resume + writing portfolio

RESUME & WRITING PORTFOLIO

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ME

I was born and raised in rural Massachusetts, which accounts for the subtle hints of Mark Wahlberg you might hear in my voice. After getting a graduate degree in English Literature, I moved to New York City, where I learned important life skills like how to dodge taxis and avoid eye contact with people. I also scored a job as a strategist and copywriter at Y&R (the ad agency, not the Young and the Restless).

After two jargon-filled years on the job, I convinced my bosses to let me do a side project called 90 Days of Making, where I forced myself to complete a new creative project every day for 90 days. Based on this experience, I was invited to speak at SXSW 2014 and allowed to start Y&R Moonshop, my very own little creative lab whose sole purpose was to make people in the corporate Y&R machine feel uncomfortable. This was late last year.

Ironically enough, this was also the time when I started growing tired of my existence as an advertising copywriter. Deep down, I wanted to do something more meaningful than selling cheap, factory-produced corn dogs to unsuspecting children. So, in my down time, I started writing about food, something that's been important and interesting to me for basically my whole life. I wrote an article for a magazine in Nashville, which got published, and I've been writing feverishly ever since. Seven published articles in, otherwise known as last week, I decided to quit my day job in advertising and pursue food writing full-time.

So that leaves me here, begging you to read at least one article in my portfolio and write back to me. :)

Oh, and say hello to your mother for me. (That's a Mark Wahlberg joke.)

Me (center).

SCHOOL

WORK

NATIVE MAGAZINE, Freelance Food Writer NOV. 2013 - PRESENTSeven published features (over 2,000 words each)

Y&R MOONSHOP, Founder and Director MAY 2013 - AUG. 2014Launched office specializing in non-traditional advertising

Y&R NEW YORK, Senior Strategist FEB. 2011 - MAY 2013Developed marketing strategies for corporate juggernauts

I.E. LIFE CHANGING IDEAS, Strategist SEPT. 2010 - DEC. 2014Developed communication strategies for non-profit clients

OXFORD UNIVERSITY, Master’s in English Literature SEPT. 2009 - JULY 2010Graduated with Distinction; Pembroke College Book Prize

BOSTON UNIVERSITY, B.A. in English and Economics SEPT. 2005 - MAY 2009Magna cum Laude; Phi Beta Kappa; English Department Prize

RECOGNITION

CANNES LION, Finalist in Direct category JUNE 2014For SXSW Social Soundscape, an interactive music project

FAVOURITE WEBSITE AWARD, Adobe Cutting Edge Project of the Week JUNE 2014 For SXSW Social Soundscape, an interactive music project

FAVOURITE WEBSITE AWARD, Site of the Day JUNE 2014 For SXSW Social Soundscape, an interactive music project

FAVOURITE WEBSITE AWARD, Mobile Site of the Day MAY 2014 For SXSW Social Soundscape, an interactive music project

SXSW 2014, Official Speaker MARCH 2014 Invited to speak about 90 Days of Making, a project I did in 2013

TED, Ads Worth Spreading FEBRUARY 2013 Recognized for work on “Annie,” the most shared Dell ad ever

LANGUAGES

ITALIAN, FRENCH, AND LATIN Fluent in Italian, proficient in French, and studied Latin in high school (not super useful)

KITCHENESEI can use words like sous-vide and vichychoisse in a sentence (like this one).

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PUTTING FOOD ON THE TABLE


#NAT IVENASHVILLE / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / 25

PUTTING FOOD ON THE TABLE

By Mat t Co lange lo | Photography by Emi ly Ha l l

Brandon Frohne’s journey to hell and Mason ’s



Brandon Frohne makes a good first impression. He’s twenty-seven and the head chef at Mason’s, the new restau-rant inside the freshly renovated Loews Vanderbilt Hotel. He’s seen every indie cooking documentary under the sun and can remember each of them by heart (e.g. Jiro Dreams of Sushi). He can explain the science behind transglutaminase (meat glue) and how he’s used it to wrap halibut cheek in chicken skin. He says “super progressive modernist cuisine” and “f*ck” in the same sentence, without blink-ing an eye. Five minutes after meeting him, you think you’re talking to an approachable Southern nephew of Marco Pierre White, the original badass, cigarette-smoking British celebrity chef—the guy Anthony Bourdain wanted to be in Kitchen Confidential.

When asked about his culinary inspiration, it’s no surprise that he names one of the most radical and misunderstood chefs of our time, Paul Liebrandt. Equally revered as he is ridiculed, Liebrandt is basically a whinier, less successful version of Mar-co Pierre White. But that’s not what Brandon finds inspiring about him. “Like me, he didn’t have much of a family. He put all his energy into cooking because that’s what he loved to do.” As he says this, his eyes relax and his voice softens. He reaches

#NAT IVENASHVILLE / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / 27Pictured: Bone Marrow and Beef Cheek Confit


BRANDON FROHNE:

Follow on Twitter @BrandonFrohne & Instagram @ChefFrohne native.is/brandon-frohne


ImagineDragons14_NativeHalf_4c.indd 1 10/10/13 2:47 PM

back into his past and offers a glimpse of why he got into this profession: he didn’t have much of a family. I hang on to these words as he takes me into the kitchen and shows off his favorite cooking tools.

The kitchen at Mason’s is a workshop. Aesthetically, it’s light-years behind the Michelin three-star kitchens we’re used to seeing in movies like Ratatouille and A Matter of Taste. There are no copper pots dangling from the ceil-ing, no pristine white tiles on the floor. There isn’t a hang-ing garden of freshly picked herbs. Functionally, though, it’s right there with the best. Tucked away in the back, Brandon has some of the most advanced cooking tools in the business: a $20,000 combo convection-steam oven you can program recipes into, an anti-griddle that can chill to negative-seventy degrees, a sous-vide cooker that he’s been using to “flash pickle” veggies all summer. His de-scriptions of what these tools can do make you want to go to Williams-Sonoma and throw away your life savings.

Have you ever tried sous-vide Fried Chicken Galan-tine? Unless you’ve eaten it at Mason’s, probably not. Brandon tells me how it’s pre-pared: “You gotta grind up all the chicken thighs, chicken breasts, spices. Then purée it to get an even better texture.” He speaks about fancy foods and preparations with a like-able colloquialism. His prepo-sitions and contractions make these cooking techniques sound simpler than they ac-tually are, like you could do

them yourself. “And then we have to stuff it into casings.” Okay, like a sausage, I could probably do that. “And then we have to sous-vide it.” Right, with this sous-vide cooker here. “And then we have to make sure it’s perfectly symmetri-cal.” That’s where my un-founded confidence ends and my appreciation begins. Even if I got the meat-spice mixture right and learned how to fill the casings and turn on the sous-vide cooker, my imagi-nary Fried Chicken Galantine would not turn out perfectly symmetrical. It would look like Owen Wilson’s nose after a fistfight.

Though he claims he’s not a modernist chef, obsessed with beautiful foams and gelées, Brandon hasn’t adopted a ro-mantic cooking philosophy—he doesn’t want ingredients to have to speak for themselves. He’s still more Wylie Dufresne than Mario Batali. His recipes have multiple components and steps that are designed to add flavors to his ingredients, not bring out existing ones. Take bone marrow, for exam-ple: “So the bone marrow—we soak it overnight. Then we change the water and re-soak it. Then you gotta roast ’em. Then we have a beef cheek confit. We take beef cheek and braise those f*ckers for like, twelve hours.”

I can tell he’s just getting started by how fast he’s talk-ing. “Beef cheek confit goes on top. Then we have these little baby quail eggs that we fry sunny-side. It’s so intricate, hard not to break the yolks on them.” Those are the three big ingredients: marrow, beef


cheek, and eggs. “Then we do this Perigourdine sauce made with truffles and veal stock that goes on it. And then a little bit of gremolata, lemon zest, parsley, garlic.”

Whereas Batali would roast the marrow with some olive oil and parsley, Brandon adds big, heavy flavors: confited beef, truffle, and quail egg. Balancing these flavors the way Brandon does is a culinary circus act.

You don’t learn how to cook with these in-gredients by yourself. You need a Yoda—a dedicated teacher, someone to put these in-gredients in front of you and teach you how to combine and transform them. Brandon’s men-tor was a chef named Dave Miller, whom he met when he was seventeen years old, shortly after moving to St. Petersburg, Florida, to live with his grandmother. “I got my first apprentice-ship at a restaurant called Six Tables. Dave was twenty-three years old and was the top chef in Florida. I just needed a job to build my life back together.”

Every week, Chef Miller would test Brandon on sauces, fabrications, and knife cuts. “Every Friday and Saturday, I’d take a test.” It was a weekly routine that Brandon craved, a stabil-

Pictured: NY Strip Steak


ity that he needed to turn his life around. This lasted for two years, before Chef Miller took a job in the Bahamas and Bran-don returned to Tennessee.

We move across the lobby to the restaurant bar, and Bran-don begins to elaborate on his childhood in Tennessee, before cooking and Chef Miller saved him. The words and images he uses catch the bartender and me by surprise. “My childhood was spent addicted to drugs, incarcerated, in and out of ju-venile detention all the time. I was a hellion.” The more he re-calls, the more words he utters, the more tragic his upbringing becomes.

He takes me back to the be-ginning. He was born in Flor-ida in 1986, and moved to Se-vierville, Tennessee, with his mother and siblings in 1989—to escape a physically abusive fa-ther. Most people don’t remem-ber life before the age of three, but Brandon carries the scars with him. “While she was preg-nant with me, he abused her, which caused my right hand to be deformed.” Two years later, in 1991, Brandon witnessed his mother’s new boyfriend as-saulting her. “I used little toy airplanes to hit him to try to get him to stop beating her.” He was four years old.

