Toward a Tasty Future
Ask citizens of the Charlotte
cognoscenti about the state of food here, and the pattern of response is predictable. First they steer the conversation away from working-class redoubts and toward white-tablecloth dining temples. Then they get defensive, and tell you the temple scene is improving. Finally, they throw the bankers under the bus. “They’re meat-and-potato diners,” a friend says. “They’re granola-bars-for-breakfast and chicken-wings-for-dinner kind of people,” says another, “too focused on earnings reports and interest rates to cultivate a taste for good food.”

Money and food don’t mix. Such is the logic. That notion would surprise restaurateurs in Houston who rely on swaggering oilmen for capital. Ditto Atlanta, where chefs court the city’s entrepreneurial class, and where Linton Hopkins, of Restaurant Eugene, once told me, “The restaurant business is medieval; we require patrons.”

Charlotte boasts an enviable track record of big-picture civic investment that feeds one of our nation’s most innovative and generous public arts programs. Here, opera thrives. Symphony does too. Yet the food arts get comparatively short shrift.

Over the next decade, as the city’s infrastructure investments blossom and a new generation of Johnson & Wales–trained chefs gains footing, that may change. But greenhorn chefs won’t be the only folk leading the charge. New arrivals from around the world are reinvigorating regional foodways, both on the low end and on the high end.

On this Charlotte run, I meet a recent immigrant from Mexico who roasts and chops pork that recalls honest whole hog cooked on a traditional Carolina pit. And I meet a Vietnamese immigrant who deep-fries cornmeal-sheathed fillets of flounder, which I hit with shots of Tabasco and eat in three greedy bites.
Between bites, I begin to envision Charlotte as a citadel of the New Piedmont. A place where immigrant cooks thrive. A place where fried chicken, pocked with fiery Sichuan peppercorns, emerges as a signature dish. A place where the chamber of commerce has a distinctive culinary culture to sell.