BREAKING Bread

Oxford American BREAKING Bread Who is welcome at the welcome table? Fifty years after restaurant desegregation, why do we continue to dine apart? A special section on the dynamics of hospitality, exclusion, and food justice. Edited by John T. Edge - 100 - SPRING 2015 Photo by Ben Couvillion OxfordAmerican.org - 101 - taught the ‘value of discretion’ had never let on class like me, or you’re black and of any class and to make of Highlands, he says. “Fine dining was what became of some of the bills pressed into his aware of the South’s peculiar history, you can’t all about flounder with beurre blanc. And filets palm after he flambéed the baked Alaska tableside, help but glance over Goren Avery’s shoulder into wrapped in bacon, held together with toothpicks. lowering the lights so that his white gloves and our shared past. When Highlands opened in 1982, we had a line shirt stood out against the fire: The tips would out the door on the first day for shrimp and grits be donated to the cause of Martin Luther King.” unch with Goren Avery is comparable to din- with meunière and cherry tomatoes. For smoked GOING DEEPER WITH RED DOG Even then, some waiters defined their own terms ner served by Goren Avery. At every turn, trout with cappellini.” BY JOHN T. EDGE of engagement. L he exerts control like a munificent dictator. Thirty-three years into Avery’s tenure, most This past fall, during the symposium where Red Soon after we take a seat at Bottega Café, a casu- diners comport themselves in a manner he appre- Dog was first screened, the SFA also premiered an al Stitt-owned Italian restaurant up the hill from ciates. Though he still sorts his tips in shoeboxes, original oratorio, Repast, written by Kevin Young. Highlands, his eyes lock on mine. Not long after those tips are generously remunerative. He’s too His poem from that work, “Pining, a definition,” we finish a pleasantly charred lozenge of pork bel- modest to reveal his effective salary. But Avery appears in this issue. Repast tells the tragic and ly, he firmly squeezes my bicep. Physically and is proud enough of his work to tell me that, on true story of Booker Wright, owner of Booker’s emotionally, Avery commands the social moment. the night before we sat down to lunch, he took in atching Goren Avery work the an unsung hero or heroine of the food world, a That’s admirable. He’s a loyalist, who walked Place nightclub and waiter at the famed restau- I’ve known Avery for nearly twenty years. an average 34 percent on each tab. In an industry Highlands Bar & Grill dining tradition-bearer whose work and life bear wit- through the door in November of 1982 and rant Lusco’s, who spoke truths about the pains of We’ve eaten lunches of Chinese dim sum and where 19.5 percent is the norm, the numbers he room is a pleasure tantamount ness to the better impulses of the Southern ex- has remained in service at Highlands, despite segregation in 1960s Mississippi and lived big and French choucroute in New York City. We’ve puts on the board are keen measures of excellence to savoring a couple of chef perience. To mark the occasion, we produced a insistent offers from other employers. In an in- died too soon in the cotton town of Greenwood. shared a bar perch often enough for me to know and endurance. Frank Stitt’s farro-stuffed and film,Red Dog, directed by my colleague Joe York. dustry rife with turnover, that’s laudable. What In what seemed to the Delta gentry a recipro- that his drink of choice may look like a negroni, Avery reminds me that his success is rooted in Wport-glazed quail. Four nights a week, Avery A frame-by-frame study of Avery at the height I see, however, and what I think that Mountain cal relationship, Wright sing-songed the menu but, owing to a fight with pancreatitis that steered a past that’s not too long gone. “They knew what glides through this burgher temple like a camera of his powers, Red Dog is a natural complement Brook doyenne may have glimpsed, is a kind of and slung platters of pompano for tips until he him away from booze, is actually cranberry juice to do and what not to do, what to say and what grip rolling through a movie set on a well-greased to the food section of this issue, which, for the redemption, a moment of earned equity that revealed, during a 1966 NBC documentary, that on the rocks. No matter. This is just the second not to tell”: That’s how he recalls men like George dolly. Beneath the spangling lights here in Bir- most part, was born of speaking assignments Avery broadcasts to those he serves. That’s the he was not happy bucking and scraping for buckra time we’ve actually had a substantive