After playing by the rules in middle school (he was a straight-A student), in high school, Brandon turned into a delinquent. In the space of a year, he had his first beer, his first joint, and starting hanging out with gang members. Then he drove without a license, robbed a gas station, and even-tually got kicked out of school. These are all the charges he picked up in the year 2000, when he was fourteen: truancy, unruly, trespassing, violation of

curfew, violation of probation, assault. These charges got him placed on house arrest with an ankle bracelet.

In email correspondence af-ter our interviews, Brandon goes into more detail about his past. He describes a scheme that he and his friends hatched to steal things from their local Walmart: “One of us would go in and buy a DVD player and take it out to the car. Then we would take that receipt back into Walmart where there were no cameras and shake hands with someone and hand the receipt off. That person would then go get the same DVD player and walk out as if they purchased it.” They called this scheme “The Re-ceipt.” It worked like a charm—they never got busted.

The American Dream rarely allows for this sort of delin-quency. People who don’t fol-low the rules at an early age don’t get to enjoy the benefits of upward mobility. They don’t go to college. They don’t get good jobs with corporate ladders and yearly promotions. They might get a second chance along the way, but not a third and a fourth. That’s what makes Bran-don Frohne’s success so rare.

After a childhood of bad for-tune and bad decisions, he cir-cumvented the system. He pur-sued a profession (cooking) and a career path (apprenticeship) that are from the Old World. Cooking has been in the Frohne family for generations—his an-cestors owned restaurants in Germany and Switzerland. And apprenticeship was the only op-tion available to him after high school. Through old-fashioned pluck and luck, he got to where he is today, running a top kitch-en at one of the most presti-gious corporate hotel chains in America.


BALANCING THESE FLAVORS THE WAY BRANDON DOES IS A CULINARY CIRCUS ACT.


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Brandon has come full circle. He didn’t go to college or culinary school, but he’s ahead of his peers who have. What he would’ve learned in culinary school he has learned at numerous jobs over the past ten years, working with his hands, making real food for real cus-tomers.

After apprenticing with Chef Miller in Florida, Brandon worked at Burger King, Red Lobster, moved to Ohio, moved back to Nashville, landed a job at Bluegrass Yacht & Country Club as a line cook, and then found a sous-chef position at Nick & Rudy’s Steakhouse. When he was twenty-two, Brandon got his first title as head chef at Park Man-or, an upscale Belle Meade retirement home. There, he soon became the Food Services Director and simultaneously started cooking with local food maven and caterer Martha Stamps.

As his work life accelerated forward, though, Brandon’s personal life hit a few speed bumps. In between his job at the Bluegrass Yacht & Country Club and Nick & Rudy’s Steakhouse, he and his girlfriend had a baby boy named No-len. Brandon was just nineteen and only two years into his cooking career. Four years later, after landing the job at Park Manor, he and his girlfriend separated. She took Nolen away to live with her family in Ohio, sending Brandon into an emotional tailspin. Despite his steady progress in the culinary world, Bran-don began suffering from depression. He wasn’t able to see Nolen for several months.

It wasn’t until 2010 that life and work started moving in the same di-rection. That year, he fell in love with a girl named Lessie (who worked in the catering business) and got married. They welcomed baby Greyson into the family a year later—the same year Bran-don began making a name for himself at Nashville cooking challenges. At Sa-vor Nashville 2011, he picked up a first place People’s Choice Award and a sec-ond place Judge’s Choice Award with a prototypical elevated Southern dish: smoked shrimp with gouda grits and pickled peaches.


flour. sugar. eggs.

1201 5th ave n615 823 3002

floursugareggs.net

After a brief foray in the Atlanta food scene (two head chef jobs in one year), Brandon and Lessie decided to return to Nashville and put down roots. He took another retirement home posi-tion, started an underground pop-up dinner club called Forage South, and continued competing in local cooking competitions. Success followed close behind him. In one weekend last sum-mer, he took home second place at the International Biscuit Festival and a Fan’s Choice Award at Savor Nashville. These performances earned him an invite to the 2012 World Chef Challenge in Las Vegas, where he reached the semi-finals, and the Mason’s opportunity came shortly after that. The interview process was basically another chef challenge: an all-in, eight-course tasting dinner for the Loews corporate team. He passed with flying colors and began curating the Ma-son’s menu.

What Brandon has created at Mason’s

isn’t a hotel restaurant, it’s a canvas for his elevated Southern cuisine. There are no oversized Caesar salads or chicken clubs, and Brandon remains adamant about this: “I don’t want to put a chick-en club on the menu.” The closest items they have are the Heirloom Tomato and Okra Panzanella (essentially an okra, to-mato, and crouton salad) and a Tangle-Wood Farms chicken panini. That’s as hotel-accessible as he’s willing to do—Brandon isn’t catering to hotel guests; he wants hotel guests to come to him. He’s building a restaurant that people want to go visit, not a restaurant that people go to when they visit. And it’s working.

The Mason’s launch has not only been successful financially, it has driven Brandon higher up the food chain. In early October, the Loews Vanderbilt Ho-tel announced that he’d been invited to cook Thanksgiving Dinner at the James Beard House in New York—the organi-

zation that doles out annual awards to the country’s most talented chefs. This invitation is a formal recognition of his talent and an indication that he may be in the running for a James Beard “Best Chef” nomination.

When I spoke to him this summer, Brandon mentioned the Beard invite and set his sights on a higher target: “What I’m striving for is to get a James Beard award—the Rising Star Under 30.” This nomination would add another chapter to his modern rags-to-riches story. But more importantly, it would demonstrate that a combination of hard work, pas-sion, and persistence can still take you anywhere.

But it all rides on his performance at the Thanksgiving dinner. If he can ex-ecute on the big stage, he’ll be closer to his goal of receiving an award. Despite the pressure, he’s prepared an ambitious and technical menu, a perfect display of his elevated Southern cuisine. It begins


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with three passed hors d’oeuvres: deviled eggs with pork belly marmalade and mus-tard seed caviar; sweet potato biscuits loaded with German-style prosciutto with blackber-ry mostarda; and Carolina rice arancini with pickled shrimp, romesco, and bottarga. Those are followed by a five-course tasting menu: butternut squash with foie-gras marshmal-low and peanut butter espuma; smoked squab with whipped carrots, German eickhorn, and salt-roasted beet; brussel sprouts and beef cheek with hominy and maple-kumquat gas-trique; heritage turkey with Backerei bread and Tennessee truffle; and finally, Olive & Sinclair white chocolate-pumpkin cremeux with vanilla-chestnut beignets and cranberry conserva.

The James Beard menu has gone through several drafts and edits. He showed me an early version this summer, when he invited me over to celebrate his twenty-seventh birthday with his eight-month-pregnant wife Lessie and son Greyson. The three of


them (now four with Violet) live in a two-story home in Nashboro Village, down by Percy Priest Lake. It has all the fixings Brandon didn’t enjoy when he grew up: stable parents, a front and backyard, an heirloom herb gar-den. As we chat over homemade ribs and chive biscuits, Brandon says the most earnest thing I’ve heard him say all week: “Everything I do now is for them. I have personal goals in the food world. I want to keep the family legacy alive. But I really want to bust my ass to create some opportunity for them.” His family is his motivation. In an industry popularized by egotistical, self-centered chefs, Brandon is like a reformed saint.

As Lessie, Brandon, and I talk about local produce, two-year-old Greyson exhibits some of the hellion genes that run in the Frohne family. One second he’s jumping on the couch, the next he’s climbing on the kitchen counter. He’s a three-foot-tall, forty-pound spi-der monkey. “Catch, catch.” He wants his dad to catch him as he jumps off the counter. “Daddy, catch.” He doesn’t stop saying this until Brandon lets him jump and catches him, which he does, very carefully (the counter’s four-feet high). As he schlepps his son back to the table, he says what every-one in the room is thinking, “Man, this kid’s going to be a stunt car driver.”

Watching Greyson tool around the house is like watching a young Bran-don, before the drugs and cooking and reformation, before Chef Miller taught him fabrications and Park Manor hired him to be their head chef. Greyson is innocent. He hasn’t heard of transglutaminase. He doesn’t know the difference between heirloom to-matoes and regular tomatoes. But he has energy, a sense of adventure, and the opportunity to do whatever he wants in life. And that’s what Brandon has been working to put on the table.

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BEN FOLDS HOLDS THE KEYS TO MUSIC CITYBy Henry Pile | Photography by Joshua Black Wilkins

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The Crying Wolf isn’t a bar—it’s a front for a primitive wolf-worshipping cult that’s

planning to take over East Nashville

By Matt Colangelo | Photography by Rebecca Adler Rotenberg


When I heard about the The Crying Wolf, I had my sus-picions. Four happy Los Angelenos move to East Nashville to open a bar? That can’t be the whole story. I can-vassed my sources for inside knowledge and stumbled upon a more likely scenar-io: The Crying Wolf is actually a co-ed wolf-worshipping cult whose centuries-old founder once lived in the basement of the bar. That’s why they came to Nashville. That’s why they have a taxi-dermy wolf head stashed in the closet. And that’s why some people report hear-ing after-hours chanting coming from the basement. It all makes sense.

To investigate this theory and protect thousands of stray dogs from savage ani-mal torture, I convinced NATIVE to let me do a story on them. Now, let’s talk about my current predicament.

