Winner at the chicken dinner

Mike Powers, a software engineer, has eaten at more than 1000 restaurants reviewed by Michael Stern.

Powers first noticed Stern when the Roadfood creator had a column in Gourmet. Not much in the magazine appealed to Powers, who’d rather have a kummelweck roll than a croissant, but the places that Stern chronicled sounded like his kind of unpretentious joints.

“My mother-in-law got wind of that and gave me the fifth edition of Roadfood for Christmas,” he recalled. Paging through the book, he vowed, “I’m going to go to all of these places.”

That was 20 years ago. Since then, he’s devised an app to track his achievements and direct him to the next Stern-approved sandwich shop, rib pit, or hash house. (He’s still got a fair amount of eating to do in Montana and Maine.) But he’d never met Stern until last Saturday, when he joined him at The Food Section’s Legs & Cans, a fried chicken bonanza featuring Stern’s eight favorite Aiken area fried chickens.

Many of the close to 200 people who showed up for the no-cost poultry party weren’t entirely certain of the event’s purpose, a predicament compounded by the featured musician declining to let anyone else within three feet of her personal microphone.

They can be forgiven for not intuiting that when I screamed, “Please subscribe!”, it meant, “One of the first great champions of American vernacular food culture is exploring restaurants within easy driving distance of this event venue, and only people who pay for The Food Section are privy to his latest finds.”

Powers, though, understood that Legs & Cans was designed to showcase this newsletter’s insistence on quality, predilection for fun, and commitment to connecting readers with new and meaningful culinary experiences.

Legs & Cans attendees with Michael Stern; Powers is in the middle.

The Roadfood junkie only had to travel 415 miles from his home in Charlottesville for one he won’t soon forget.

There is no need to go to the same lengths as Powers! With a paid subscription to The Food Section, Stern will show up in your inbox every Tuesday.

In observance of Memorial Day, The Food Section won’t publish a newsletter on Monday, but we’ll be back on Tuesday with Stern’s review of Atomic City Eatery, located in the town created to replace the one dismantled for the construction of the Savannah River Site nuclear weapon manufactory in 1951.

This past Saturday marked my first visit to the excellent Savannah River Site Museum, where the collection includes a fallout shelter and this contemporary roadside protest sign posted by an area resident, perhaps a member of one of the 1,500 families given mere months to clear out.

Between the hand lettering and glass glare, it’s a little hard to make out the words, but they’re worth repeating here: “It is hard to understand why our town must be destroyed to make a bomb that will destroy someone else’s town that they love as much as we love ours.”