Let’s start at the end of the night. I’m barreling up I-95 with the windows down and the music at full blast. Every song feels like a message: T. Rex’s Planet Queen, Cities by Talking Heads, 15 Step By Radiohead, like a mixtape from a boy who wants to get down. I’m full of promise. I never want the night to end, but I’m driving fast, straight to my house, where the tone will inevitably shift. I’ll calm myself and smoke a bowl with Seth while I talk about the magic of the corn dog through my wine-induced congestion. By midnight, it’ll all be a dream.
When I get to my door, after 30 minutes and 8 songs, the tune that’s playing is Femme Fatale, that Velvet Underground/Nico number that makes women feel beautiful and mysterious, and I snap a picture of myself in the driver’s seat, illuminated by the streetlights and the glow of the dash, and I feel it and everything else in my eyebrows.
What’s brought me here is a meal, the second Euterra dinner I’ve attended in as many months. When I arrive at the dinner, hosted in the warehouse-home-art studio of a friend of Chef Corey Bullock, I’m alone and a little nervous in a surreal polyester dress I bought 21 years ago in Harvard square. Half of the bottom hem is ripped open, but it’s a long dress, and I’m a short person, and I hope no one notices.
I choose a seat at the communal table of well-dressed strangers that positions me near the chef’s family—his mother Mary and her boyfriend, Tom, a couple of family friends, and a boisterous 60-something elementary school teacher named Jackie Coffey who is great at talking, and I’m grateful for her ability to fill the silence I brought with me. I had wondered, on the drive from Richmond to Petersburg, if I would be able to sneakily read my book on my phone under the table, unnoticed, during the dinner, but Jackie has other plans.
Someone gets our attention, and Danny, our beverage emissary, begins by explaining our first glass—a pear cider from Patois. It’s giving off hay and the critters that bunk in it, and it finishes with a tangy sweetness. Two snacks arrive on a piece of slate. In the first, a preserved leg of wild goose is sliced thinly and placed atop a crispy acorn pizzelle. Bullock used his grandma’s pizzelle press to make it. In the other, a shiso leaf wraps around a jiggly bit of dotori-muk, a Korean acorn jelly. And there’s the aha! — It’s fall! Acorns! Pears! Game birds! It says, ‘Hey, there’s another season between tomatoes and pumpkins, and it’s bountiful if you know how to look at it.’
“Kudzu is everywhere,“ Bullock is saying as we make eye contact with one perfect sour pig ear dumpling, gilded with a petite purple blossom. It’s dusted with oxidized kudzu and served with a black locust shoyu that Bullock’s stowed away for years, presumably in his basement or garage, and I momentarily wonder where exactly all these little tidbits live in Corey and Lori’s house. Do they take up a couple shelves in the fridge, behind the OJ and sour cream, or does he have a separate rig just for fermentation? I suspect the latter, given the vinegars and garums that proliferate the menu. I make a note to invite myself over and explore.
Snacks over, Danny is back to introduce a new wine, a 2020 Vino di Anna Palmento Bianco. We’re swirling juice from indigenous Sicilian grapes plucked from the slopes of an active volcano, and there’s the expected minerality but also a surprising note of honeysuckle, and I find myself making a note to look up if honeysuckle grows in Sicily. Turns out that it does, and the kind that grows there, Lonicera fragrantissima, is especially fragrant (as the name suggests) and, in addition to the white and yellow flora I’m used to, it also presents stunning pink trumpets in what feels like characteristic Italian finery.
The room gets quiet, as we’re presented with a dish that is all white: a piece of squid transformed to look like a wing, and under it, a satiny lobe of jimami dofu, a tofu made from fresh peanuts. When Corey comes to the table to talk about this course, he tells us that we’re in high peanut season and that, when he visits his father’s family in North Carolina, he likes to wrestle the goober peas from the dirt when they’re at their freshest and eat them out of hand. “They taste more like the legume they are that way,“ he adds. It’s another revelation, one that I’m guilty to admit I knew but forgot: peanuts have a season, too.
After a cleansing bowl of noir de carmes melon (a dark, French melon that makes me reevaluate my relationship to the melon family in general), late season sungolds, and lemon verbena, we’re ready for our next course, and when it starts to arrive, a giggle ripples through the people around me like the wave. When the dish lands on the table in front of me, the same giggle bubbles up through my chest. It’s a damn corn dog! Suddenly missing the state fair for the past two years is ok because I’m dipping something in mustard and eating it off of a stick, like September intended.