I’m parked across the street from Rosepepper Cantina, where I’ve agreed to meet with the four founders of T.C.W. (that’s their evil acronym). It’s a dark and overcast afternoon, even for De-cember. My dashboard says it’s thirty-three degrees and raining, with a little flashing snowflake icon warning me that the roads are icy. Cars are going twenty-five in what I’m pretty sure is a forty-five mph zone. Everyone around me is erring on the side of caution, except me—I’m about to break tortilla with a gang of

suspected wolf shamans.They invited me to a conspicuous

Mexican restaurant for “margos and ta-cos,” which is either an attempt to get me drunk and convert me to animal worship or just one of their nostalgic creature comforts.

From what my sources tell me, it’s probably the latter. The founders of T.C.W.—Daniel, Erica, Dave, and Jake—all came to this thirty-three-degree, freezing rainland by way of Los Ange-les. Sunny LA, land of revealing bikinis and hard-boiled crime dramas. Why they would travel 2,000 miles to es-cape eighty-five-degree weather, I have no idea. Maybe they’re on the lam. Add it to the growing list of things I’m figura-tively dying (and might be literally dying) to know about this crew.

I walk into the restaurant and spot the four of them huddled around the host-ess, laughing and acting jovial. I make eye contact and walk over. We exchange a round of handshakes and pleasantries:

“Hi, I’m Daniel,” “Hey, I’m Erica,” “I’m Jake,” “Dave.” I know, I’ve heard all about you guys and your lupine séances. What I really say is, “Hey guys, I’m Matt. Nice to finally meet you.”

Dave, the ringleader, is about five feet nine inches tall with a medium build and one of those long scruffy beards that puts him in the ninetieth percen-tile of beard-sporters, but still nowhere near Duck Dynasty status. If you follow baseball, think Red Sox playoff beard. Betraying his age are a few wisps of Dumbledore gray around his chin. His longtime friend, Jake, is taller and lankier, probably around six feet with a twenty-nine-inch waist. He too sports facial hair, but it doesn’t exactly qualify as a beard. It’s more of an overgrown hipster stubble.

Dave and Jake are an odd couple. The two things connecting them are their affinity for baseball hats and their expe-rience bartending together in LA. Apart from that, they couldn’t be more differ-ent. Dave used to be a professional BMX rider, back when the sport was taking off in the ’90s. He pioneered a style

known as street riding and released a fa-mous BMX video called “Nowhere Fast.” Jake has a background in fine art photog-raphy and graphic design. He started a clothing line in Japan and wrote a blog of witty giraffe cartoons.

Daniel and Erica, on the other hand, are definitely a married couple. They both have armloads of tattoos; they’re both wearing wedding rings; and they’re both standing in each other’s personal bubbles, approximately half an inch away from each other. As if they couldn’t be more similar, they both moonlight in the fashion industry. Daniel models for Original Penguin (he’s actually their

“Nashville face”), while Erica designs clothing and jewelry.

They met each other outside a bar in LA. Daniel was managing one night and stepped outside to for a cigarette. Erica walked up to him and said “hi.” That was it. “I snagged him,” she says, looking at Daniel with a wry smile. I’m noticing a stereotypical band dynamic here: a cou-ple of dudes on one side versus a couple on the other. Who has the tiebreaking vote? Do they all get along? I have a lot of questions to ask.

We walk over to a big table in the back and sit down—me on one side and the four of them on the other. The first ques-tion I ask them is, “Who had the idea for the bar?” Everybody looks at Daniel, but Dave responds first, “Daniel and I talked about it ten years ago in LA. I was still at the Cha Cha Bar; Erica was probably in Miami. We were just drunk, talking….” Daniel elaborates, “We were at a ware-house, drunk, skating a half-pipe. I said,

‘You know what, man, you’re a good guy. We gotta open a bar.’”

Daniel is also the person who came up with the name, and Dave is the first to give him credit, “We were sitting one day, chatting, and he was just like, ‘I got a perfect name for that bar: The Crying Wolf.’” My attention now shifts to Dan-iel as the ringleader, the quiet but char-ismatic man who assembled the group. I see it now: Daniel convinced Dave to start the “bar” (probably with sedatives), then met Erica, then brought on Dave’s

EVERYONE AROUND ME IS

ERRING ON THE SIDE OF CAUTION,

EXCEPT ME—I’M ABOUT TO

BREAK TORTILLA WITH A GANG OF

SUSPECTED WOLF SHAMANS.


friend Jake. They nod, yes, that’s correct, minus the sedatives.

Jake adds that coming to Nashville was a leap of faith: “I was trying to open a bar with Dave in LA, separately. I had actually never met Daniel and Erica un-til I got off the plane. I flew to Nashville on a one-way ticket with nothing but a duffel bag.”

Judging by how nice they are and how many times they’ve said the word

“bar” with a straight face, I’m starting to believe that they did just move here to start a bar—that I’m mistaken about this whole cult business. Just to make sure, I ask one last question about the name, “What does The Crying Wolf

mean?”They have two answers to this ques-

tion, both of them quirky and totally non-cultish. Okay, they’re not in a cult. Daniel and Erica tell me that it started with a short story. Daniel gives me the six-second summary, “There was this short story that Erica and I wrote one night when we were working at the bar and nobody was there. It was about a schizophrenic guy who works at a bar that’s so slow he starts creating his own customers.” He says the story was called

“The Crying Wolf,” though he doesn’t re-member why.

That’s when Jake and Dave jump in with an excitement that says: “Oh, we

know where the name comes from.” Jake goes first, “Because everybody talk-ed about it—yeah, we’re going to open a bar—it was totally the boy who cried wolf. But then it actually happened.” So that was the joke, the boy who cried wolf. Dave nods his head and rhetorically asks the question that they had been asking themselves seriously for ten years, “Are we crying ‘wolf,’ or are we really going to do this?”

It’s a question that speaks to the dif-ference between having an idea and real-izing an idea. Many of us have business ideas, but few of us ever realize them. Few of us convince our friends to in-vest money in our company; few of us

JAKE MANNYAge: 37Moved to Nashville: June 2012 from LA via SeattleMain job: Behind the scenes jamsSpirit animal: Nic Cage

DAVE YOUNGAge: 34Moved to Nashville: May something, 2012Main job: Jack of all trades Spirit animal: Country Bear Jamboree


drive around the city looking for a place to lease; and few of us decide to rent a nearly condemned space in East Nash-ville and spend nine months renovating it.

That was the time it took them to rent the space, fix it up, get all the proper li-censes, and launch. According to Dave, this process was supposed to be faster.

“Originally, we planned on a six-month turnaround. We came in, we gutted it, we cleaned it up as much as we could.”

Then, the four founders went to the Metro Department of Codes and Build-ing Safety, expecting to get the green light. Long story short, they didn’t get the green light; Metro informed them

that the building wasn’t up to code. Ap-parently, they didn’t even have building permits. With permits and renovations and everything else, getting the build-ing up to code would take another three months.

After a moment of silence, Dave says something that makes my eyebrows furrow and pulse quicken, “The Wolf forced us to do it.”

Hold on, The Wolf forced you? Here we go again. Just when I thought these guys were bona fide business owners, Dave has to reference an imaginary wolf that forces him to do things.

I ask them who The Wolf is, with a chuckle more nervous than Shelley Du-

vall’s in The Shining.Erica, who’s been pretty quiet up to

this point, assures me that they’re not going to chase me down and murder me with an axe, “The Wolf is the build-ing itself.” The Wolf is the building, not the stuffed animal you pray to at night? A relieved smile comes across my face as Dave waxes dramatic about the build-ing and the role it’s played in their deci-sion making, “The Wolf is its own thing. The Wolf makes you do what it wants. There are four of us, but we answer to the Wolf.”

Erica understated the importance of The Wolf. It’s bigger than the building. It’s an externalization of the entire busi-

ERICA BO NESSAge: 33Moved to Nashville: July 23, 2011Main job: Keeping three guys organized. They call that being a “secretary,” apparently.Spirit animal: Translucent unicorn

DANIEL RICHARD NESSAge: 31Moved to Nashville: July 23, 2011Main job: Takin’ care of businessSpirit animal:Duh


THE CRYING WOLF:

located at 823 woodland st.native.is/the-crying-wolf


ness, an animal whose well-being is the most important thing in the world. All decisions are made in its best interests; it holds the tie-breaking vote in every debate. Jake offers an example: “All four of us will have ideas—like for the hallway—and we’ll throw them all out there, and the Wolf will decide.” The idea that they can build and pay for wins.

The fact that they need an imagi-nary wolf to resolve design issues says something about the business: namely, that having an even number of owners complicates the decision-making pro-cess. Besides the imaginary wolf, there is no tiebreaking vote. They are four


Working together to

get the results you want.

615.500.2748615.373.4347 ext [email protected]

LiveInNashville.com

hovering parents and the bar is their (fur-ry animal) child. To make the right deci-sions for the bar, they need to be unselfish and make compromises.

Making things more difficult is the fact that Daniel, Dave, Erica, and Jake all come from design backgrounds. (Dave and Daniel also worked as graphic de-signers.) They all have ideas about how the bar should look, and they want to contribute them. This leads to a lot of debates. One strategy they use to share ideas and resolve their inevitable design quarrels, all you Pinterest users will be happy to know, is mood-boarding.

