A Cook's Gulf Coast Road Food Quest With His Dog

I'm coming home. Snacks, my canine copilot, and I ventured to Florida, and the only thing between us and the finishing line is a stretch of hundreds of miles of uneaten food. My overarching belief regarding where to eat when traveling: Cooks always know the best places to eat. I put my feelers out to those along the coast and built my agenda.

Unfortunately, the first day can be surmised with a brief list of grievances: five hours of traffic outside Tallahassee with no cell phone service, fast food chains dominating the landscape. Resigning to my fate of hungry malaise for the night, I spend the remainder of the evening watching grainy infomercials at a motel on a tract of service road in Chipley, Fl. — a town that the concierge described as "a piece of sh#t sh#thole" where "the only liquor store is fifty miles in the opposite direction." There's a Chinese buffet in the middle of the parking lot — closed.

Leaving the memories of Chipley behind, I trek onward. Before I left New Orleans, my friend Jen tipped me off to a bar in downtown Pensacola called Hopjacks. "Go snack on their fries," she'd said. "They're Belgian cut and fried in duck fat."

I show up the next day at 11 a.m. as they are setting up the patio. As a rule, I wear my chef coat while on a quest for road food. It's a cheap tactic, but it invites conversation from the people I actually want to talk to.

I finish my snack and find the cook sitting at the bar, an older man named Ken. I trade him a drink for a few questions about Pensacola's food scene. Cooking for over thirty years, his scarred arms and blistered hands reiterate his culinary history. "I've seen this area live and die several times," he confides. "It's finally coming back and it's on the right track to being the best I've ever seen. You should come back in a year and check everything out again." If my snack at Hopjacks was any indication, I am tickled to see what else Pensacola has to offer.

I venture on and take a detour to Leatha's BBQ Inn in Hattiesburg, Miss. Tucked behind an RV dealership in a gravel parking lot, Leatha's was "easily the best barbecue within five-hundred miles of New Orleans" according to an old colleague, James. My first impression of the place was that it could easily moonlight as a bingo hall. Picnic-style community seating, red plastic tablecloths, and the owners, a group of old, cherubic women sitting at a table nearest the television entranced by Dr. Phil created the ideal atmosphere to pig out.

, a true mom-and-pop joint. As Caroline takes my order, I explain where I'm from and why I'm there. I order a sweet tea with extra lemon and the pulled pork and rib plate with baked beans and honey mustard cole slaw. It all arrives accompanied by a plate of hot dinner rolls and an iced tea pitcher of Leatha's house-made sweet and smoky barbecue sauce.

Upon first bite, I knew this was easily the best barbecue I'd eaten in the Mississippi Delta. The pulled pork had a red smokering roughly an inch into the flesh, and the ribs were emphatically staying-on-the-plate rather than falling-off-the-bone.

Halfway through my meal, Caroline parks herself across from me. "So? Was it worth the drive?" 

"Well, I'm a cook," I confessed. "This is what I live for. I couldn't be happier doing what I'm doing right at this moment."

Caroline smirks and nods her head approvingly, "Oh, so you know." 

She immediately opens up, getting Paula Deen flirtatious and I chat her up for personal information: Where she likes to eat, what she likes to cook, why she does what she does. She regales me with a story about a little Italian bistro that just opened up that "serves real veal, not that fake veal stuff you usually see."

Puzzled by the idea of "fake veal" yet enchanted by her joyous culinary discovery, I reply, "Yeah, I know, right?"

I admitted that I couldn't leave entirely happy without a hug and a kiss on the cheek from the woman who fed me and joined me for my meal. She obliges, and I am sent home with a wet cheek, a full belly, a grocery bag full of smoked pork and dinner rolls, an agreement that I will be back as soon as possible for an actual interview, and a sense of overwhelming accomplishment.

Dong Phuong, a little Vietnamese bakery in the part of town colloquially referred to as Little Vietnam. We share a meatball banh mi and a roll of fresh-baked red bean cakes with cà phê đá on an adjacent stairwell, as I share with her the details of my first documented epicurean adventure.