Indholdsfortegnelse for February/March 2024 i Garden & Gun

EDITOR’S LETTER ■ Follow me on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) @davedibenedetto When I lived in New York City in the late nineties, bourbon on the rocks was my go-to drink order. Besides the taste (and punch) of whiskey, I liked that it spoke to my Southern roots. Back then few bars in the city had voluminous brown water selections, as the bourbon boom as we know it hadn’t yet taken hold, and trusty Maker’s Mark with its fancy wax top usually got the nod. But my arrival at Garden & Gun in 2008 synced up perfectly with the groundswell. Since then I’ve been privy to some memorable bourbon moments. The most memorable? Well, that had to be at a G&G event at our Charleston, South Carolina, headquarters. After dinner,…

YOUR GUIDE TO SOUTHERN CULTUREINTERVIEW Night sweats, cellulite, elderly parents: No topic is off-limits to Leanne Morgan, the Knoxville-based stand-up comic who at fifty-eight has only recently broken into the zeitgeist after years toiling at comedy clubs. That attention comes thanks in part to her first Netflix special, Leanne Morgan: I’m Every Woman, an hour-and-fifteen-minute showcase of her flawless delivery—along with the pleasures of granny panties and Jell-O salad—which became one of the platform’s most streamed stand-up specials of 2023. Now she is on her Just Getting Started tour, selling out theaters and arenas nationwide, and will soon appear in Amazon Studios’ Reese Witherspoon/ Will Ferrell wedding caper, You’re Cordially Invited. Need a little laugh in between? Morgan’s Instagram videos of her day-to-day life are worth every second. Did you…

A CELEBRATION OF SOUTHERN FOOD AND DRINKANATOMY OF A CLASSIC When chefs travel, it’s a good bet they’re going to bring back ideas. That’s what happened when Ryan Poli left the celebrated Nashville restaurant Catbird Seat at the end of 2018 and headed across the globe. “I shot over to Asia to get my head straight,” he says. After stops in Japan, Thailand, Bali, and South Korea, the chef returned with an idea inspired by a Korean street snack that moves garlic bread into another dimension. “I haven’t seen it in America,” he says. “It’s a little sweet and a little savory, which is the American palate. We love sweet and savory and sugary and salty. This one hits all those notes.” Poli tucked the dish away for a few…

GLOVES Conjure speedster Steve McQueen with retro Hestra driving gloves, made from thin, pliable hair-sheep leather ideal for milder weather ($150; huckberry.com). WATCH Inspired by the Shelby Cobra, this Breitling stunner’s subdials reference the tachometer and dashboard gauges of the iconic sports car ($8,000; breitling.com). LUGGAGE Throwback British racing green meets modern vegan leather in Paravel’s handsome suitcase duo ($795–$825 for set; tourparavel.com). LOAFERS Today’s driving mocs offer comfort, grip, and serious style, as seen in this timeless navy blue suede pair by the Arkansas outfit Martin Dingman ($250; martindingman.com). SUNGLASSES The rounded, wood-grain-evoking design of these Garrett Leight polarized frames nods to the age of old Hollywood and appeals to both Katharines and Carys ($445; stag provisions.com). SCARF Indulge your inner Grace Kelly (or Thelma and Louise) with a…

Bourbon’s distillation chiefly from corn can initially make for a spirit that lacks distinct contours. Distillers offset this slackness by using secondary grains, such as rye, and through long aging in oak barrels, which provides a tannic edge as if from a tea bag. Lower-shelf bourbons tend to have more corn and spend less time in a barrel, and so can be rounder and less edgy. Which means they play well with others—a good mixing bourbon is an easy-to-lead dance partner. ¶ So who can do the leading? Bourbon gets along with an array of complementary ingredients, but a few rank among the most consistent and amenable partners. Try these pairings and see how they improve your cocktail choreography.…

