The NY Nap App is back in the press this week. This time in the home section of the NY Daily News. The piece itself is on clocks. The Nap App is the only one of its kind featured. Pick up a copy or check it out below.
When I agreed to fly into Charlotte then drive down to Camden, South Carolina for Johnny Pockets’ wedding, as opposed to driving all the way overnight in the van with the boys, I told Sam that it was on one condition – we stop somewhere in North Carolina for barbecue.
We did some research. Sam leafed through our copy of Jane and Michael Stern’s Roadfood. It seems Charlotte is better known for its fried chicken. Don’t get me wrong, I love fried chicken, but Steven Tanner’s three thighs and a biscuit at The Commodore is pretty much the pinnacle of that particular Southern staple for me. Good barbecue, on the other hand, is just plain difficult to come by in New York. Bar-B-Q King is in Charlotte. But, as I’d already eaten there and written about it for Vice here, we agreed to keep looking.
I checked out the North Carolina Barbecue Society’s Historic Barbecue Trail. Unfortunately, the closest place was Bridges Barbecue Lodge in Shelby, nearly an hour outside Charlotte in the wrong direction. Now, I’ve been known to drive an hour or more out of the way just to get something good to eat, but we had a rehearsal dinner to be at early that evening.
We finally decided on the Stallings Rock Store Bar-B-Q, located less than thirty minutes from the airport. It was a beautiful Fall Friday in the South. There was not a cloud in the deep royal blue sky. The drive to Stallings was simple and direct.
The Rock Store Bar-B-Q was originally a Funderburk filling station, constructed in the thirties. Between that incarnation and its current, the building served Stallings as a convenience store. That incarnation, as well as its rustic fieldstone and mortar construction, gave the Rock Store its name.
Let’s get to the meat of this. We had an early flight, so it seemed we were the first customers of the day. Thankfully, the Rock Store opens at 10 AM. Stepping inside, the store was already permeated with that robust smoky aroma that is one of the precursors of good barbecue. The menu is standard. Chopped pork, sliced brisket, and pulled chicken offered as sandwiches, sandwich combos with one side and a drink, or plates with two sides and a bun. There are also ribs, not so common in North Carolina, offered by the rack, plate, or pack. The sides include baked beans, macaroni & cheese, white coleslaw, red coleslaw, cucumber and onion salad, banana pudding, corn bread, and Brunswick stew.
I ordered a pork plate with Brunswick stew and cornbread. Sam ordered pulled chicken with macaroni & cheese and banana pudding. The Rock Store has three types of sauce; Eastern Carolina which is vinegar based and laced with chili flakes with a touch of brown sugar to mitigate the acidity and heat; Stallings Secret which is ketchup based sauce at its best, sweet and smoky with an edge of soft spice; and Carolina Gold which is mustard based and I assume they have to have given their proximity to South Carolina. I don’t mean to be unnecessarily harsh. I just don’t like mustard based barbecue sauce. Most of the time, it tastes like bad honey mustard dressing to me. To be fair, Sam tried the Carolina Gold and liked it a lot. I, however, abstained.
I loaded up my bun with a mound of moist, smoky pork and liberally applied the Eastern Carolina sauce. I took one bite and realized that I must have still been half asleep when I ordered. Thirty seconds later, after a trip to the counter, I was back with a side of red slaw. The Rock Store’s version combines thinly sliced green cabbage with flecks of red pepper and is dressed with the vinegar based sauce. It serves as a perfect foil in both texture and taste to the soft richness of the pork shoulder. While the Brunswick stew was good, the lima beans were too firm, and, overall, the tomato was overpowering, making for more of a note take on that dish. The cornbread was soft and moist and, as is usually the case with cornbread that is not at least a little on the dry side, overly sweet. Even after nearly ten years in New York, I still don’t enjoy sweet cornbread. As my friend Joseph says, it’s supposed to be better with butter or a vehicle for other dishes. Top a piece with Brunswick stew or black eyed peas, crumble some in your collard greens – you get the picture.
Sam’s pulled chicken was delicious. It seems like the birds had been brined prior to smoking. If so, this greatly enhanced both the taste and texture. The meat took on the smoke without losing its natural flavor and was moist but with a bite. I find barbecue chicken too often runs from one extreme to another in terms of texture. I had a couple of bites with the Stallings Secret Sauce. It was a perfect compliment. The macaroni & cheese left a lot to be desired. I was looking for a brick of the stuff cut from a casserole dish. What Sam got instead was a styrofoam cup of noodles swimming in an alarmingly yellow cheese sauce. As for the banana pudding, my only complaint is that there was not enough of it for the both of us.
All in all, it was a successful barbecue stop. The meat was moist. The sauces were well made. And, though the sides left a little to be desired, if I ever have to drive from Charlotte to South Carolina again, I’d be happy to go back and eat at the Stallings Rock Store Bar-B-Q.
Some may say that to be awarded Best Gutbomb in The Village Voice’s Best of NYC 2010 is a dubious honor at best. But, seeing that the award was given for Honeychiles’ OG Po’Boy, I would have to disagree. After all, the OG is roughly a half a pound of hand cut fries on a homemade mayonnaise slathered foot long french loaf doused with roast beef debris gravy. I think The Voice sums up the essential gutbombedness of the OG quite well…
This sandwich is so staggeringly enormous, so very tasty, so deeply caloric, that it’s impossible to finish unless you have been doing manual labor, are extremely drunk, or have resigned yourself to collapsing on the floor.
