February/March 2020

Garden & Gun

Soul of the South

Garden & Gun2 min read
Garden & Gun
Senior Vice President & Editor in Chief Executive Managing EditorPhillip Rhodes / Creative DirectorMarshall McKinney Photography and Visuals DirectorMaggie Brett Kennedy / Deputy EditorsAmanda Heckert, David Mezz Style DirectorHaskell Harris / Art D
Garden & Gun2 min read
My Charleston
By Charleston standards, I’m a newbie, especially when you consider the city was founded 350 years ago. I moved here from Manhattan a mere twelve years ago to join Garden & Gun shortly after its launch. The Lowcountry was not a foreign landscape to m
Garden & Gun2 min read
Contributors
“My strength as an illustrator is that, apparently, I’m incapable of embarrassment,” says the writer and amateur artist Daniel Wallace, who wrote and sketched “A Southern Family Portrait” (p. 30). There’s freedom in staying humble, Wallace says. “I k
Garden & Gun2 min read
“I Have Worried That My Yearning For Old-time Florida Is A Bit Unhealthy”
Everyone up North wants to escape the snow and the blustery cold and dip their toes in the warm tropical waters in Florida. And what better way to find out where to go than to read the December 2019/ January 2020 issue of Garden & Gun? Kay Worley vi
Garden & Gun4 min readCooking, Food & Wine
Renaissance Man
Alexander Smalls has crammed his corner apartment in Harlem with color—leopard-print cushions dot yellow couches, and jewel-colored drapes from his travels in Ghana sweep the floor—creating a warmth that matches the acclaimed chef and restaurateur’s
Garden & Gun3 min read
Clutch Move
When Dallas natives Rae and David Liu left home for college (Columbia and Georgetown Universities, respectively), moving back wasn’t part of the ten-year plan—and the siblings had plans. Rae studied accessories design at the Fashion Institute of Tech
Garden & Gun2 min read
A Southern Family Portrait
Brother. Show me a man who loved hot dogs more than my brother Bill and I’ll show you a two-headed horse. Second cousin once removed. Kindergarten teacher by day, cougar by night. Excelled at both. Mega-rich investor who chucked it all to open Alabam
Garden & Gun4 min read
Country Redemption
Waylon Payne is waiting for me in the lobby of the FieldHouse Jones hotel in East Nashville, and I’m late. Dodging laptop-toting millennials, I find him posted up against the wall with a bemused grin as he hands me a cup of coffee. Wearing tight ston
Garden & Gun3 min read
Funeral Rights
Q We’ve been taking some flak: Is an open-casket funeral sorta hillbilly? A Death is a many-horned beast that should be given due regard, in the sense of celebrating the life that preceded. But it seems you’ve raised two questions. First, what is h
Garden & Gun3 min read
Justice at Last
The murders occurred in the 1960s, the victims ranging from an eleven-year-old Alabama girl finishing her Sunday school lesson to Mississippi’s most valiant voting-rights activist. The killers, however, didn’t face justice until the 1990s and later.
Garden & Gun3 min readRegional & Ethnic
Mudbug Love
Bill Briand, whose father ran hospitals for the U.S. Navy, grew up with the kind of experiences only children of military families understand. Don’t expect the other kids on the base to make friends with you, because they know they’ll be leaving soon
Garden & Gun3 min read
Southern Whiskey, Scottish Brogue
I was very naive as to what the business entailed,” Gareth Moore says. “When I first went to the distillery, I was like, ‘Um, where’s the on button?’” Moore is the CEO of Virginia Distillery Co., which makes American single-malt whiskey in the foothi
Garden & Gun2 min readCooking, Food & Wine
Golden Touch
AGE: 50 HOME BASE: Asheville, North Carolina KNOWN FOR: His work as a chef, restaurateur, and spice dealer. Born in London and raised in India, Irani opened his first restaurant, Chai Pani, in Asheville in 2009, and launched Spicewalla in 2017 to sup
Garden & Gun2 min readRegional & Ethnic
Heads Above The Rest
Rebecca Wilcomb can’t recall her first bite of radicchio. “It’s like saying, ‘Do you remember the first time you had pasta?’ I can’t. It has just always been there,” says the executive chef of Gianna in New Orleans. Wilcomb has traveled to her grandp
Garden & Gun4 min read
South by South America
We make arepas like they make in the city of Maracaibo,” Elimar Mendoza says, referring to the Venezuelan port and oil center. A college student, Mendoza works the counter and makes tres leches cake at Patacón Latin Cuisine, a Venezuelan restaurant o
Garden & Gun4 min read
Fair Feathered Friends
Some people raise chickens as a hobby; some raise them for food. Paul Bradshaw raises chickens to champion conservation. Or as he puts it, “to protect poultry genetics as a critical hedge against rapid environmental change.” As a result, his hundred-
Garden & Gun3 min read
Tabasco’s Other Treasures
Florence Crowder knows they’re in here somewhere. Somewhere among the thousands of camellias on Avery Island, Louisiana—also the home base of the hot sauce giant Tabasco—have got to be the two flowers she’s been seeking for a decade. The Duchess Deca
