As my chowism has become more organized, I have sometimes wondered how far it goes back. Certainly since I moved to Chicago 17 years ago, ostensibly to further my advertising career, actually to eat deep dish pizza and be able to go to foreign films without having to start the film society and run the projector myself (all of which I actually did). Participating in online food fora has certainly ramped my chowism up, not to mention my understanding and knowledge of what the heck's in front of me, but long before then I was at least checking out Mexican food in Pilsen, and bravely but hopelessly trying to make sense of the jumble of little plates of weird stuff in Korean restaurants, and so on. And, at the other end of the scale, at least once in a great while trying a Trotter's or an Everest Room (not to mention organizing a trip to France around reservations at Ducasse and L'Esperance, and so on). Indeed, at a dot com job a few years back, my friend Wyatt and I were known as "the incredibly expensive lunch club" for the way that, if anyone suggested, say, Panda Express for lunch, we would counter with Bistro Zinc or the Cape Cod Room.
Before moving here, to the tiny extent that there was much ethnic food in Wichita, where I grew up and worked after college, I was the person who sussed it out-- Vietnamese, Greek, Lebanese, whatever dim hope of differentness and culinary interest might be found somewhere in a city otherwise known for one or more of every franchise on earth. Though it must also be admitted that I spent far too many lunches at Wendy's, Pizza Hut, or eating for lunch a supposedly dietetic turkey sandwich at a place called Terri's Diner (which was so ordinary and forgettable that despite probably eating there 250 times, I can no longer remember where it was). I also-- this is a slightly more poignant note-- once took a trip to New York with a friend, and made reservations for what was then an outrageously expensive dinner, about $75 per person, multiple courses paired with different wines (what a novelty). A very grownup thing to be doing at 24 or so, earning something in the
extremely low five figures. And the restaurant? Cellar in the Sky, located within Windows on the World, my only trip to the World Trade Center (a complex I otherwise ignored on subsequent trips to New York City, so that all I remember of those absent landmarks is a portion of turbot in a greenish sauce, paired with a very nice French white).
Although in high school I ate far too much at McDonald's-- where I worked, at the absolute nadir of the polyester-based uniform era:
--still, my childhood was not without a considerable degree of culinary sophistication compared to my peers. My mother had the usual devotion to learning French cooking a la Julia Child circa 1970-- serious cooking out of books was present enough in our lives that I, as a 9 or 10-year-old, was aware of it when Michael Field, a popular chef and author of the 1960s, dropped dead at a relatively young age; and the family well remembers the serious day of labor she once put into Julia's duck
a l'orange, which came to disappointment in the end when we realized that there was about as much meat on an entire duck as on a single chicken thigh. But besides such attempts at sophistication, she took her German Mennonite ancestry seriously in cooking matters though the rest of that faith and lifestyle had fallen by the wayside generations back; she still issues my sisters and me Christmas cookbooks full of recipes for vareneky and pluma moos and such things, and would inflict borscht, boiled tongue etc. on us for dinner as often as other moms made casseroles with crumbled potato chip tops.
My father, though happy with a steak for dinner most nights, was a great fan of Jewish deli food, truly an extraordinary taste to have developed as an Irish Catholic in the middle of Kansas, where a deli would open for about three months every three years before failing in the face of complete indifference to its offerings from any goys but us. And then there's the fact that as a small child, my favorite food is supposed to have been green olives. So even as I stuffed myself with Ho-Hos and Space Food Sticks like any child of my times, I was at least exposed to other things, aware of them, and-- unlike most of my peers-- experiencing food as something to be thought about, rather than just fuel to be inhaled whole.
Which brings me, at last, to what is perhaps my Ur-chow memory. I went camping for a day with my friend Louis Podrebarac (this is perhaps first grade), and on the way back we stopped at a place downtown that was supposed to have the best hamburgers in town, according to Louis' father. Why a German immigrant doctor who had fled the Communists in the 1950s was supposed to know about the best hamburgers in a Kansas town was a mystery to me; arguably I could have done better just asking my own grandfather for guidance, since he'd owned a burger stand in the 1950s, but in this case Herr Doktor Podrebarac's instincts were right. Bill's Big 6 was a revelation, a melding of cheese and grilled onion and beef and bun that was light years beyond the McDonald's hamburgers (and their imitations at other local chains like Sandy's and Griff's) I'd had before. (In fact, years later working at McDonald's, I would often grill onions for my own Quarter Pounders, and believe you me, they were the best Quarter Pounders anyone ever ate.) Being 7 at the time, I had no way of getting myself back to Bill's, so it was probably 7 or 8 years before I went looking for that little white hamburger stand somewhere downtown next to a building with white columns (a funeral parlor, I think). But I kept the legend of Bill's alive in my heart all those years, as representing how much more the simple and humble hamburger could be in the hands of a master.
Years later I would pay tribute to Bill Lamb, protege of the great Ralph Baum, Bataan Death March survivor, irascible Archie Bunker type, noble burgermeister, and perhaps the man most responsible for awakening my awareness of food, in a comic I spent way too much of the 1980s drawing called The Hofmeyer Chronicles. In it, society has collapsed in that usual Road Warrior post-apocalyptic kind of way, and a scientific institute in New York sends two field researchers out to find out what's going on in the rest of the country. Hofmeyer, the one who looks like me, is a bit clueless about real life, hence the affected Kansas dialect he speaks in trying not to arouse suspicion when he makes first contact with someone in Kansas:
The jetblack toupee on a man at least in his 60s, and the jumpsuit, would have been instantly recognizable to any true food enthusiast in Wichita.
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As it turned out, I was approached on three separate occasions this weekend by strangers in regards to my 10 year old son. 
. Thanks for being there for me!
