Weekend @ Acme and Champagne Dinner 12/19
12/6 Greetings from Carrboro, It really doesn’t make any sense. At all. Look at the rest of the world. France has Champagne and crémant. Spain has cava. And Italy has prosecco. Sounds lovely, right? And classy. Festive, even. So what did the great American marketing machine contrive for our bubbly drinking pleasure? Cold Duck. [...]
Week @ Acme 11/22
11/22 Greetings from Carrboro, There was a time in my life when a certain unavoidable contingency embraced “Gobble, Gobble” as an appropriate Thanksgiving greeting. This was deemed the holiday bookend to that ever popular Christmas shout out “Merry, Merry.” Both were spoken with a rather nauseating peppiness that’s usually the domain of local [...]
Week @ Acme 11/15
11/15 Greetings from Carrboro, I’m pretty sure that it absolutely ends tonight. OK, I know. I know. Never say never. But serving dinner on the patio in November is always iffy. Much less this late into the month. It’s just too cold. The chairs outside are soon stacked and put away. Mulch [...]
Week @ Acme 11/11 and Bordeaux Wine Dinner
11/11/11 Greetings from Carrboro, We were suckers back then. At least, I like to imagine it wasn’t only me who swallowed their spiel – hook, line, and sinker. Either way, those salesmen could smell the earnest naiveté on me and would lay it on thick. They wore golf shirts and tassel loafers [...]
Week @ Acme 11/3
11/3/11 Greetings from Carrboro, My mother is from the South. So much so that she once ate three-fourths of the professed “best hot dog of her life” before she realized she had never put the wiener in the bun. I swear. Southerners, you see, like to put food on food. And then [...]
Week @ Acme 10/17
10/17 Greetings from Carrboro, It’s a good thing not to let tradition get mired in the truth. That just confuses things. Take Thanksgiving. The ‘70s had this just about right. I would bring home from school the ubiquitous construction paper handprint turkey along with a romanticized version of Pocahontas and Christopher Columbus eating [...]
Week @ Acme 10/17
10/17 Greetings from Carrboro, It’s a good thing not to let tradition get mired in the truth. That just confuses things. Take Thanksgiving. The ‘70s had this just about right. I would bring home from school the ubiquitous construction paper handprint turkey along with a romanticized version of Pocahontas and Christopher Columbus eating [...]
Week @ Acme 9/28
9/28/11 Greetings from Carrboro, People who know me well know that I have a huge head. Literally huge. Bordering on the tragic. My brother called me “truck head” for a reason. And every football coach that I ever had thought it was hilarious. I’ve been spent a good chunk of my life [...]
Weekend @ Acme 9/16
9/16 Greetings from Carrboro, It’s remarkable. The temperature dips below 65 degrees and kitchen people start talking about duck fat. Like clockwork. Now, this may just be a Southern thing. Akin to people in Vermont breaking out the margarita glasses and flip-flops that first day the snow melts enough that they can see [...]
Weekend @ Acme 9/8 and Italian Wine Dinner
9/7 Greetings from Carrboro, I’d rather not remember certain things. At all. Restaurant stuff mostly. To that end, I’ve been working on a new and improved version of that history to give me a decidedly more heroic nature. With strong doses of common sense and grit. Something very John Wayne-ish. But people [...]