Photograph by Robyn Lee
Jesse and I changed a few things up on the Honeychiles’ menu for the fall. Two items came off, black eyed peas and our Caesar. Two items went on, red beans and rice and a shrimp and sausage gumbo. As for why:
1. I was honestly tired of the Caesar making it into reviews of the restaurant. It’s not that I don’t stand behind the dish. I do. I actually love the buttermilk parmesan Caesar dressing (so modest huh?). It’s just that the salad was there for people who wanted something lighter to eat. Now that we’ve been open for a little while and cooler, then colder weather is upon us, I just don’t think it needs to stay on the menu.
2. The black eyed peas were never a big seller. The red beans represent more traditional New Orleans cooking, and they really stick to your ribs – making them a great dish for the colder months. We’ve come up with a recipe that will appeal to vegans, vegetarians, and carnivores alike (you guys can add andouille sausage for a couple of bucks).
3. Shrimp and sausage gumbo… need I say more?
We’ve got some more surprises coming up for the month of November, so keep an eye out. I assume we’ll be talking turkey soon.
If you want to check out the new lunch and dinner menus, they’ve been posted on the new and improved honeychiles.com, or, better yet, just come on in and get yourself something good to eat.
My MxNM wireless music controller application for the iPad has returned to active development. The initial release, dubbed MxNM LE, utilizes the MIDI protocol to send control change messages to remote applications via UDP. While this methodology works fine, the MIDI specification’s vocabulary is extremely limited. Today, users are looking for rich, two-way communication between devices and applications. That’s where the Open Sound Control protocol (OSC for short) comes in. To quote opensoundcontrol.com:
Since its introduction in 1997 by CNMAT researchers Matt Wright and Adrian Freed, the Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol has been successfully integrated into dozens of hardware and software products, and used in thousands of performances and installations. OSC goes beyond MIDI by addressing needs specific to musical performance with new electronic instruments such as high-bandwidth connectivity, precise temporal semantics and temporal regularization, extensibility and rich type support, human readability and state-free operation.
Several MxNM LE users, utilizing the application to control Ableton Live, have requested the ability to label columns and rows of pads and pads themselves. I developed a proof of concept of this functionality earlier this summer only to conclude that the approach was inefficient from both the development and deployment perspective. From the development end, the code would involve creating 99 Core Data or SPO objects per song (and 99 more for each subsequent song!). From the deployment end, the user would have to manually create label sets for songs, enter pad, row, and column names, and switch between label sets when songs change. The result, I believe, would be a crash-prone, sluggish application. Furthermore, the application would be in no way whatsoever user friendly, at least as far as labeling is concerned.
With OSC, however, clip, scene, and track names (i.e. pad, row, and column) can be sent dynamically from Live to MxNM. This eliminates the need for persistent data and duplicate data entry by the user thus adding functionality while maintaining speed and efficiency. A host of other parameters can be communicated in both directions. The real benefit of this is that each application can control the other (e.g. a volume slider for a particular track can now both be adjusted on the iPad and host computer).
All in all, this clearly makes OSC the logical candidate for the continued development of MxNM.
Honeychiles, the Cajun restaurant I am helping Jesse and Josh from Ex Humans open in The Charleston, held it’s opening party last night. We offered a limited preview of the menu that included jambalaya, smoked cheddar and green onion hush puppies, and catfish po’ boys. We also brought up a hundred pounds of crawfish from Louisiana which we boiled throughout the night and served in the back on long table covered in newspaper. The night was a smash success if I do say so myself. We sold out of the menu preview in under two hours.
You can read some less biased opinions about the party and check out some pictures after the jumps:
NY Press
Mishka
After a year hiatus, The Colonel Records Freedom Fest returns to Williamsburg with three days and/or nights of rockin’ good times.
Friday July 2 @ The Charleston
-Colonel Records family and friends spin rock and roll. Free drinks! Free shwag! FUCK YEAH!!!
Saturday July 3 @ Lulu’s
-Stalkers, The Weight, Tough Shits, Modern Bummer, and Daddy Long Legs melt your face off.
Sunday July @ secret bbq location
-Fletcher C. Johnson and The Goddamn Rattlesnake. More free drinks! Free food too!
My second app for the iPhone, the NY Nap App, is now available in the App Store. From the website:
For the homesick New Yorker in need of a nap or a good night’s sleep… Now you can fall asleep or wake up to the sounds of the greatest city in the world no matter where you happen to be.
Read more and take a look at some screen shots here. Or, if you have an iPhone, why not buy a copy. After all, what’s $.99 these days?
I took a break from developing MxNM at the end of this week to start work on a couple of new websites. The first (here comes the shameless self promotion) is for my band The Weight.
The second is for the talented and lovely Nikki Lane.
Check ‘em out.
In honor of Earth Day (and also as a result of my love for minimalism), I programmed and installed a new low energy, minimal theme. I call it monochrome as it utilizes the monotype font and is obviously monochromatic. I originally got the idea when my girlfriend sent me a link to Blackle.
To quote – “Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. ‘Image displayed is primarily a function of the user’s color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen.’ Roberson et al, 2002.
To find out what you can do to save energy, visit the EPA’s Tips to Save Energy page.