#DEJA VU RESTAURANT MAC#

“We want to bring it back up for people and remind them that it’s really good, and it’s OK to like it,” she says. When you use good meat, it’s actually pretty nutritious,” says Dawson. They lump it in as an unhealthy food that Appalachians eat. “Once people get to a certain level of feeling like they’ve made it, they don’t eat baloney any more. It is served on a communion wafer – not the flavourless white bread usually offered up as the body of Christ, but a flaky, wafer-like biscuit. It has the salty sweet scent of caramel, and a rich, briny, fattiness to it, but it somehow still manages to be light. It’s certainly not your regular sandwich meat. “That’s not the kind I ate growing up!” Dan Seguin, who is from Michigan, says, chuckling to himself. Photograph: Kristian Thacker/The Guardian In between courses Mike Costello would share the stories of the dishes that the guests were enjoying. They travelled 17 hours to get here, and they are talking about the baloney. The chatter of the 20 or so people present is almost drowned out by a shrill chorus of crickets, but I can still hear the couple next to me. I t’s an unusually nippy evening for August in Lost Creek and I am sitting at a long, wooden table in Dawson and Costello’s backyard, looking at a baloney course – an unusual item to see on the menu of a 10-course, $110 supper club. But it is these questions about community, class and stigma – and ultimately, whether it is a bourgeois act to like good food – that pushes me to visit them.

Their food has been James Beard-nominated, their farm visited and televised by Anthony Bourdain, and they’re no strangers to rave reviews. They run a supper club together in Lost Creek, West Virginia, where they often talk about these tensions over food, and why they matter. “It’s when it is seen as a hobby, or a leisure activity, that someone indulges in because they want to, not because they have to – that it becomes aspirational,” Mike Costello, Amy’s husband, says. Why is it that at that point, things once derided – like tending a community garden, making your own bread, or pickling your own vegetables – become sophisticated? It is a common double standard that food associated with poverty is seen as a marker of slovenliness and can bring great shame on those who eat it – until it’s adopted by the middle and upper classes. Lost Creek Farm’s communion wafers with black pepper bologna, sweet potato mustard and sour corn.

My friends joked that I had become “bougie”, even before my material circumstances had changed. I now straddled two cultures, and food had the capacity to alienate me from both.

#DEJA VU RESTAURANT MAC#

My family was the kind that only knew of two cheeses – “yellow” (mild cheddar) and “orange” (red leicester) we ate fish, chilli con carne and mac and cheese from the tin and an expensive meal out for us would usually be at a fast-food chain.Īs I went to university and started work as a journalist, I was soon introduced to things I’d never eaten: steak, fancy wine, cured meats. These contradictions have always been fascinating to me, a person who grew up in an immigrant working-class family, and who now operates in a middle-class world. In the UK, where I am from, having a Spanish or Italian ham shoulder or leg on your kitchen counter is now a status symbol: it communicates being cultured and well-travelled enough to know about delicacies from the European continent, having the money to buy it (they can cost upwards of $350) and, oftentimes, owning the expensive, fancy equipment to slice it. “I asked myself: ‘Why would I feel ashamed of that ham and yet Spanish people are super proud of it?’” Dawson says. Hams were hanging from restaurant ceilings and sitting pride of place on the counters, but no one was cringing or rushing people hurriedly past, hoping they would go unseen. Then, on a trip to Spain in 2013, Dawson was visited by a strange deja vu. She had grown up being told everything about West Virginia was backwards, and a sweating ham sitting on the kitchen counter seemed emblematic of that. Her teenage self saw success as being able to buy everything you wanted, not harvesting it yourself. It felt like something you only did because you needed to, like a poor person thing,” Dawson, who is 37, says now. “No one else’s parents were curing meats, and the middle-class families definitely didn’t do that. Amy Dawson of Lost Creek Farm prepares her bloody butcher corn bread for the dinner that evening at Lost Creek Farm.

Deja vu restaurant