Before I left Mozza to do the things I had to do with life, I was rapping with Nancy Silverton about the best meal I had ever had. I told her I was staying at this cheap place outside of Venice sometime in 2007. Italy. I remember being in the middle of this very lonely, yearning stretch. It was raining out and I left the grounds of my place and just started walking down a country road before I kept walking...and walking...and walking. Eventually, miles away and soaked, I stumbled into this place that looked like a farm house in the middle of Wisconsin. They gave me a table and I felt like they didn't really want me there before they served me the most extraordinary meal I had ever eaten. When this lead was presented to Ms. Silverton - the greatest meal I had ever eaten, and outside of Venice - she wanted to know everything: the tastes, the presentation, the style...bottom to top then back over again. I think she knew me as eloquence in a lot of ways but in those moments I was anything but. I told her I remembered being sad, and cold, and lonely and lost, and then that I felt like everyone hated me before my Nebbiolo came with a simple pasta course, home made with an easy and beautiful marinara before another glass of red with a pizza they folded into something that looked like a calzone before they practically kicked me out. It's possible I was being overdramatic, as usual, or not...and at some point she asked me fairly emphatically what I liked about it, as if I wasn't remembering my life correctly, before someone cut in to talk to her...
Today, after checking in, after all the connections and thought it took for me to be wandering through Mae Sariang, I was starving. There was a guy on the street one block down and one up from my hotel, cooking on the outside edge of the patio of this place with a TV and yellow and green checked tablecloth and some locals strewn about. He was plating for this woman a simple dish - chicken on rice with greens and a hard boiled egg. I walked up and he looked at me very suspiciously before I pointed to what he was plating and held up 2 fingers. He pointed to a table and I sat down. There were a lot of flies and jugs of water on the tables and a couple minutes later, he brought me exactly what I ordered - chicken on rice with some odd greens and a hard boiled then browned egg and a small bowl of chicken soup. The first bite of the chicken made me think back to Venice - that was my first thought, these two joints fighting for rank. It tasted like he had been soaking the chicken in whisky and caramel and black magic for weeks - unreal. I ordered the same thing again and it came and I ate it and when I asked for my bill, he asked for 50 baht or about 1.65 and then I went on my way, trying not to blink too fast or at all because I'm beginning to recognize my greatest fear -- missing any of this as it's happening, all that is happening...
