Slumping Across Texas

Before there was Guy Fieri, pre-Andrew Zimmern, when Anthony Bourdain’s culinary explorations were just a fantasy of a cranky chef on the line, Jane and Michael Stern were piling into their car and searching America for authentic local foods along its blue highways. The Sterns’ countless editions of their Roadfood guides, monthly Gourmet magazine columns, and weekly appearances on public radio’s The Splendid Table have endeared them to multiple generations of American eaters. But they remained a distant presence. You had about as much of a chance of running into them at a loose-meat sandwich place in Iowa as you did Mario Batali at an IHOP in Seattle. Then came the Internet.

A fan and foodie named Stephen Rushmore encouraged the Sterns to set up roadfood.com and made it happen for them. With the barbecue freaks and pie pedants on the message boards demanding face time, the Roadfood Annual Eating Trip was born. Which is why I was standing outside an aging motor coach hard by I-35 in downtown Austin, Texas.

Things had started with an unmemorable group meal (about 100 of us) at an Austin chicken-fried-steak and bluegrass joint the night before. But now about half that group was geared up for the main event: a sold-out day trip through legendary Texas barbecue country. These were not the handful of spots to the west in the pretty Texas Hill Country. No. These were the rough-and-ready joints east of I-35 in dusty, fading ag towns such as Lockhart, Taylor, and Elgin.

It was not exactly a fashionable assembly, but it was not as motley as I had feared—a gathering of the profoundly obese, morbidly obese, and supermorbidly obese-plus. In fact, Michael Stern, narrating in his nasal Chicago accent on the bus’s PA, was not the only ectomorph in the venture.