discussion. Pearson and Irving Goldsmith, who schooled mingham, he bobs and weaves and runs and rips for SFA symposia. true gift of his career. To his patrons and his peers. dollars. “The meaner the man be, the more you The first came when Joe York and I scouted him at the Relay House, who taught him how to over polished oak floors, between linen-draped Lolis Elie’s recollection of the late Rudy To himself, his progeny, and his city. smile,” he said, his voice crackling with emotion, Red Dog. At dinner that evening, I learned that carve roasts and flambé desserts table side, who tables, alongside French brasserie broadsides. Lombard, who drove the desegregation of New Black male waiters have long played dramatic his words revealing the duplicity required to live back when Alabama football games were staged showed him how to serve without kowtowing. Avery, who has the look and charm and drive Orleans restaurants and co-edited a book that roles in this pageant we call the South. Until separate but supposedly equal lives. Blacks in the at Legion Field, Avery’s father cooked barbe- “They polished me,” Avery tells me, his eyes of a less combative James Carville and brings a profiled that city’s old-guard black chefs, is the recently, those roles have demanded varying Delta were emboldened. Whites were forced to cue on a barrel pit in their Smithfield yard and glistening. “They got me ready for all of this.” swivel-necked acuity to his profession, knows lone exception to that genesis. But read that piece degrees of subservience. Commerce and conven- acknowledge that their interracial relationships sold two-bone stacks of butter-and-beer-sauce- how to read this room. Thirty-plus years into a and you recognize that Elie and Lombard are tion have served black men who style themselves were on tenterhooks. That two-and-a-half-minute drenched ribs and white bread to fans. By the uch has changed in Birmingham during tenure that his colleagues hope will carry past the fellow travelers who have long focused their at- garrulous jesters or faithful retainers. Today, monologue—which, if you’re curious, you may time he was thirteen, Avery worked alongside Goren Avery’s career. The city elected its fifty-year mark, Avery arches back from two-tops tentions on those same welcome table issues. The restaurants remain sites of commerce where stream on the Web—laid bare the inequities of his father, dodging cars in game-day traffic to M first black mayor, Richard Arrington, in more interested in canoodling than ordering, and, paths we Southerners take to revisiting our past democracy is promised but not fulfilled. That’s the day and the affects of subservience. hustle sandwiches and rent side-yard parking 1979. (Current mayor William Bell, also African- like a dunking bird aiming for a glass of water, are sometimes circuitous. Writing about Lance one of the points that Todd Kliman makes in his Southern inequities have historically been spots. After he returned home from Berkeley, American, regularly commands a corner table at plunges into martini-thirsty foursomes, suggest- Hill, also of New Orleans—who documented the meditation on race in contemporary Washington, starker. Race is a measure, along with gender and California, and his 1970s stint at Chez Panisse, Highlands and cuts up with Avery.) In 1992, the ing appetizers of beef carpaccio to complement radical 1960s work of the Deacons for Defense D.C., dining rooms. ethnicity. Exclusion based on food choice has long before he opened Highlands in 1982, Stitt was city opened the nation’s first major civil rights their brimming gin coupes. and rallied Louisiana voters in the early 1990s In D.C., and throughout the South, jester leveraged class distinctions, especially among one of their customers. Thirty-plus years later, museum. Grasping a starched napkin in his left hand to defeat onetime Klansman David Duke—Sara waiters once were omnipresent. Bill “Bojangles” those in the mountain South. Also in this issue, Stitt and Avery are the last of the opening team When Highlands opened in 1982, the debut and twirling a pair of mod eyeglasses in his Roahen spells out the possibilities of Hill’s new- Robinson of Richmond famously spilled oyster Chris Offutt, a proud son of Kentucky, reminds to regularly walk the Highlands floor. of a restaurant didn’t seem comparatively note- right, Avery wheedles and cajoles regulars who est project, a celebration of the mirliton, a squash soup on a patron at the luxe Jefferson Hotel in the us that, when humans discriminate, wealth and On this trip, Avery and I go deeper, beyond worthy.

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