That’s right, you heard it here first, the owners of The Crying Wolf mood-board. Dave explains it like this, “We’ll put our ideas up on the wall, draw them, and think about what will work—budget-wise, time-wise, structure-wise—and the Wolf will decide.” There’s that pesky wolf again, deciding things. Our waiter brings us an-other round of drinks and overhears the wolf talk. I wonder if he’s going to be our waiter for much longer.

One benefit of having four founders is that T.C.W. has been able to develop a system of divided labor, where people do the tasks that they are the most will-ing and able to do. Dave does most of the design and construction on the building. Daniel sees to the business side of things. Jake handles the infrastructure, licens-ing, and legal matters. And Erica is the proud designer of their booths and ladies’ bathroom. By dividing the labor and spe-cializing in the tasks that they are best at, the four founders can run a business that would make Adam Smith proud.

Which is good, because they’re still not done with the bar. In fact, from their perspective, they won’t ever be done. Jake describes T.C.W. as a bar “in constant evolution,” and Dave says that they’re “constantly changing things.” By approaching their business as a perpet-ual work-in-progress, the founders have made themselves its indentured servants. While they’re not praying to the Wolf ev-ery night, they are working their tails off for it.

I think I understand why they’ve cre-ated this mythical wolf figure. It’s not just

because they “cried wolf” for ten years, and it’s not just to resolve design issues. It’s because they want to embody the entity for whom they are working. They want a constant reminder of who their leader is and why they are putting in all this work.

The Wolf represents the dream that they have been working towards for over a year (and talking about for over ten): to open a neighborhood bar that supports the local community and art scene. It’s their boozy version of Gatsby’s green light, something that they have gazed at from a distance for years. The only dif-ference is that they’re realizing it. When I ask them where they want T.C.W. to be in five years, Dave says he wants it to be the “clubhouse” of Greater Five Points, a bar that evolves with the area and helps the area evolve.

From afar, it seems like T.C.W. launched without a hitch; that it went from abandoned building to scenester bar in the blink of an eye; that it didn’t take over nine months to renovate; that the Metro Department of Codes and Building Safety didn’t almost rain on their parade; that they hadn’t been planning the bar for over ten years. But appearances can be deceiving. Like many other businesses starting up in Nashville, The Crying Wolf is a product of fifteen million decisions and setbacks, none of which involves ani-mal worship.

“THE WOLF IS ITS

OWN THING. THE

WOLF MAKES YOU

DO WHAT IT WANTS.

THERE ARE FOUR

OF US, BUT WE

ANSWER TO THE

WOLF.”

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68 / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / #NATIVENASHVILLE

BY MATT COLANGELO | PHOTOGRAPHY BY EMILY HALL


#NAT IVENASHVILLE / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / 69

The story of a dying house and the owners who revived it

THE LAZARUS

HOUSE


Walking into The Treehouse for dinner, you wouldn’t think about the building’s past. You wouldn’t know that the hundred-year-old wooden floorboards are original and were only discovered during renovation; that the well-ap-pointed kitchen used to be someone’s bedroom; or that the tables, chairs, and bar top were all hand-made from original wood framing. All you’d see,

like I saw, is a room full of people eating and drinking under the yellow glow of thirty Edison bulbs.

What you’d miss, like I missed, is the history that makes this restaurant so authentic and remarkable—a his-tory that stretches back to the era of Thomas Edison himself, or more pre-cisely, eight years before Edison died.

We have to go back to 1923, a boom year in which Time Magazine opened

for business and Yankee Stadium opened its gates to the most fans ever in a baseball stadium. It was the year that the Hollywood sign was erected, Pancho Villa was assassinated, and President Warren G. Harding died of a stroke. Outside of North America, it was the year that hyperinflation reached its karmic peak in Germany, and the year that the Russian Civil War ended.


Though it wasn’t in the news, 1923 was also the year that a modest single-family home was built in East Nash-ville at 1011 Clearview Avenue. We don’t know much about the people who built this house, except that they were not especially gifted at paying their bills on time. Relics include sev-eral past-due utility bills and a past-due library notice from the Lockeland Library for Snow White (for which a

boy called “Dickey” was responsible and probably grounded).

Situated at the center of Five Points, between Historic Edgefield and Lock-eland Springs, 1011 Clearview wit-nessed the destruction of a promising, up-and-coming neighborhood. In 1923, East Nashville was recovering and re-building, seven years after a terrible fire turned 500 houses into smolder-ing rubble and left over 2,500 people

homeless. While 1011 Clearview missed the fire,

the house definitely was affected by the Tornado of 1933, which destroyed a large swath of land from East Nash-ville to Lebanon. From accounts on the ground, it’s likely that the house would have sustained serious wind damage, perhaps enough to tear off its roof and knock out its south-facing windows. It’s a miracle the house wasn’t leveled.


THE TREEHOUSE:

Located at 1011 Clearview Avetreehousenashville.comFollow on Facebook @treehousenashvillenative.is/the-treehouse


A total of 1,400 homes, sixteen churches, thirty-six stores, five factories, four schools, and one library were damaged in the tornado—which gives you a sense not only of the tornado’s de-struction, but also of how gentrified East Nash-ville was before the tornado.

The house at 1011 Clearview withstood this natural disaster, which occurred during a more prolonged economic disaster known as the Great Depression, and it survived the resulting de-gentrification of East Nashville. By 1993, the area had worsened and the house had fallen into enough disrepair that it was bought for pennies on the dollar: $45,000 by Nashville fiddle leg-end Buddy Spicher (pronounced “Spiker”). He had recently purchased the house next door for $22,000—prices that wouldn’t have been un-usual in the 1920s but fit snugly into the session musician’s tight budget.

That’s where our two protagonists come in: Matt Spicher (Buddy’s son, forty-five) and Co-rey Ladd (Buddy’s grandson and Matt’s nephew, thirty-one). They grew up in the house, broke rules in the house, and eventually turned it into the profitable business we know today as The Treehouse (named after the actual tree house that Buddy built in the backyard).

Their stories about growing up at 1011 Clear-view paint a very different picture of the Five Points area. Corey remembers Grandma Spi-cher shooting a lawnmower thief with a paint-ball gun and people stumbling out of a seedy bar called Shirley’s Place on Woodland Street (where 3 Crow is now). Matt recalls a next-door neighbor named “Sweet Willie” who got ar-rested for “running prostitutes and drugs” out of his house. To echo a euphemism that Corey and Matt employ repeatedly: it was a different time back then.

Despite the area’s shortcomings and their limited budget, the Spichers fixed up the house with the help of local labor. What they lacked in construction tools (like levels and tape mea-sures) they made up for in pluck and ingenu-ity. Matt describes the time his family lived in the house as two decades of “hobo craftsman-ship.” Paying the hobos presented another dif-ficulty: “If you paid them too early, they would disappear and head straight for Shirley’s. If you didn’t pay them enough, your skill saw and drills would disappear.” They made sure to pay them decently and on time.

Since the Spichers didn’t have the means to demolish and rebuild the house, it became a

constant work-in-progress. Over the twenty years that they lived there, they slowly fixed and added things to the property: fresh paint, tiles, new kitchen appliances, green Formica countertops, you name it.

So imagine the family’s surprise when, in 2012, Corey shared his idea for The Treehouse Restaurant and Bar, the first step of which would be to completely gut the house. He would be dismantling twenty years of hard work and hobo craftsmanship. He would be turning a nearly hundred-year-old home into a financially uncertain restaurant. To quote his grandfa-ther Buddy Spicher: “Do you know how to make a million dollars in the restaurant business? Start with two million.”

Corey dove headlong into the renovation project with his grandparents’ blessing and a passion bordering on a bankruptcy wish. What he lacked more than anything were the financ-es. To start the demolition, he sold a house he owned down the street for a $20,000 profit. He spent that money on thirty-foot dumpsters and beer, and he convinced his friends to help him knock down walls. The demolition took about six months and cost way more than $20,000.

During the demolition process, Corey uncov-ered artifacts in the house that had been hid-den for years. The original wooden floorboards were found intact, just a couple feet below the floor. Inside the fireplace were $3 utility col-lection notices from the ‘30s and ‘40s. So was Dickey’s past-due library notice from the Lock-eland Library. They even found Mason jars un-der the house, presumably from the 1920s. Co-rey and his friends salvaged these materials and turned them into the tables, chairs, benches, light fixtures, tea mugs, and bar top that now grace The Treehouse. In fact, almost all of The Treehouse’s interior is recycled from the origi-nal house.

But recycling the building materials didn’t solve the financial problem of how to pay for it all: the demolition, renovation, licensing, and everything else you need to open a restaurant. Enter Uncle Matt, who “put the investment together” to keep the bank from foreclosing on what little was left of the asset. Though he

COREY

REMEMBERS

GRANDMA

SPICHER

SHOOTING A

LAWNMOWER

THIEF WITH

A PAINTBALL

GUN.


doesn’t disclose exactly how significant this in-vestment was, he suggests that it was north of $300,000. Something tells me it was well north of that figure. In any case, it was money well spent.

Once Uncle Matt was on board, Corey built out the rest of The Treehouse team with friends from the Nashville food scene. Having worked for five years as a sushi chef around town, he knew some people who could help out. To helm the back of house, he picked Chef Todd Alan Martin, a rising star in Nashville who studied at the Culinary Institute of America and worked at high-end spots such as Miel and Lockeland Table. His menu is a surprising and appropri-ately homey combination of Latin American and Southern cuisine. Cornbread with Mexican Ana-sazi beans, for example, is an item that not only looks good on the plate, but is something you can nestle into on a cold winter night. Nothing too fancy, but that’s the point.