1821–1960s • 1821 A newspaper in Bourbon County, Kentucky, runs an advertisement for “Bourbon Whiskey” by the barrel or keg, the first known appearance of that phrase in print. • 1826 A Kentucky grocer sends a letter to distiller John Corlis placing an order and recommending that “if our barrels should be burnt upon the inside” it would much improve the whiskey. • 1830s Bourbon makers begin branding their distillery’s name onto barrel heads, giving rise to the term “brand name.” • 1870 George Garvin Brown introduces Old Forester, the first bourbon exclusively sold in a sealed glass bottle. • 1880s Displeased with the flavor a ryegrass straw imparted to his mint julep, Marvin Chester Stone invents the first modern drinking straw by spiraling a piece of paper around a…

CHICO FERNÁNDEZ’S FAVORITE EVERGLADES BIRD IS THE GREEN HERON. “You know how he is always perched on the downward slope of a mangrove branch?” Fernández asks, as if everyone knows where green herons prefer to perch. That’s what he loves about the bird, he says. It stands with its head down and bill cocked toward the water, hunched over and at the ready, always prepared to thrust its beak toward an unsuspecting fish. Always ready, one might say, to make a cast. Fernández stands on the casting deck of a flats skiff when he asks the question, firing it over his right shoulder to a big guy poling the boat forty yards off the Indian River Lagoon shore. Fernández holds a fly rod in his right hand and a fly…

In De Leon Springs State Park, just north of DeLand, Florida, I walk toward Old Methuselah, an ancient bald cypress. Lush green ferns unfold at its base, and the towering canopy eats up all available sky space, outcompeting the sweet gums and water hickories growing on the edge of the park’s watery bog. The five-hundred-year-old tree is something of an anomaly: Most pines and cypresses—some of them more than a thousand years old—were harvested as part of the region’s logging economy in the early 1900s. There’s a strange, lovely comfort in knowing that in a state the Spanish dubbed La Florida, the flowery one, moss and vines will cover everything that stands still for too long. Although I am from South Carolina and teach in Georgia now, I’ve had a…

“Beauty and humor come from the human spirit”—Peter Yang, who photographed the comedian Leanne Morgan (p. 33) Peter Yang PHOTOGRAPHER Peter Yang’s secret to looking great in photos: Don’t take yourself too seriously. “There’s something corny about someone trying to be good looking,” says the Texas-raised, Los Angeles–based photographer, who captured portraits of the comedian Leanne Morgan for this issue’s Interview (p. 33). “Beauty and humor come from the human spirit, energy, and warmth.” Yang has spent his career photographing such celebrities as Michael B. Jordan, Stephen Colbert, and, for Garden & Gun, the late Leslie Jordan, but recently he’s been most captivated by everyday folks. “Since the pandemic, I’ve started photographing people on the street, and families and couples,” he says. “It’s made my work more joyous.” C. Morgan…

■ James, Doubleday, $28 If the whole of philosophy is a footnote to Plato, as someone once quipped, then the whole of American literature might be deemed a footnote to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ernest Hemingway certainly thought so: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” he once famously said. “There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” In 1959, the intellectual Norman Podhoretz wrote that “no other American novel (with the possible exception of Moby-Dick) has been so thoroughly ransacked for motives and morals, so lovingly examined, so jealously claimed as an ally in so many different polemical campaigns.” It’s read as a key, he went on, “to the very essence of the American imagination.” All of which makes…

Spectacular. That’s the word that came to mind the first time New Orleans native Chris Borges laid eyes on a watermelon radish. “I was in school in California, in the mecca of sustainable agriculture and farm-to-table, and so we were seeing a lot of great produce, including the watermelon radish,” says Borges, now the executive chef at Commons Club at Virgin Hotels New Orleans. “There’s no other word. Their beauty speaks for itself.” Native to China, the radish doesn’t actually taste like watermelon, but slice into one and you’ll immediately understand where it gets its name. The interior is bright reddish pink, with contrasting green edging. And it’s not just a pretty face. It has a milder flavor than a typical red radish, which makes for easy eating, and “without…

