Brooklyn band The Subjects are chronicling their culinary adventures for PAPER as they tour the country. Week one finds them eating cole slaw-slathered sandwiches in Pittsburgh, tacos in Chicago, and vegetarian home cooking in Bloomington, Indiana. Dig in!
Oct. 3, Boston, MA:
Sometimes when you play an out-of-town show, one of the local bands like The Thick Shakes will offer to put you up for the night. And sometimes they'll cook you dinner. And sometimes they'll offer you a cold beer and make you fresh pasta from scratch and you'll all sit around eating and telling stories until 5 in the morning. And then sometimes, when you wake up, they'll be cooking home-spiced bacon and hash browns and have home-made strawberry jam that you can spread on their home-baked bread.
Oct. 5, Pittsburgh, PA:
There are a lot of reasons to stop in Pittsburgh on tour. The music scene is great, the rivers and bridges are beautiful, and the food is literally heart-seizing. Our friend Matt is our usual host, and we insisted on returning to Primanti Brothers (46 18th St., Pittsburgh, PA,). This place puts fries and coleslaw on their sandwiches, and serves them on wax paper. These artery-clogging sandwiches are so good, that once you're done, you want another. Despite your body going into shock.
We followed up the sandwich with ice cream at Klavon's (2801 Penn Ave., Pittsburgh, PA,), an old-fashioned drug store that serves egg creams and looks like the candy shop in the "Candy Man" scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. We took the opportunity to use their penny scale to track our progress. So far, Matty Pickles is in the lead.
Oct. 6, Bloomington, IN:
We met The Delicious on our first tour through the Midwest, and now each time we pass through we use playing a show in Bloomington as an excuse to have a huge party at their house and cook an enormous amount of vegetarian food. After our show, we set out to do just that. Their drummer Ben (our usual chef) was out of town so Jimmy and Dave took over cooking duties. The menu included a hearty orecchiette with red onions, hot peppers, stewed tomatoes, and cheese, accompanied by copious amounts of High Life in camouflage cans.
Oct. 7, more Bloomington, IN!
Breakfast in Bloomington means one thing -- The Runcible Spoon (412 E. 6th St., Bloomington, IN). The name is a reference to a nonsense word created by Edward Lear in The Owl and the Pussycat. This place serves one of the only acceptable corned-beef hashes in the world, and is decorated like a 19th-Century children’s novel. It opened in 1976 in an old house, and is a sinewy maze of rooms and staircases. Its fantasy décor continues in the bathroom, where an old bathtub-turned-aquarium gives you the feeling that you’re not alone.
Oct. 8, Chicago, IL:
After playing the Empty Bottle on Thursday night, the plan was to stay up all night and watch the NASA rocket crash into the moon on Friday morning at the Planetarium. In between dodging the freezing rain, we ducked into the late-night Mexican restaurant Arturo's (2001 N Western Ave, Chicago, IL) and ate pork lomo and el pastor tacos under neon jukebox lights with Jesse of Flameshovel Records. At this point, Joe crumbled under the weight of his taco platter and fell by the wayside, leaving Pickles, Jesse, and Dave to continue the moon mission. The suspense was almost palpable as we walked around in the rain trying to find the planetarium at 5:45 a.m. We asked a couple of fishermen by the lake and eventually found the place (and ourselves in a really bizarre situation). I think it’s safe to say that we were the only people who were there after staying up all night, as it was mostly families and science students, but we were welcomed nonetheless. The NASA broadcast was projected on the planetarium screen, and then we were given moon pies on our way out to the bus. We slept at Jesse’s for about an hour and then hit the road for Lincoln.
Oct. 9, Lincoln, NE
After our first week of heavy eating, we realized that we probably should sneak in a bit of cardio -- very important if we want to keep eating like this for the next three weeks. Luckily, the Bourbon Theater green room had some outstanding pieces of Nintendo history, including the NES Power Pad. We engaged in a fierce Olympic competition that found Joe victorious and left Jimmy with an asthma attack. We followed this up immediately with burritos.
Next week we'll be in Boise, Seattle, Portland, Eugene and San Francisco, so if you have any dining suggestions, please post them in the comment box below!