To manage the bar and front of house, Corey and Matt nabbed David Fisher. David’s experi-ence developing drink menus and setting up point-of-sale systems stretches from Nashville to NYC to Los Angeles, where he’s worked at big-name spots such as Beauty Bar. Besides a deep knowledge of wine and cocktails, what he adds to the team is restaurant management ex-perience. Actually, he’s the only one with man-agement experience. (While in college, Matt managed a college bar in Murfreesboro called 527 Main Street, but that was years ago and a dif-ferent type of establishment.)

Together, this four-person team turned a tumbledown house with history into a homey restaurant with a future. Corey had the original idea, Matt found the financing, Todd brought the food, and David melded everything into a coher-ent whole. When The Treehouse is on its game, you see the food, drinks, and décor all contribut-ing to an experience that is both relaxing and in-triguing at the same time. It is an homage to the history of the house (and the materials hidden within it) as well as an attempt to experiment with food and drink. It is a place that mixes old and new, familiar and unfamiliar, in equal parts.

This mixture is reflected in the interior of the restaurant, which was designed to mimic the dreamy nostalgic feeling of an actual tree house. The finishings, which Corey and Matt made themselves, give the restaurant a comfortable,


domestic feel while also evoking a sense of wonder and discovery. “Remember what it felt like to go up in a tree house?” they ask me.

The bathrooms are full of old fan-tasy and science books: Einstein, Galileo, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, as well as a cou-ple Boy Scout and Girl Scout handbooks and some adolescent coming-of-age nov-els. Also in the bathroom is a steampunk submarine panel that Matt built, with a bunch of fake gauges and knobs. It’s hard not to imagine yourself as Dickey, the adolescent boy who originally lived in the house and took out books from the Lock-eland Library down the street.

The homey feeling at The Treehouse comes from all the recycled materials: the original floors, the old mantles that are now being used for bathroom shelv-ing, the old door knobs that were turned into coat hooks. Matt explains how they even repurposed old two-by-fours: “We took all that wood and cut it up into pieces, and that’s the table you’re sit-ting at. And the chairs, they used to be the walls.” Nearly every physical object in the restaurant is repurposed.

What makes this recycled design serendipitous is the fact that some of these materials were only rediscov-ered during the demolition process, like the original floors and Mason jars. Without the demolition, Corey and Matt would not have uncovered these materials—and they wouldn’t have used them in the design. In Corey’s words, “The history came out of the house when we were doing the demo-lition.”

The process of physical rediscovery that informed the interior design of The Treehouse parallels a process of culinary rediscovery that is transforming Nash-ville and Southern food culture. Chefs and bartenders are returning to local ingredients, reading old cookbooks, and experimenting with new applications of those flavors—whether they’re Southern or South American. Like Corey and Matt, they’re using older ingredients to create new taste profiles.

This old-made-new trend is particular-ly popular in Nashville, a city that is long on history and forgotten foodstuffs. Chef Todd’s menu isn’t New Southern per se—it’s more New South American—but it’s reimagining old flavors in a similar way. The same goes for David Fisher’s drink menu, whose cocktails adopt but skew traditional liquor combinations. The Me-dicina Latina, for example, is a Latin take on the Penicillin that uses tequila instead

of Scotch.In areas like Germantown and East

Nashville, where new restaurants are opening on a weekly basis, this culinary rediscovery is fueling rapid neighborhood revitalization. It’s stimulating the local economy, generating national press, and re-branding Nashville as a food city in the process (it’s also raising rents).

The Treehouse is a relative latecomer to this revitalization effort, but a signifi-cant one: as a historic-house-to-restau-rant conversion, it’s a physical embodi-ment of the urban revitalization that’s taking place. It’s not a concept restaurant that ignores the neighborhood’s history. On the contrary, it’s a restaurant that re-vives the neighborhood’s history. It’s not just an addition to the neighborhood; it’s a product of the neighborhood and the neighborhood’s pioneers, people like the Spichers who settled there and worked there.

Matt and Corey want The Treehouse to “feel like a home” for people in Five Points, especially the “late-night niche” of kitch-en staffers and bartenders who get out of work late. To make that happen, they did something remarkable: instead of build-ing a new home; they excavated the home that was already there. They revived the history of 1011 Clearview and incorpo-rated it into the restaurant. Now, when you go to The Treehouse, you won’t just see entrées and Edison bulbs. You’ll see a forty-two-seat home that was ninety-one years in the making.

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BY MATT COLANGELO | PHOTOS BY RYAN GREEN

DAVE THIENEL IS PROMOTING A HIGH-BIKE, LOW-CAR DIET FOR NASHVILLIANS.

BIKES OVER CARS



Dave Thienel owns Rush Bicycle Messengers, a local courier service offering a faster, cheap-er, and more sustainable alternative to car delivery. That’s what he claims, at least. I’m skeptical. Are bikes more sustainable than cars? Yes. Are they cheaper to maintain? Sure, since you don’t have to pay for gas. But faster? There’s no way a guy on a bike is faster than a guy in a car. Not in a spread-out

“car” city like Nashville. Dave, are you out of your gourd?

To test his patently fabricated claim, I challenge him to a race. First person to the river wins. Me in my 40-mpg white Fiat, Dave on his baby-blue cy-clocross bike. Good luck, Dave. We step out of his brand-new office on the corner of 9th and Church and ready ourselves. I partake in some dynamic stretching next to my car, and Dave jumps on his saddle. On the count of three. One. Two. Three.

Dave pushes off and accelerates up 9th Avenue Street. I execute a textbook three-point turn and follow him in hot pursuit, my 101-horse-power lawnmower engine roaring like an over-confident lion cub. As I turn the first corner, I come to the sad realization that he is already pulling away. I squint my eyes and up-shift into fourth gear. I’ll catch him on the straightaway. That’s when I hit my first red light—and nearly hit the car

in front of me.By the time I meet Dave at the riv-

erfront, fifteen minutes have passed. I’ve sat at six different lights and watched two other bicycle couriers pass me. “How long have you been waiting?” I ask him. “A little over five minutes,” he responds. He’s standing next to his bike, strapped into an over-sized green backpack that should have slowed him down but didn’t. Dave is a slender six feet tall, but he has the deceptive strength of someone who’s been cycling for more than eight years.

“You should get a bike,” he tells me. Should I get a bike? Though Dave

proved that biking is a fast way of get-ting around downtown Nashville, it isn’t the easiest or most obvious way of getting around the larger metro-politan area. The truth is: Nashville is a fairly spread-out, suburban city with a very low population density—1,204 inhabitants per square mile, com-pared to New York’s 56,012 or San Francisco’s 17,246. Only 8,000 people live downtown, which amounts to roughly one percent of the popula-tion. The rest of us live in Nashville’s gentle sprawl: in areas like Sylvan Park or Five Points that are a mile or more outside downtown. Getting from one place to another usually means travel-ing several miles. And with traffic, that can sometimes take a while, which points to an important variable in this


equation.Nashville is a driving city that’s

becoming increasingly difficult to drive in. One of the main reasons for this is Nashville’s economic development. As the city contin-ues to grow and prosper, its traffic continues to worsen. Most people now recognize that we’re approach-ing a tipping point. Our highways and roads can barely handle the current metro population of 1.5 mil-lion, never mind the additional mil-lion that will be living here by 2035.

Based on the ratio of drivers to high-ways, it’s not hard to imagine bum-per-to-bumper Los Angeles traffic in Nashville soon. To avert this traf-fic disaster, the city of Nashville has been looking into alternative transit options.

Unfortunately, by “looking into” alternative transit options, what I really mean is failing to approve any alternative transit options. If you’re not a bus person and need to get somewhere before the year 2020, that leaves bikes—either your own

* nas

hvill

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personal bike or one of the city’s shared “B-cycles.” For most people, bikes are the only real alternative to cars.

Which is one reason why more people are starting to bike. Dave sees this trend on a daily basis:

“Every spring I say, ‘Man, there are twice as many people on bikes this year as there were last year.’” Some of these new cyclists are recent transplants to the city, people from LA or New York who are already used to cycling in a city. But many

are newbies, people who are biking in Nashville for the first time. These are the people whom Dave is hoping to convert.

Believe it or not, Dave was once a bike newbie too—and not when he was five. He started riding bikes

“occasionally” in 2006, two years after he graduated high school, left his hometown of White Bluff, and moved thirty-five minutes east to Nashville as a seventeen-year-old. At the time, he wasn’t a very good or confident cyclist at all: “I rode on

RUSH:

musiccityrush.comor call 615-707-9695native.is/rush


the sidewalk for a month when I first start-ed riding. I call sidewalks a cyclist’s training wheels.” He sympathizes with new cyclists. He understands how intimidating riding in a city can be—he experienced it firsthand.

Before he became a bike messenger, Dave rode around town on a used thirty-dollar Miyata doing odd jobs. “I worked at a re-tail store and was living off twenty dollars a week for food. Then I worked at Pier 1 doing stock.” He eventually transitioned from the retail industry to the slightly more lucrative hospitality industry. “I worked at the Opryland Hotel for a while doing ban-quet serving, which is actually pretty hard work.” He worked at another hotel after that before becoming a personal assistant/handyman for some people around town.

“People would ask, ‘Can you plank my gar-den?’ Sure, I can do that.” He was familiar with this kind of manual labor from his childhood in White Bluff, where he used to bail hay for five dollars an hour at the age of twelve, and where he learned how to re-build a carburetor at the age of sixteen (a skill that he hasn’t employed in a few years).