A white Jeep blocks the old drive-through lane of a one-time McDonald’s, set in the back of a Shell station in the Orlando suburb of Kissimmee, a patchwork of stucco strip malls southeast of the theme parks. On the deck around front, men gather in the dark beneath strings of café lights, wearing flower print shirts and flip-flops, smoking fat cigars, bright red tips dancing across the night like fireflies. From the back corner of a dining room lined with faux ivy walls and set with butcher paper–draped café tables, a seven-piece band blares, heavy on the accordion. The lead singer shouts out to all the Colombians in the house. All the Dominicans. A waiter, dressed in black, delivers a tamarind-glazed pork belly to a table and steps back to…

On the plot of land numbered 211 on a 1728 map of New Orleans, Heather Harllee’s three children have found treasures: willowware china; old shoes; handwrought nails; a pirate’s map on graphing paper; glass bottles from the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, when West Virginia was just Virginia; an icon of the Virgin Mary; railroad spikes—possibly for spiritual protection; children’s initials carved in a door. In 2010, soon after Harllee bought the Creole cottage on lower Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, her contractors lifted the house on jacks in an effort to replace a rotten sill. Her daughter, Caroline, would dive underneath where it was dark and come up with bones, relics of a nineteenth-century grocery business run by Felix de Lille, a free man of color who had…

BOURBON’S POPULARITY IN RECENT YEARS HAS GIVEN RISE to a new culture of reverence. Once just whiskey, cheap and good, now it’s often expensive and great, with many bourbons exalted and a few essentially deified. You can also find houses of worship, where admirers of the corn gather and reverently taste. ¶ Bars that lean heavily into whiskey in general and bourbon in particular continue to sprout up across the South, welcoming both neophytes and those with deep experience in the whiskey divine to compare notes. And maybe make a new friend. As people used to do at bars. Here’s a guide to nine that have opened since 2020, along with three timeless spots for devotees. WATCH HILL PROPER Prospect, KY Walk into Watch Hill Proper, just outside Louisville, and…

NO, BOURBON DOES NOT NEED TO BE MADE IN KENTUCKY (JUST THE United States). And—are you sitting down?—some of the boldest, most flavorful bourbon being produced today is emerging out of Texas. “It’s like Kentucky whiskey, but amplified,” says Jake Clements, cofounder of the Texas Whiskey Festival, held in April and now entering its seventh year. “Our whiskey has come so far in such a short amount of time.” Indeed. Texas bourbon has pretty much gone from zero to delicious in less than two decades. Garrison Brothers, located in the Hill Country between Fredericksburg and Austin, was first out of the gate when it started making bourbon in 2006. Others tumbled into the market over the next five years, including Balcones, Firestone & Robertson, Treaty Oak, and Ranger Creek. Another…

EEEAAA-ONGK! EEEEAAA-OOONGK! It’s hard to judge if the abrupt braying of mother-and-son donkey duo Little Edie and Diego is truly as loud as it seems, or if the clamor is more a reflection of the prevailing tranquility of DrinkWater Farm. Regardless, it doesn’t long distract from the spot’s serene spell. Situated not far from the Blue Ridge Parkway, the home of Wade Billeisen and Frank Carochi is reached via ten miles of narrowing rural roads southwest of bluegrass-loving Floyd, Virginia, that lead to a long gravel drive that runs along Burks Fork creek and a copse of trees with firewood stacked neatly between trunks. Of DrinkWater’s 140 heavily wooded acres below Buffalo Mountain, the couple has spent the last few years carving out (literally, pretty much) a central tract that…

