Have you been listening this week? It’s time to cast your vote! Which AI character should win the coveted TFS assignment? Will reading duties fall to Bella, Chris, Matilda, or Bill? Let your voice be heard!
P.S. If you want to hear from a real person, founder Hanna Raskin was recently on Charlotte talk radio to chat about TFS:CLT, and what’s ahead for the newsletter. Listen to the WBT convo here.
I’d been working at newspapers for more than 10 years when I got the crazy idea that I wanted to write about food. At The Charlotte Observer, where I was working as a copy editor, some of my editors thought I was certifiably crazy. One actually asked me, “You’re a good journalist—why would you want to throw away your career?”
I remember immediately thinking: Who says covering food isn’t journalism?
Writing about food is more than just “does that taste good?” It’s economics; it’s consumer news; it’s how we live our lives and how we act on our own histories. Throw in a little trendspotting, and you’ll never run out of good stories.
After almost 40 years on the food beat, one of the best things I’ve learned is that the most interesting people are people who love food. People who just eat to live usually turn out to be kind of boring. You want to find fun people? Look for the people who live to eat and go sit next to them. I guarantee they’ll have something lively to say.
As your Charlotte team for The Food Section, we figured we should take a moment to let you get to know who we are. Stephen Colbert has his Colbert Questionnaire. We have The Food Section Dissection: Who we are in six questions.
What is the best sandwich? (Sorry, Stephen.)
Purvis: Pastrami on rye. When I was living in a mouse-infested apartment in Elizabeth in 1985, I used to make a major splurge on the pastrami sammie at Leo’s on Elizabeth Avenue. (I still miss the cardboard cutouts of the dancing pickles.) And I’ve had the pastrami at Katz’s Delicatessen in New York more than once. I’ve never had to fake it there.
Taylor Bowler: The Tori Nikkei sandwich at La Lima Sangucheria in South End. I was still thinking about it a week later. It’s got sweet-savory tamari honey chicken, a punch of citrus, crunchy daikon slaw, and it absolutely slayed.
Greg Lacour: If we’re talking Charlotte, a particular burger that once was a specialty of the much-missed Penguin Drive-In in Plaza Midwood: a double burger served Southern-style, with chili, slaw, mustard, and onions, which I prefer to the standard lettuce-tomato-onions-mayo-pickles. It’s everything grand and sloppy about Southern food in one handheld singularity. (The Penguin still exists but under different ownership and in a different location, and the folks from the old Penguin branched off to operate two separate restaurants, both of which serve this burger under different names. It’s an insanely long and complicated story. But the burger’s still a glorious mess.)
Name three things that are always in your refrigerator.
Purvis: 1) Kirkland Asolo Prosecco Superiore. Sure, I’d rather drink a cold Veuve Cliquot Grande Dame—but I’m a working girl. At $7.99 a bottle, being able to always have a chilled bottle is an affordable luxury. 2) A block of Kerrygold unsalted butter. 3) A carton of locally grown eggs from the Charlotte Regional Farmers Market. If you’ve got eggs, you’ve got dinner.
Bowler: 1) Sunshine energy drinks, blueberry lemonade flavor. They’re equivalent to a cup of coffee, so I have one almost every morning. 2) Almond milk, because no one in my house likes the taste of dairy milk. I use it to make smoothies, and my kids put it on cereal. 3) Kirkland brand Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Lacour: 1) A large bottle of balsamic vinegar. Every other salad dressing falls short for me. 2) An assortment of Charlotte-brewed craft beer. This area has more than 100 breweries, and I want to sample them all. Four different beers are in there now, including Czech Pils from Divine Barrel Brewing in NoDa, just up the street from me. 3) Hummus. That’s the spread for me. Mayo’s gross.
What’s the coolest thing you’ve done on the job?
Purvis: I spent a day as a grape picker in the vineyards at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville. That’s where I learned about drunken bees: Birds peck the ripening grapes, releasing a little juice that ferments in the sun. Then bees drink it and start flying around exactly like drunken drivers. Surly drunken drivers.
Bowler: I swam with stingrays in Grand Cayman. Legend has it that kissing a stingray brings seven years of good luck, so I did as I was told.
Lacour: As a 24-year-old cub reporter in 1994, I got to cover the conviction of white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith, who assassinated Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963. Two hung juries deferred justice for 30 years before the state reopened the case. I was standing about 15 feet from Evers’ widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, when she exploded in joy and relief during a post-verdict news conference. I will never forget it.
Where was your last restaurant meal?
Purvis: Constantine’s, a family-owned Turkish restaurant in Gastonia. I’ve always been a fiend for Middle Eastern food, but after going to Istanbul and Cappadocia in Turkey in October, I’m always on the lookout for my next great baba ghanoush.
Bowler: Ohana Poke in Latta Arcade. I did the build-your-own bowl with jasmine rice, ahi tuna, and a bunch of toppings.
Lacour: So that big plate with the monolith of cornbread that ran atop our first newsletter? Well … it wasn’t that. But it was an order of nachos from the same place, Lupie’s Café, with cheese, pintos, onions, jalapeños, and Texas chili that warmed my gullet on a gray winter afternoon.
As we say in the South, where are your people from?
Purvis: Both sides of my family are from Georgia—Atlanta on my mother’s side, Americus on my dad’s — for generations. I have copies of barbecue sauce and Brunswick stew recipes that go back at least four generations.
Bowler: All over. My dad’s side is from New England, my mom’s from Memphis. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, then northern California before going to college in Savannah, Georgia. I lived in Atlanta for most of my 20s and moved to Charlotte 13 years ago.
Lacour: My dad and I were both born and raised in New Orleans, but he traced his folks back to where my mom’s from: Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana, about midway between Baton Rouge and Alexandria. Both sides are of French descent and spoke some French, but I’m not Cajun. (I’ve heard I’m technically “Louisiana Creole,” but “creole” is a term with complicated and divergent meanings. And, hey, just hit me: I’m writing this on Fat Tuesday. “Little bitty boy/With a heart of steel …”)
What’s one thing you’d never guess about me?
Purvis: I didn’t plan to be a food writer. I started in newsrooms in high school, and I’ve been a police reporter, a page designer and worked on the national news desk at five newspapers. When I started out, I was planning to be a foreign correspondent and live all over the world. As the old song says, “Then I fooled around and fell in love.”
Bowler: I’m a spectacularly bad weeknight cook. You can ask my kids. They’ll tell you Mommy makes a mean box of Annie’s mac-and-cheese. I’ve mastered a handful of recipes that I pull out for holidays or special occasions, but on school nights when I’m shuttling kids to sports, I’ll eat a bowl of Cheerios, usually standing over the sink.
Lacour: I have a thoroughly weird and only semi-accountable fascination with Russian, especially Soviet, history. I’m re-reading David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb, about the Gorbachev-era collapse of the USSR, but it’s hard to read about one empire’s collapse while living through the collapse of another.
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