After working in the retail, hospitality, and personal assistant industries, Dave’s love of bicycles led him to the courier busi-ness. He started as a bike courier for Green Fleet Messengers, but eventually he was moved into car deliveries. (Green Fleet has a mixed fleet of bikes, cars, and trucks.) Needless to say, he quickly got tired of driv-ing a car all day. “By the end of the day, I felt so stressed and angry for no reason. Do-ing that job, I realized how much less I was riding my bike.” That’s when he decided to start a bike-only courier service.

He started Rush Bicycle Messengers as a full-time, one-man show in the beginning of 2012. His other job, ironically enough, was parking cars. “I did that for close to two years, and we’re over two years old now. I cut my hours more and more the busier things got.” Parking cars for half the day and riding bikes for the other half confirmed his

preference for the latter. He suffered through the former to make rent while he built his business from scratch. “I was going door to door to law firms. It was just me at first.”

Business started to pick up about six months in, when Dave added monthly maga-zine and coffee deliveries to his standard court filings and mail runs. (Full disclo-sure: Rush delivers all of our magazines on a trailer every month.) To accommodate these larger, more time-consuming deliv-eries, Dave began hiring part-time cyclists to help him out. They then started to pick up consistent daily deliveries as well, which meant Dave had to pass off even more work to his employees. Now that his business is in full swing, Dave acts as more of a dis-patcher, sitting at the front desk of his new office and assigning routes to his employ-ees via iPhone. From my vantage point, bike deliveries seem to be catching on.

The same factors that make biking a more appealing alternative for commuters are starting to interest businesses as well. If you’re sending a package locally, say from West End and 31st Avenue to downtown, bikes are probably faster. Depending on the load, they’re almost always cheaper too. And as car traffic continues to worsen, the biking calculus will continue to improve. No one wants to be stuck in rush-hour traf-fic, listening to the sound of their own turn signal. At the same time, no one wants their delivery guy to be stuck in rush-hour traffic with their dinner.

Dave isn’t just promoting bike delivery, he’s promoting a new lifestyle and com-munity in which bikes are the main form of transportation. It’s not just about mak-ing money for him. He wants to get more people riding because he has a vision for how that could change Nashville. “Biking isn’t for everybody, I know, but I know a

“ I CALL SIDE-WALKS A CYCLIST’S TRAINING WHEELS.”


lot of people can get something from it. I feel like the city can change a lot for the better.” For Dave, more bik-ing will encourage the local economy, where people patronize businesses that are closer to home. More biking will also make people happier be-cause of the inherent physical activity (“When you commute on a bike, you get endorphins from riding”). Lastly, he thinks that more biking will en-courage a more tightly-knit commu-nity, where people have something in common besides living in the same city. To make this vision a reality, he wants to turn drivers into riders.

To do this, to get longtime drivers riding bikes, Dave will have to over-come the perception that biking is an insider’s sport. The perception that there are “roadies” (people who race bikes or work in bike shops) and ev-erybody else. "That's what this city needs. To realize that you don't need to be wearing lycra and padded shorts to ride your bike.” According to Dave, there’s currently a gap in Nashville between your average cyclist and these so-called roadies. He’s trying to bridge this gap, both with Rush Bicycle Messengers and a bike-events group he runs called Music City Cy-cling.

To use a food analogy, Dave wants to get Nashville on a Northern Euro-pean high-bike, low-car diet. Not just because he personally likes bikes or Northern Europe, but because it will be healthier for Nashville in the long run. Though he doesn’t claim to be changing the world, Dave definitely has a social mission: to cultivate a community of happy bike-riders and form an economy of local, bike-riding consumers. He’s doing his own pub-lic planning on a small (but growing) scale; by converting drivers into rid-ers, he’s creating the need for more bike infrastructure and bike -friendly policies in a city that’s adding cars everyday.

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4429 MURPHY ROAD 615.383.5639

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BY MATT COLANGELO | PHOTOS BY MELISSA MADISON FULLER

THE FOUNDERS OF JAMAICAWAY ARE ON A MISSION TO FEED YOU—ESPECIALLY IF YOUR

NAME IS RIHANNA, DRAKE, OR GUY FIERI



Kamal Kalokoh and Ouida Brad-shaw are the mother-and-son team behind Jamaicaway, the popular Jamaican restaurant located inside the Nashville Farmers’ Market. On a superfi-cial level, the name of the restaurant implies that their food is cooked in the “Jamaican way,” with Jamaican ingredients, marinades, and sea-sonings. Which it is. But hidden in the name is also a reference to the place where Ouida and Kamal grew up: Boston.

Jamaicaway is a street in Jamaica Plain, a his-toric streetcar suburb about five miles south-west of downtown Boston. It curves along the eastern shore of Jamaica Pond and magi-cally becomes Pond Street after passing the Jamaica Pond Boat House. The reason there are so many “Jamaicas” in this part of Boston has nothing to do with all the Jamaicans living there. According to the local historical society, the name dates back to 1677 and is most likely a reference to the leader of the Native Ameri-can “Massachusett” tribe, a man who went by the name of Kuchamakin. Chamakin . . . Jamai-ca . . . you get it.

Before moving to Nashville and starting the Jamaicaway restaurant, the Bradshaw fam-ily lived near Jamaicaway. Ouida moved there from the island of Jamaica in 1968, at the age of twelve, along with her parents and nine siblings. She and her family joined a large contingent of fellow immigrants who probably liked the idea of moving from one Jamaica to another. (There are currently about 28,000 people with Jamai-can ancestry in this part of Boston, enough to support fifteen different Jamaican restaurants and several direct flights to the island.) Com-ing of age in this large immigrant community, Ouida learned not only how to cook Jamaican food, but how to feed hundreds of people at a time—lessons that would prove useful in the

restaurant business.Before she became a professional feeder,

though, she was a professional teacher. After getting her education degree from Fitchburg State University, twenty-two-year-old Ouida became an elementary school teacher in Bos-ton, teaching fourth and fifth grade for the next twenty-one years. During this second chapter of her life, she continued cooking and even in-fused cooking into her teaching.

Ouida’s style of teaching was what you might call food-centric. She didn’t motivate her stu-dents with a love of learning; rather, she moti-vated them with a promise of food. “I would set all these criteria for them: perfect attendance, good behavior, completing your homework, being respectful in class. The students who performed well would be invited to a luncheon at the end of the month.” On that day, Ouida would turn her classroom into a restaurant and cook whatever type of food the good-egg stu-dents wanted—Italian, Mexican, Jamaican. “It was a very positive thing for them.”

Six years into her teaching career, during the summer of 1984, Ouida gave birth to Kamal Kalokoh—her son and future business part-ner. Ouida raised Kamal in the same Caribbean immigrant community that she was raised in twenty years earlier. That meant he grew up around his many Jamaican relatives, family friends, and a festive, community-centric Ja-maican culture.

In Jamaican culture, food is the glue that holds everything together, the centerpiece of an inclusive, mixed-race, communal way of life. It’s no surprise then that food is central to Ouida’s and Kamal’s most vivid memories of Boston. When talking about their life up north, Ouida and Kamal both mention the holiday get-togethers that they used to host. Ouida explains how the dinner was served: “We al-


ways did buffet-style dinners. Three tables full of food.” Kamal describes how many people were there: “My mom was one of ten siblings, and each one of her siblings had at least two or three kids. There were about sixty people there.”

Ouida not only had to prepare a lot of food for her family, but she had to prepare a lot of different kinds of food. She describes making Jamaican standards like curry goat and ackee and saltfish (Jamaica’s national dish), as well as a table of vegetarian options for her strict Ital relatives. (The Ital diet is a Rastafarian ver-sion of a kosher, low-sodium, vegetarian diet—part Christian, part Hindu.) Feeding sixty-plus people with such different tastes and dietary restrictions was a feat, especially without a pro-fessional kitchen.

But then again, preparing a variety of food for a large number of people is a fact of life in Jamaica. For starters, Jamaican cuisine is one of the world’s most diverse. Centuries of colo-nial trade and conquest brought to the island a smorgasbord of ingredients and cooking tech-niques from around the world. You get curry dishes from India, salted cod (or “saltfish”)

from Europe, meat patties from England, and many fruits and vegetables (such as ackee) from West Africa. Though most dishes are built upon the five mother ingredients of onion, scal-lion, garlic, thyme, and pimiento, Jamaican cui-sine incorporates meats, grains, and fish that are definitely not native to the island.

It is a flexible cuisine that reflects Jamaica’s difficult colonial past and offers many options to picky eaters. Which is great if you’re plan-ning to start a Jamaican restaurant. But until she moved to Nashville in 1999, Ouida wasn’t even planning to cook for a living. That year, she quit her teaching job, packed up her things, and moved to Nashville with her husband, Da-vid, and Kamal. David was transferring to De-loitte and Touche’s Nashville office, and Kamal was, well, in the middle of high school. He wasn’t initially a fan of the move. “I would’ve rather been dodging bullets in Boston than liv-ing in Nashville,” he says with surprisingly little hyperbole. Ouida puts it more plainly: “He hated it.”

With more free time on her hands and no more students to bribe, Ouida decided to pur-sue cooking professionally. She opened up a


catering company called Great Taste Catering and decked out her big Nashville kitchen with fancy equipment: “I got everything Viking: the hood, the huge stove, grill, warming cabinets, trash compactor, wine cellar.” She didn’t spare a penny outfitting her new office, and it paid off. Her kitchen could cook just about anything, even something Kamal had up his sleeve.