This corn dog, with a pâté of snapping turtle held together in a breading of cornmeal and the pollen of the cattails that grow in the marsh, served with a just-slightly-spicy foraged mustard (Their take on French’s, Corey says), is at once familiar and foreign. It is made to look like a cattail, and I’ve never been confronted with the similarity between corn dog and cattail before. It’s striking. Nature’s corn dog.
Have I ever eaten snapping turtle, I wonder, as I hear Jackie telling the table that she’ll have to pass because she has a pet turtle at home. Do I know this woman well enough, after four plates and an hour of banter, to finish her corn dog? I decide that I don’t, and that decision haunts me to this very moment. I should have offered to finish her corn dog. The family section of the table would’ve been tickled by it. I should have slipped it off its cattail stem and into my pocket for the ride home. In fact, I should carry a purse for just this reason—the possibility of extra corn dogs.
But we’re not done being amused and charmed, and as soon as the memory of the corn dog is cemented in our minds, we’re presented with the actual mandible of a lamb, meticulously cleaned down to the bone. It’s all goth angles and haunting dental details, and resting on its eight baby incisors is a tostada no bigger than my thumb made from nixtamalized bloody butcher corn from Autumn Olive Farm, with braised lamb tongue and pickled wild cucamelon, which, as Corey points out, is much more tender than cultivated cucamelon. A single wispy vine with a few fresh cucamelons is draped across the uppermost part of the bone, and when I pick them off and pop them in my mouth, they squish pleasantly between my molars. I’m thinking a lot of teeth in this moment, for obvious reasons.
The 2019 Domaine Geschickt Phenix from Alsace, which accompanied the corn dog, can be felt in my veins now. What kind of course could possibly follow a tostada on a lamb jaw after a snapping turtle corn dog? The dish that comes feels comfortingly simple by comparison. Pheasant and smoked maitakes extend the autumnal theme, and the dish eats like something you could reasonably expect to find in an actual restaurant and not the dreamscape we’ve been inhabiting so far. It’s not flashy, but it’s impeccable, and paired with a 2018 Daniel Ramos Kapi Amphorae, with its chewy plum notes and taut tannin structure, it feels like act 2B in the screenplay that is this dinner, a kind of resolution after all that action.
Dessert, all three courses of it plus a mignardise, keeps circling the theme of the land in its exact moment. A nixtamalized apple retains its shape after hours of boiling, and inside, a fluffy goat milk ricotta feels like a little bit of treasure. It’s served alongside a tuft of rabbit tobacco (Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium), which emits a sweet Grandpa scent when crushed. I tuck it behind my ear. Later, I learn that it’s been used medicinally by the native population of the East Coast for centuries, and I give the wooly cluster a place of honor on my desk at home where it can remind me of this night.
As I’m finishing the last of the apple, I notice Corey operating a manual shave ice apparatus. He tells us that the next course, which is indeed shave ice, should be enjoyed immediately. Don’t wait for your neighbor to be served, or yours will melt. I’m grateful for the permission, but I would’ve done it anyway because I have no control when it comes to shave ice. The shave ice reminds me of kakigōri, with a creamy drapery of pawpaw cream and little gems of gelatinized honeysuckle vinegar to scoop up from the bottom of the bowl.
After the shave ice, a buckwheat tart brings us back to those peanuts. They’ve been transformed into a green peanut miso caramel, and I can’t help but pinch one of the plump, fresh peanuts from the sandy buckwheat shell, licking the caramel off my thumb and index finger and looking around for someone to make eye contact with, someone who’s feeling the same thing, this rush that’s nearing its end.
As we sink our teeth into a dark chocolate and gingko truffle, Barry, the owner of the building emerges to introduce the cast and crew. Each introduction ends with applause, and when Barry introduces Lori and Corey, I feel the urge to jump to my feet and give them a standing ovation, but everyone else is just clapping politely, so I stifle the impulse and prepare for the next step. I know it’s coming because they did it last time—a little jaunt upstairs to Barry’s bar, with its taxidermied buck head and glittering disco ball and red lighting. Crystal glasses of pawpaw horchata welcome us after our ascent. Danny has somehow gotten behind the bar with Barry before any of us could get up the steep back stairs, and he presides over the last beverage, Pan-like and grinning.
When Corey manages to join us at the bar, I’m near the stairs, and I receive him with the kind of full-body hug I would normally save for someone I knew much better, but a meal like this one has a way of creating intimacy. It’s a gift, an elaborate one that I’m not sure I deserved, and I’m grateful for the way it has invigorated me and prepared me to head back home, full of the things I’ve eaten (though lacking a corn dog in my pocket) and the stories they hold.