atlanta, Georgia, I signed up for a “foodie”-themed bus tour of the city, attempting to participate in a social outing while (hopefully) self-medicating every step of the way. And it was fun, if awkward—most of the tour participants were older, married couples—until the tour ventured out to the Buford Highway area.
For me, this was the most exciting part of the trip. Buford Highway is home to one of the densest concentrations of Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese restaurants in the United States. At our first stop, the group recoiled upon being asked to refrain from taking photos at an Asian farmers’ market. They turned their noses up at being asked to eat fried pig ears in chili oil using chopsticks. “Too fatty,” a woman from Sonoma County remarked, waving the plate away. The ears were cooked perfectly, and were delicious.
After being whisked through a David Chang-y boba tea bar and pointed in the direction of a rolled ice cream place, I made the decision to abandon the tour. The “foodie tour,” it turns out, wasn’t populated by Civil Eats-reading Democrats with an opinion on Soleil Ho’s coverage of the Bay Area, after all. I walked across Buford Highway and into an ophthalmologist’s parking lot, where a sign with a red arrow directed me towards a basement entrance emblazoned with the words 华北小餐馆North China Eatery.
When I pulled open the door, a blast of cold air rushed out like a trapped spirit, and a middle-aged man looked up from his work to welcome me.
The place felt special. As the knot in my stomach loosened, I Googled “North China Eatery.” This video of Anthony Bourdain eating at North China Eatery during his tour of Atlanta with Chef Sean Brock for The Layover popped up on my phone, and I proceeded to order more dumplings than I’ve ever ordered in my life.
“We make pork and chive dumplings right now,” the proprietor told me, nodding towards the man who’d greeted me. The man who greeted me held a dumpling aloft, as if to confirm what I’d just been told.
And I’m not going to write about it too much, but I sat there and dealt with my feelings about the death of Anthony Bourdain while I ate the greatest Chinese dumplings I’ve ever tasted. Lamb with zucchini and pork with fennel were my favorites. At one point, the apparent matriarch of the restaurant looked up from the careful folding and pinching of dumpling skin to ask if everything was okay. I nodded, hoping that she was referring to the flavor of the dumplings and not my quiet, focused gluttony.
One of the most recent posts on the North China Eatery Facebook page (from August 24, 2018) is a link to the video of Bourdain’s visit to the restaurant, with the caption “wish he could stop by again.”
Me too, North China Eatery, but that’s not how it works. People just go one direction—towards death—though a lot of them spend a great deal of money trying to convince themselves otherwise. Perhaps the best thing to do, when we lose someone, is to honor their work in this world by continuing it. They’re gone from this world, but their ideas don’t have to be.
I paid for my dumplings, grabbed a take-out menu, and hailed a Lyft back to the conference center. Later that evening, I bumped into a pugnacious couple who’d been on the foodie tour.
“You’re lucky that you abandoned that ship,” the old fellow told me. “It just got worse! We went to a fried chicken place. Apparently, Southern Living says it’s the best Southern-fried chicken in the U.S. So, I asked the cook at the restaurant for the definition of Southern-fried chicken, how it differs from regular fried chicken, but they didn’t even know!”
We stood there for a moment, waiting on the elevator.
“What is that difference?,” I asked the guy.
“Hell, I don’t know,” he scoffed. “If I knew, I wouldn’t have to ask, would I?”
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