Kamal jumps into the conversation now and tells me about his first real cooking experience. He was fifteen years old, his first year in Nash-ville. Cinnabon had just opened a Nashville loca-tion and, of course, as fifteen-year-olds, Kamal and his friends had to try it out. He went with his best friend at the time, Danny, and was not particularly impressed: “I thought, I can do this myself.” So he and Danny went back to Ouida’s kitchen, printed out Cinnabon’s recipe, baked a batch of rolls, and sold them at school the next day. They weren’t perfect, but they were good enough for hungry high school students: “The dough didn’t rise, but they tasted fine.” Kamal’s first time cooking was a mild success.

But Kamal wasn’t living in Nashville when his mom turned her catering business into a brick-and-mortar restaurant and called it Jamaicaway.

It was 2003, and Kamal was back in Massachu-setts attending his mother’s alma mater, Fitch-burg State University. There was no immediate need to come back and help out. The restaurant was new and, like many new restaurants, strug-gling to stay afloat. After a decent opening week, business died down. Ouida tells me in a hushed voice how bad it was: “For the first three years, I did not get paid.” When asked when her busi-ness finally started to pick up, she says without hesitation, “October 2010.”

October 2010 is when Jamaicaway was fea-tured on The Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives (you know, the show where Guy Fieri drives around the country getting an aneurysm). A couple weeks after the show aired, lines start-ed forming and profits started spiking. Like him or not, Guy Fieri, a.k.a. the Hungry Hair Gel, a.k.a. the Golden Goatee, made Jamaicaway into the popular food destination that it is today.

If you watch the clip of Guy Fieri at Jamaic-away, you’ll see a fresh-faced Kamal in the kitchen, serving curry goat to an understand-ably salivating customer. That’s because Kamal came back to Nashville in 2010 after spending five prodigal years in Miami attending Johnson


& Wales University and not quite making enough money to live in Miami.

He came back to Nashville because he wanted to cook. He took what he learned at culinary school in Miami and applied it to his mother’s kitchen at Jamaicaway. It didn’t take him long to get settled there; he knew the recipes from watching his mother cook them at home. But still, something was missing for him. He wanted to make a name for himself. He wanted to do his own thing.

Kamal’s opportunity to chart his own path came in the winter of 2012. He was working in the kitchen at Jamaicaway, serving curry goat and meat patties, when he heard that the rapper Drake was in town. Something came over him. “I put rice and peas, plantains, and chicken on a plate. It was busy as hell, but I was like, ‘Mummy, I’ll be right back, I gotta go feed Drake.’” Ouida didn’t recognize this fellow’s name and responded as any supportive mother would, “Who’s Drake?” Kamal explained everything as best he could. “Don’t worry, don’t worry—I gotta feed him real quick.” He rushed out of the restau-rant, plate o’ chicken in hand, to feed Drake.

To say that it took Kamal longer than “real quick” to find Drake would be an understatement. His pursuit of the rapper around town was more akin to stalking than searching. He started with the MLK Magnet High School, where Drake was spotted in the morning. No luck. “The kids were all outside, frantic, like, ‘Yo, we just met him, he talked to us.’” Kamal asked them where he had gone, and they didn’t know anything except that he had driven off in a big red bus. Kamal the detective got his first clue.

With his mother holding down the fort at Jamaic-away, Kamal drove around town in search of a big red bus. He drove around Germantown. Nothing. He drove to Midtown. No bus. Then he drove down-town and miraculously saw the bus outside of the Union Station Hotel. A couple hours had passed. He went inside the hotel to see if Drake was there, to no avail. So he kept searching: “I drove down Broadway looking for him. Something told me to park my car in front of the Bridgestone Arena, so I did that and walked into the arena.” Drake was playing a concert later that night, so the odds of him being there were high. “I walked backstage all the way down the stairs, past some local Bridgestone workers, past the peo-ple setting up the rig, and caught Drake walking out of a door.” This was his chance.

“Yo, Drake, here’s some really good food from Ja-maicaway down the street.” Kamal shoved the plate of food in front of him. His nerves were through

the roof. Drake’s, on the other hand, were not. He reacted as if this were all planned. According to Kamal: “Dude just started eat-ing right in front of me.” Drake thanked him and invited him into the hospitality room, where everyone in the room eyed his food. “All his boys were looking at his food saying, ‘Where’d you get that?’” Kamal took one look at the untouched catering food and told them he could “feed them all right now.” They gave him fifteen nods of approval, so he raced back to Jamaicaway and re-turned with a car-full of free food.

After catering Drake’s next show in Columbus, Ohio, the rapper’s manager called and gave Kamal the news: “You’re Drake’s tour chef.” From January 2012 to the middle of the summer, Kamal traveled around America and Europe with Drake on his Club Paradise Tour, the highest-grossing hip-hop tour of the year. Every night, he made the same Jamaican food that he grew up eating and later began serving at Jamaicaway. Every night, all the food was eaten. By the end of the tour, Kamal had cooked for Richard Branson, Kanye West, Quincy Jones, and the entire Manchester City soccer team. His reputation as a tour chef preceded him.

In September 2012, just a couple months after Drake’s tour ended, Kamal was asked to be Rihan-na’s personal in-house chef. This too was a result of Kamal’s pluck and luck. He had sent a five-para-graph email to Rihanna’s management at Roc Na-tion, introducing himself and asking to be her tour chef. They replied curtly: “Thank you. We have a tour chef.” Refusing to give up, Kamal contacted Rihanna’s tour manager, who didn’t offer any prom-ises and admitted his preference for bigger catering companies. But two weeks later he called Kamal and said, “Look, come to Vegas and cook for her. If she likes your food, you’ll be her caterer.” She ended up liking his food, and he ended up being her personal chef from September 2012 to March 2013.

When Kamal returned to Nashville in the spring of 2013, he and his mother were already making plans to expand the Jamaicaway empire. Like Ouida did ten years earlier, he decided to turn his personal catering business, Riddim N’ Spice, into a brick-and-mortar establishment. He wrote the business plan, found the space, and just recently bought a food truck so he can launch the concept before the res-

“‘MUMMY, I’LL BE RIGHT BACK, I GOTTA GO FEED DRAKE.’”


JAMAICAWAY, RIDDIM N’ SPICE, AND TOPANARIS:

jamaicaway.com, riddimnspice.com, or on Facebook @TopanarisbyJamaicaway native.is/jamaica-way


5 0 5 1 2 T H AV E S . ( 6 1 5 ) 2 5 2 - 8 7 8 7

SUSHI LUNCH BUFFET MONDAY - SATURDAY 11:30AM - 2:30PM

HAPPY HOUR MONDAY - THURSDAY 4:30PM - 6:30PM

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taurant opens (in fall 2014). Ouida opened a raw, vegan, Ital-

friendly restaurant called Topanaris this past January. It’s basically a more organic version of Jamaicaway: “At Ja-maicaway, it’s all natural; at Topana-ris, it has to say free range, no GMO.” These restaurants, along with a new Jamaicaway location in Cool Springs, represent the next steps in the Kalo-koh-Bradshaw family business.

Though they’re cooking the same kind of food, mother and son are preparing it in very different ways. Kamal’s new restaurant will serve slow-cooked fast food (think Chipo-tle or Qdoba). He sees it primarily as a quick-fix, late-night spot, which there aren’t very many of in Nashville. Ouida’s Topanaris, on the other hand, features next-to-no-cooked slow food. It’s a quieter, sit-down restau-rant where you can spend time eating your food and talking to your friends.

The fact that Nashville can sup-port three different kinds of Jamaican restaurants, without a large Jamaican population, speaks to the growing food culture here. The city is chang-ing and developing a taste for differ-ent kinds of food. Before Jamaicaway, there were one or two Jamaican res-taurants in town, and none of them survived. Now there are three Jamai-can restaurants, and they’re all surviv-ing.

For Kamal and Ouida, this expan-sion doesn’t represent a change in their long-term goals. They still have a deep-seated desire to feed people and build a community around food. Unlike the slick, millionaire restau-rateur types that we see in New York City and Vegas, Kamal and Ouida aren’t driven by money and fame; they want to share their food with people and make them happy. Whether it’s transplanted Jamaicans, overzeal-ous Food Network hosts, or Grammy Award–winning hip-hop sensations, that’s been their life’s mission from the start.

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BY MATT COLANGELO | PHOTOS BY JEN McDONALD



Fat Mo’s is a gastronomic para-dox. On the one hand, it’s a fourteen-loca-tion, all-American fast-food chain; on the other hand, it’s a mom-and-pop business whose owners are not American, whose burgers are not cooked in a traditionally American style, and whose service is not particularly fast. It’s a smaller kind of chain, a slower kind of fast food, and an international take on a historically American cuisine. Fat Mo’s defies easy descrip-tion, partly because of the food they cook and partly because of the people who cook it.

Mohammad and Shiva Karimy are the mom-and-pop owners of Fat Mo’s, what they de-scribe as a “fresh homemade hamburger” chain. When I met them, I casually referred to their business as a fast-food chain, and Shiva quickly corrected me: “We are not fast food; we make everything fresh when you order it.” Point taken. Her distinction isn’t in what they serve, but how they serve it. Fat Mo’s offers a typical fast-food menu (e.g. burgers, sandwiches, fries, shakes); it just takes a couple extra minutes to get it. Surprisingly, this recipe has proven very successful for them. To understand why, you need to experience Fat Mo’s for yourself—and try their burger.