In New York City, they’re known as bodegas, the corner stores where you can buy a bagel and a cup of coffee or Kleenex and cigarettes, probably dodging a house cat or two as they scurry through aisles and plop down on the candy bars. In Japan, they’re known as kissa bars, a riff on the 1950s teahouses where jazz fans would gather and listen to their favorite—and often extremely rare—records. In Florence, Alabama, however, it’s known as All the Best, a coffee shop–snack bar–record store combo that is the brainchild of a local couple, Kristy Bevis and Ben Tanner, and has become a fixture of the downtown scene. At the corner of Tennessee and Seminary Streets, the sliver of a shop is tiny but inviting, and it’s easy to…

■ Find us on Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok @gardenandgun IN GOOD SPIRITS What’s the best gift to give a party host (Southern Conundrum, December 2023/January 2024)? A donation in your host’s name to a nonprofit organization that’s meaningful to him or her. Another bottle of wine or gag gift will not live on, but a donation, however small or large, will. And it absolutely solves the “regifting” problem. Kelley LavinOsprey, Florida I took a foraged centerpiece class a few years ago here on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, and it was so much fun (“Handpicked Holiday,” December 2023/January 2024). Amazing what you can find in your backyard! Laura DavisChincoteague, Virginia JIMMY IN PARADISE Though I can’t sing or play a musical instrument, the more I read about Jimmy Buffett,…

More than a few months remain before Southern peaches arrive in earnest. Until then, peaches held captive in jars and cans may be freed to help one get through the interminable wait. Or you might get your fix with a cocktail. Peaches have long made their way into strong drink—distilling the fruit into brandy became a noble method for preserving and shipping the flavor of a ripe peach before refrigerated train cars showed up in the late nineteenth century. Today you can find all manner of peach-imbued tipples in bottles and cans, including an array of liqueurs, whiskeys, and vodka sodas. Lamentably, the taste of many of these often has more in common with artificially flavored candy than a sun-dappled orchard in June. Happily, that’s not always the case. After…

THE BEST OF SOUTHERN HOMES, GARDENS, STYLE, AND MORECOLLECTIONS Before he even reached the cases of shiny silver dishes and booths of vintage state plates, Daniel Barrett Mathis spotted the strangest hunk of pottery near the door of the I-44 Antique Mall in Tulsa. The vase looked heavy and its colors shocking, heartbeats of red paint dripping into swirls of green-blue, orange, and black. He couldn’t decide if the piece was fabulous or charmingly ugly. “I hadn’t seen anything like that before, and it’s not like anything else I have,” says Mathis, whose Instagram handle @NotaMinimalist hints at the incredible number and scale of his collections—hand-carved walking sticks, seashells, vintage beaded fruit—arranged artfully in his Oklahoma City home. “But I kept walking back over to that pot—and then I just…

THE BUNGALOW SPRAWL OF A GREAT WESTERN CITY MOVEDbeneath me like stops on a zoetrope wheel. I looked out the window of the plane and felt the plastic airline cup flex in my hand. The first sip of bourbon burned in a thrilling way. I watched a Wes Anderson movie in the dark. I’d been thinking about this bourbon on ice for the past few hours as I turned in my rental car and trudged through two different airports. I wanted a real drink. But just one. One and a half ounces a day max. That’s it for me now. Oh how the mighty have fallen! My doctor Mac told me I’d come to the end of excess. I was about to become a fat diabetic, and there’s no such…

THE PARKING LOT OF THE PARTY SOURCE, A MASSIVE liquor store in Newport, Kentucky, might seem an unlikely location for an award-winning craft distillery. But as my friend Will Hinkle and I pull into the lot, New Riff Distilling’s gleaming copper still, ensconced in a sleek glass tower, commands attention. We learn during our early afternoon tour that a hundred-foot-deep well taps into a limestone-filtered aquifer beneath the distillery, which helps explain why Party Source’s former owner Ken Lewis decided to build it right here in a corner of the lot. Naturally stripped of iron and sulfides, the mineral-rich well water is ideal for cooking ground grains to ferment and distill into bourbon. Flowing from the earth at a constant fifty-eight degrees, it’s also circulated throughout the distillery as an…