Midnight Snack (reprint)
Hey Snackers! Anna, here. This is the article I did for Syracuse High that got my column canceled. Veedat and I are going on vacation to visit my Granny, so I figured I’d send you this. I’m proud of it. Enjoy and stay hungry.
Report From the Nightward
By Anna Okkes
Restaurant: Cowboy Dan’s Bar and Grill
This reporter is old enough to remember a time before the city enforced its no-smoking ban. My parents would come home from a night out in the city, pay the sitter, and then poke their heads into my room to see if I was asleep. I could smell the smoke on their clothes. I didn’t mind.
Very few food reporters have written about what I like to call urban terroir. So, I’ll be the first. Terroir is a wine term referring to all possible factors involved in the building up of a grape’s flavor—the sunlight, rainfall, soil acidity, etc.
Could it be that restaurants have a terroir, too?
Our olfactory senses make up eighty percent of flavor perception, if you didn’t know. So it follows, a meal enjoyed under the Tuscan sun tastes different than one enjoyed in the city: the grease buildup, the occasional waft from the bathroom door, and of course, the smell of smoke.
Maybe I’m not winning you over.
Last night I followed a pack of blinkies to the edge of Dock Street: a curving bayside strip-mall containing a Dollar General and a shut-down trampolinium. The Nocturnal scavengers resemble whip-its—if whip-its glowed. The wispy pack jumped high over my head and into a dumpster to feed. I turned around, lost and was about to give up when I heard a zap and a buzz from somewhere in the fog. A neon sign shaped like a red cowboy hat plinked to life.
-Blinkies
Cowboy Dan’s appeared on Dock Street, in our city’s Nightward. I could smell the stink of cigarettes from outside and, for a second, reconsidered my choice.
For a second.
Then I went in.
There was sawdust on the floor, and jolly mariachi music played from hidden speakers. Plumes of blue smoke attacked my senses. I coughed immediately.
Sidling up to the bar, I was welcomed by a homely bartender wearing an apron covered in what looked like blood.
“What’ll ya have, darlin’?”
No menus.
“What are you known for?” I asked.
She laughed, then went into a violent fit of coughing. Once she recovered, my host replied, “We’re known for our drinks, kid, but I can tell you’re too young, and I don’t want to get into any trouble with your kind.”
She could tell I was a day-timer.
“Burger?” I asked. My eyes were stinging now. I picked out a twenty from my wallet.
“We got those! And listen, hon, you don’t need to pay up front. I trust you. Be right back.”
As you know, dear reader, most of the food I have sampled in the Nightward has looked—how should I say this?—strange. Things glow and phase, squeal and squelch. It’s sensory overload. And the service I’ve received has always been on the chilly side.
The burger was a burger, plain and simple; American cheese, a sweet and buttery bun, ketchup, mustard.
-Burger
But it was good. Damn good.
Better than any I’d had in the city during the day. The one strange thing was that the fries never stopped steaming—even after they got cold.
Likewise, the hospitality I received stayed warm all the way up until I walked out of the bar and into the clean midnight air.
So, fans, much like the blinkies in the dumpster, sometimes we have to dive deep into the terroir of the city. We have to risk coming home a bit ripe if it means finding something truly special.
Yours Allways,
Anna Okkes