Honestly, I hadn’t been to a Fat Mo’s before I got this assignment. Over the course of writ-ing this story, though, I’ve been an ungodly

number of times—let’s just say five times so I don’t sound like a total fat ass. My first experi-ence was at their Smyrna location, which Shiva and Mo recently took over from a struggling franchisee. (Twelve of their fourteen locations were opened by former employees.) When I walked in, Shiva and Mo were standing behind the counter, her in a long dark dress and him in his grease-bespeckled work clothes. It was 1:00 p.m. They shook my hand and, gesturing to the menu, invited me to order lunch.

I scanned the menu from the bottom up, which makes zero sense and made me won-der where all the burgers were. The first items I saw were the “Big Catfish Sandwich,” the

“Grilled Chicken Sandwich,” and the “Philly Cheesesteak.” Where are these famous burgers? Oh wait, here they are. About halfway up the menu I saw what I was looking for: half-pound

“Double Mo” burger, quarter-pound “Little Mo,” half-pound regular Fat Mo’s burger, 16 oz. Fat Mo’s “Deluxe” burger, and last but not least, the grandaddy of them all, the meat that can’t be beat: the 27 oz. Fat Mo’s “Super Deluxe” burger. Planning to eat again within the next month, I ordered the half-pound regular Fat Mo’s burger and sat down to chat with Shiva.

As I waited for my burger, I guided the con-versation toward what I would soon be eating: what makes a Fat Mo’s burger different? Shiva’s


eyes darted around the room in search of Mr. Mo, her husband of thirty years and head chef of twenty-three.

“Mo can tell you more, but for one, our burgers are fresh. We make them every day by hand.” She stresses fresh-ness, both on the Fat Mo’s website and when talking to me. At first I feel like I’m being sold to, but when I see their burgers firsthand, I believe her.

Their patties bear the unmistakable, almost-perfec-tion of something handmade. Despite being thinner than the practically meatball-shaped patties you see in newly popular gourmet burger joints, they share a certain something that says they weren’t made by a machine. Shiva explains how every morning she and Mo form them by hand, patting them down with their palms (she shows me her palm) and rounding them off with the L-shaped curve between their index fingers and thumbs (she traces a line from the tip of her index finger to the tip of her thumb).

The fact that Fat Mo’s burgers are fresh doesn’t make them special, though. What makes them special is what Shiva refers to as “the Persian spices and herbs.” She lists out a few of them upon request: cumin, turmer-ic, oregano. Mo mixes these (along with fifteen other

secret seasonings), adds water, and makes a marinade out of them. He uses this marinade not before he cooks the burgers, like most marinades are used, but while he cooks them. He sears the burgers on both sides at 400°F, then drops them into the cool marinade bath for two minutes. Then, in an act of beautiful beef tor-ture, he puts the freshly cooled, marinated burgers back on the flat-top for another few minutes to cook them through. There’s no such thing as medium-rare at Fat Mo’s; everything is served well-done.

When I get my burger, well-done, it doesn’t come out looking fancy. It’s served on a red plastic tray along with a handful of spicy fries. It reminds me of the way my hometown soft-serve shack used to serve its burgers. I lift up the sesame bun to inspect what’s inside: ketchup, mustard, mayo, pickles, lettuce, tomato, and of course my burger. Just as I ordered. As I bite into it, the vin-egary Heinz ketchup cuts some of the spices Shiva just clued me in on—especially the cumin. The spiciness is subtle, but it makes a Fat Mo’s burger taste different than your average McDonald’s or Burger King burger. It tastes like a burger from a faraway place and a bygone era. Which it is.

FAT MO’S:

fatmos.comFollow on Facebook @fatmosnative.is/fat-mos


Mohammad learned this recipe when he was a teenager in Iran. Before he worked as an Oriental rug salesman in Vienna, before he met Shiva in Istanbul, and before the Iranian revolution started in 1978, Mo worked at an American-style fast-food restaurant in Tehran. That’s where he picked up the spicy marinade technique that defines a Fat Mo’s burger. The spice mixture, a variation of a traditional Persian advieh, is used in many meat dishes and rice dishes. It’s some-times added to a stock (like in the case of stews), but it’s frequently turned into a marinade as well. If you’ve had Persian food before, you’ll recognize some of the flavors seared into the outside of Mo’s burger. It’s an Iranian take on an American classic.

The fact that Mo worked at an American-style fast-food restaurant shows how different life was in prerev-olutionary Iran. According to Shiva, she and Mo grew up in the “America of the Middle East,” a secular melt-ing pot of immigrants and religions and ideas, many of them Western. She remembers watching Days of Our Lives religiously with her grandmother and going to see The Sound of Music at a big multiplex with her friends. Mo remembers listening to a famous Italian singer named Al Bano and watching him perform on the roof of a hotel in Tehran: “Thousands of people filled the streets around the hotel to see him. They chanted his name.”

The Iran the Karimys grew up in had many Western influences and had had Western (and Eastern) influ-ences for thousands of years. Iranian food is a product of this influence. Ever since the Silk Road established a channel of cultural transmission between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, there has been a cross-polli-nation of ingredients and cooking styles between these regions. We know that Marco Polo famously brought back noodles from China, but many other ingredients were traded as well, such as black pepper and nutmeg. This exchange continued throughout the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, as travel between Europe and the Middle East became easier. Over time, French and Italian cooking styles gradually influenced Iranian cooking, and vice versa.

Mo flipping burgers in 1970s Tehran is a modern ex-ample of this cultural exchange, one that was aided by Western radio and television. People all over the world saw Americans eating fast food all the time, and it wasn’t long before they combined elements of this tra-ditionally American cuisine with their own. That’s how you end up with homemade Persian-spice-marinated burgers being served in Iran. How those burgers ended up being served in Nashville is another story—one that completes its own circle of cultural exchange.

When the anti-Shah demonstrations turned violent

in 1978, many Iranians who could leave the country did. Mo and Shi-va were among those people. They moved to two of the more popular places for Iranian refugees at the time. He moved to Vienna, where he sold Persian and Oriental rugs for several years; she went to university in Istanbul, about halfway between Iran and Austria. They met a year later in Istanbul. Shiva was studying to become a doctor like her father, but she decided to marry Mo and leave Istanbul with him. They resettled in Vienna be-cause of Mo’s connections there, but six years later they secured political asylum in the United States, which was hard to get and hard to pass up. As soon as they could, they bought two one-way tickets to Nashville.

For many Iranian immigrants at the time (and basi-cally all immigrants ever), making a living in their new home country proved difficult. They went from being well-respected doctors to taxi drivers, from lawyers to window washers, from CEOs to janitors. For Shiva and Mo, the transition was smoother. They had a skill that was easily transferrable and didn’t require any cre-dentials or graduate degrees (and is probably the most stereotypically American skill next to herding cattle): making burgers.

When they opened the original Fat Mo’s in Antioch in 1991, about three years after arriving in Nashville, Shiva and Mo decided to make burgers the way they did in Iran. Unlike their main competition at the time—mul-tinational burger chains like McDonald’s and Burger King—they began serving fresh burgers that were made to order. This is an important point of distinction for Shiva: “We never use lamp heat. No lamp heat, no mi-crowave.” That’s a good thing. That means your food hasn’t been sitting around for half an hour before you eat it. It’s how the big multinational chains used to do it, before they became big multinational chains.

Shiva and Mo also stuck with their tried-and-true spice-marinade recipe. Overall, this process takes lon-ger than their competitors’, but it yields a tastier prod-uct. It also yields longer waiting times. Shiva explains,

“Our drive-thru got backed up at first, but we devised a more efficient system. We would go out and take or-ders from the line.” Word to the wise: if you’re getting a burger, it’ll take about five minutes; if you’re getting the catfish sandwich, though, it can take up to ten minutes. The sooner you can get your order in, the better it is for everybody—which is why they let you call in your order before you go and pick it up (hint, hint).

If you haven’t seen a Fat Mo’s menu in a while, you

“WE NEVER USE LAMP HEAT. NO LAMP HEAT, NO MICRO-WAVE.”


should be ashamed of yourself. But you should also check it out. In an attempt to evolve with the health-conscious times, Shiva and Mo have added some lighter options to the menu. Depending on the franchise, you might see a home-made turkey or veggie burger, made with a similar Persian spice mixture incorporated into the burger itself. On the slightly less healthy side of the equa-tion, you might see a Philly cheesesteak or a fried catfish sandwich. If you want a gyro, they have those too now.

When I ask her if Fat Mo’s is on a diet, Shiva betrays a hint of frustra-tion. “Everyone thinks Fat Mo burgers are not healthy. Actually, they have a 81/19 meat-to-fat ratio.” While this isn’t technically “lean” beef—that requires a 92/8 meat-to-fat ratio—it’s leaner than most burgers you can order. (Chefs of-ten push this ratio closer to 70/30. The more fat your burger has, the better it’ll generally taste.) Knowing this makes me feel better about scarfing down that half-pounder. I grab another handful of spicy fries as Shiva goes into depth about her potato and ice cream distribu-tors.

Talking to Shiva reminds me that food is more than a recipe. It’s a product of the people who make it and the his-tory behind it just as much as the ingre-dients that go into it. Knowing this in-formation about Fat Mo’s might change the way you experience their food. It might remind you of the 1970s or all the times you watched The Sound of Music. It might bring out flavors from half a world away that you otherwise wouldn’t have noticed, like cumin or turmeric. You might even imagine a young Mo-hammad Karimy flipping burgers in what was once a secular, prerevolution-ary Iran. The next time you bite into a Fat Mo’s burger, think about the story behind Fat Mo’s and how that burger came to be. It might make it taste even better than it already does.

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