Monday, August 3, 2009

Barbecue and pizza, but no barbecue pizza

So, an important task for these few weeks I have off, besides finding out that the Today Show is actually on past nine o'clock is also finding out if there is anything worth eating down here, besides Krispy Kreme, which I can tell you is a big fat winner. So, because I'm a Midwesterner and Houseboy is an East Coaster neither one of us knows very much about barbecue, but we figured that our Midwestern and East Coasten friends and family, if and when they visit us, will want to eat of the pig, basted in the sauce and expect that it will be the best barbecue in Nashville, if not in Tennessee, since I hear that Memphis has better barbecue anyway. Since I'm a vegetarian this will result in a citywide search for the best cornbread and mac and cheese and the least disgusting boiled and salted vegetables, because down here it's warm enough to grow vegetables year-round, so they have no love or respect for them and would rather eat something brownish and soggy that they ironically call "green beans."

The other important search is for edible pizza, which is more of a stretch. Having just emigrated from Chicago, I realize that we have the bar set pretty high, what with the Chicago style stuffed pizza and Medici's pesto and sundried tomato and goat cheese deliciousness and the cheesy crust on the Lou Malnati's and the cornbread crust on the Leona's.... you get the picture. We do have the back up of Papa John's delivery, which I haven't had in about seven years, but remember fondly from simpler times in Minneapolis, back when I was young and excited just to have multiple delivery options. We ordered Chinese! It was quite metropolitan.

Anyway, all of this is to say that so far we've found Mellow Mushroom*, which has awesome delicious sandwiches and white pizza and pesto pizza and is decorated like an LSD trip, but does not deliver, so we're still on the search because when it's 90 degrees out, I'm not walking half a mile to pick up a pizza, and I think we've had the discussion about me driving already.

However, we will be taking people there because eating pizza under a giant psychedelic mushroom is just cool.


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* I love the picture on that website of the three greasy hippy dudes making pizza. That's exactly what it's like there too. No hairs in my food yet, luckily.

http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

6 comments:

  1. Woah! Hippie-esque pizza chain of the South - so incredibly strange! Do you think the scruffy beards are part of the dress code - the same way clean shaven-ness is part of other places dress codes?


    Note: I seem to be fond of this "-" today. FYI

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  2. I'll check with my family on the barbecue issue. As far as pizza goes...I'm clueless. Most of my family lives in Bellevue, though.

    Oh, and my favorite place to go when I go to Tennessee is O'Charley's because we don't have them here. But it's basically like Chili's or something, so I can't really recommend it except that they have the most awesome broccoli in the universe.

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  3. Oh, and my Aunt Kim really likes Barbara's Pavilion (or something), which is in the middle of nowhere in Franklin. They have very very Southern food. Very. Like, there's gravy on everything.

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  4. Saturday: I think hyphen usage is a sign of intelligence, so just go ahead and pepper those things in there.

    Shine: I'll look for O'Charley's - I love broccoli! On the other hand, I hate gravy, so I'll have to run Barbara's by Houseboy to see if he wants to try it out.

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  5. I hate gravy. They practically kicked me out of the South.

    (I don't even really like barbecue very often because it's meat-tastic...please don't tell.)

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  6. "I hate gravy." This is blasphemy. To a fat guy, anyway. The Missus and I had Mellow Mushroom in Florida. Classy place... But good pie.

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