The festival was great, and I’ll get to that.
But first, The Chefs.
Here’s the story. My somewhat recent and never-before-actually-met friend Hunter Boon had invited me to meet him in Atlanta and drive the four hours up to Townsend, Tennessee, to spend the weekend in a big compound with 20-something chefs and attend the Grains and Grits Festival.
The Answer is Always Yes.
Again.
So I got on a plane and flew to Atlanta, and Hunter and his Magnificent Pal, Cara, picked me up. And I say never-before-actually-met Hunter because we hadn’t actually met. Hunter had been reading my pieces on LinkedIn for ages and reached out one day and we started talking and became friends instantly. He’s one of those people who seems to be somehow in the middle of everything. There are only three degrees of separation between Hunter and the rest of humanity. He knows everyone, and everyone knows him.
And Cara was wonderful. It was almost a four-hour drive and full of great conversation.
Most people can’t have a good conversation for four hours.
So, back to The Chefs.
Because Hunter is good friends with Michael Sullivan, who is the center of this Chef’s Universe, we stayed in a big compound with all the chefs, maybe 20 or more. There were houses and a big cabin at a campground just a few miles away. The Big House became The Place for everyone and the energy was delightful.
So… The Chefs.
Yeah, I’ve watched Anthony Bourdain and watched movies about restaurants and cooking but that barely scratched the surface, but I never really understood the culture and these guys were The Culture.
Energy. Massive piles of positive energy. And skill, savory humor, and genuine camaraderie. I’ve hung out with ad people and software people and just groups of people who all did different things, but this was different.
These guys, and I grew up calling everyone guys… As in “You guys going to dinner?” and it could be half men and women. It’s a California thing. Sorry. And this gang of chefs was both male and female, and some of the males had significant others, so what the hell ever.
These guys.
These guys all had an indomitable energy. They all came in various shapes and sizes and looks, but they all had a superhuman level of energy. And humor. They ate and drank and smoked and laughed at levels most people could never muster. There was a kitchen counter with dozens of donated bourbon bottles and great amounts of food, on the counter and in the fridge, some was being cooked and it was everywhere.
And it was all good.
I was a newcomer, but I felt very much at home.
When everyone at the party knows each other for maybe decades, being the new guy can be dreary, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. Everyone knew each other and they ALL knew Sully and they were kind to the newcomer who writes about distilleries.
Michael Sullivan is a cooking icon. Hunter describes him as the center of the cooking universe in the center of the country. “I can walk into any restaurant in America with Sully and the whole kitchen will come out to say ‘SULLY!”
It was like that here.
We all ate and drank and smoked and laughed till late, and at 6 AM, a lot of the guys were heading over to the festival to start the fires.
The Fires. Or as they call it, The Ring of Fires…
OK, I’ll talk a little about the Grains and Grits Festival now.
It’s in a big green field on the outskirts of Townsend, Tennessee, which is on the outskirts of Gatlinburg and Knoxville, and it’s a pretty place. Rivers and hills and trees and trees and more trees. Throw in a Daniel Boone and some bears, and it’d be complete.
This festival has been cranking along for 10 years and has evolved to the point that all 1,600 available tickets sell out in 10 minutes.
“This is my 5th year and me and all my friends are at our computers the minute the tickets go on sale. We wait all year for this!” said some random guy with a plate of food and a little cup of bourbon.
I ran around filming interviews the whole time and everyone was happy. Genuinely happy. Before they opened the gates, there were all 1600 people standing in a line ten across, waiting for the start, and when it opened, I got in the middle as the crowd streamed by and shot some video.
I felt like a rock in a stream full of salmon going upstream.
There were maybe 20 food offerings and maybe 30 bourbon/whisky/gin/vodka/whatever-it-is-in-that-bottle distilleries with booths giving away samples of their wares.
But… What about The Fires.
All the food was cooked on an open fire. Oak fire. Paella, shrimp, whole roasted pig, turkeys, mac ‘n cheese, clams, oysters… Everything was cooked over fire. So that means a bunch of guys got there at the crack of dawn, after goofing off most of the night, to get the fires going and the coals roasty hot.
A bit like a steam train. Build up a head of steam before you go fast.
So they got the fires going, and then the cooking started, and it was magnificent. Turkeys hanging in the oak smoke, whiskey brown, whole hogs, fire too hot, pull out some coals with a shovel, not hot enough, throw in more oak.
It was beautiful chaos. Between The Chefs and a gang of helpers from a local school, all in matching t-shirts, one could see constant movement. It was an army preparing for an invasion and it truly was an invasion. Those 1,600 lucky ticket holders were on the other side of a picket fence, waiting for the go-ahead while they watched the fires and the food and the chefs doing the Great Dance of Food.
If you’ve ever peeked into the back of a busy kitchen, you’ve seen this dance but imagine the dance about to feed sixteen hundred people.
Sixteen hundred people noshing and drinking like fiends, and these guys fed them all.
I was exhausted, and all I did was wander around with a video camera.
At one point, I was back in the cooking area filming, and Sully ripped by me, as he had been doing all day, and I asked him, “Sully, how the hell do you do it?”
“It’s just who I am.”
And that is it.
“It’s just who I am.”
After it all got closed down and put away and the fires put out, I was back at The Compound as the chefs came wandering in, after a high speed sixteen-hour day and they started cooking sausages and more food and drinking and smoking and laughing and telling stories and I asked them how the do it.
“It’s just who I am…”
I think it’s that simple. Every conversation I had with these guys, who had just spent a day that would put most people into a coma, and still had plenty of juice in the tank, basically said the same thing.
They are chefs because it’s just who they are. They loved it. One gentleman, who runs a top-notch restaurant, said he’ll spend twelve to fourteen hours a day and come home with a smile on his face. “I love it.”
I suspect the energy of the restaurant feeds their natural energy and they become one with that insane flow.
It really is a breed. A tribe. A separate sub-species that the rest of us can never fully understand.
“If I have to explain, you won’t understand.”
That’s it.
I may never understand that tribe, but I admire the hell out of them. These people work harder than any profession I’ve ever encountered, and they do it out of love and maybe an addiction to being so plugged into the pure energy of creating the thing we all require to live.
How does one join this tribe? No idea. I suspect a lot of people feel a calling and simply can’t hang on to the wheel as it spins faster and faster and the centrifugal force spits most out into the ether of doing something else with their lives.
But the ones who have the strength, creativity, and stamina to hang on delight the rest of the world with their delicious creations.
I really didn’t write that much about the festival, I realize that. Hell, Hunter S. Thompson didn’t write much about the Mint 500 because, well, screw it. Because the race didn’t matter as much as everything else around it.
And the Grains and Grits Festival is wonderful, and the bourbon was great, but the chefs who defied gravity were the thing.
All Hail The Chefs, and thank y’all for making food more than something to keep you from being hungry.