Garden & Gun6 min readMedical
Leaps and Bounds
When my dog walks these days, he shuffles stiffly because of the arthritis that forces him to take medication twice a day. He can’t hear out of his right ear, and his left isn’t much better after a series of ear infections and hematomas a couple of y
Garden & Gun7 min read
The Southern Screen
When I was growing up, during those long desert years before I looked old enough to sneak into bars, movies were the thing. No, they were everything. First, there was the drive-in on the highway and the Paramount downtown, which had once been the loc
Garden & Gun6 min read
Charleston By The Dish
THERE’S LATELY BEEN MUCH HAND-WRINGING in Charleston over the state of the local restaurant scene, which a decade or so ago scaled previously unimaginable heights: As openings and accolades mounted, trusted writerly types with epicurean chops called
Garden & Gun4 min read
The Home Stretch
TWO DECADES AGO, THE LATE CHARLESTON matriarch and consummate storyteller Emily Whaley decided to publish a small book of horticultural advice. The book’s scope quickly expanded, weaving together tales of rural life, foxhunting, ballroom dancing, bri
Garden & Gun4 min read
Charleston’s Wild Side
WHETHER YOU’RE HAVING A BEER AT SALTY Mike’s or standing in line at the Harris Teeter, there’s a good chance you’ll hear somebody talking about the trout bite or how the surf ’s looking at Folly Beach. That’s because the tidal creeks and rivers, spar
Garden & Gun4 min readFashion
Boutique Finds
WALK DOWN KING STREET ON A GIVEN SATUR- day (or for that matter, the odd Tuesday afternoon), and you’ll be transported along its handsome blue-stone sidewalks amid a polite—you’re in Charleston, after all—but persistent stream of shoppers. Louis Vuit
Garden & Gun3 min read
Creative Pursuits
NOT LONG AFTER ITS FOUNDING IN 1670, Charleston was already a destination for artists and art seekers. In the 1700s, the seaport was the first place in America where artists painted masterful portrait miniatures on thin slices of ivory—mementos kept
Garden & Gun8 min read
Chesapeake Dawn
BETWEEN A GREENHEAD’S FEEDING CHUCKLE and the hailing call of a hen mallard, Garrett Mullaney muses about the future of waterfowl hunting in America. The twenty-seven-year-old software sales executive is in the middle of a conversation about raising
Garden & Gun12 min read
Jericho Rising
It’s 9:00 p.m. and the poet Jericho Brown is singing Whitney Houston in a crowded bistro. “Ohhhhh, I wanna dance with somebody,” he croons. “I wanna feel the heat!” Brown grins, shimmies in his seat, takes a messy bite of his hamburger. Asked if he
Garden & Gun10 min readCooking, Food & Wine
The Ultimate Guide To Grits
“If I don’t love you, baby / Grits ain’t grocery,” quipped Little Milton in his famous 1969 song. We can assume that the Mississippi bluesman did, in fact, love his baby, because we know that grits are groceries—and so much more. Grits have sustained
Garden & Gun1 min readRegional & Ethnic
Cheese Grits Cakes
Yield: 8 servings Tommy DiGiovanni, the chef de cuisine at Arnaud’s in New Orleans, makes grits cakes with yellow stone-ground grits baked with cheese and cut into disks. “Think of the grits cake kind of like a biscuit,” DiGiovanni says, “and top i
Garden & Gun1 min readRegional & Ethnic
Shrimp And Grits
Yield: 4 servings Raised on Edisto Island, South Carolina, the author Theresa Jenkins Hilliard learned to make shrimp and grits from her grandmother, whom she honored in the cookbook Mama Doonk’s Gullah Recipes. “She used basic seasonings, but she
Garden & Gun6 min read
Field Studies
Whether you’re an armchair adventurer who’s long dreamed of casting a tight loop into a mountain stream or a lifelong wing shooter looking to fix a bad habit, there’s an expert who’s ready to help. Study under one of the world’s finest bamboo-fly-rod
Garden & Gun5 min read
Soda Shop Time Machine
I’m having lunch with my sixteen-year-old son on a sunny afternoon on Main Street in Davidson, North Carolina. The place we’ve chosen—the Soda Shop—occupies a holy spot in our family legend. It’s the site of the blind date in 1967 between my father,
Garden & Gun12 min read
The Southern Agenda
As a young girl growing up four blocks from New Orleans’ St. Charles Avenue, Zenia Smith had no idea the whole world didn’t celebrate Mardi Gras; she didn’t know then that even a dozen miles away in New Orleans East, streets weren’t loud with merryma
Garden & Gun1 min read
South And The City
In New York City this March, at the recently reopened Museum of Modern Art, see an exhibition of the works of Donald Judd, the minimalist sculptor who made Marfa, Texas, his playground. At the Museum of Food and Drink in Brooklyn, G&G contributing ed
Garden & Gun3 min read
Dance Fever?
I am no great shakes as a dancer. Sure, I’ve been known to get out there amongst ’em, sometimes at great length, but only under three conditions: (1) It’s with a woman. I had the chance to partner with a man in a Hollywood movie. (Check out the costu

Garden & Gun

More Issues From Garden & Gun