Peanuts and Cracker Jacks: Enjoying Comfort at Dickey-Stephens Park

Last night, I had the rare opportunity to enjoy one of the luxury suites at Dickey-Stephens Park, home of the Arkansas Travelers. I should preface this with the following statement: I am not a baseball fan. I’m not really a sports fan in general, and of the sports that I can watch, baseball seems to slip further and further down that list. But this isn’t about baseball or sports in general. This is about living the fancy life.

Dickey-Stephens Park sits right along the Arkansas River, nestled next to the bridge that links Highway 67 between Little Rock and North Little Rock. It opened in 2007, and feels nicely maintained for a seven-year-old facility. They go for a birth of baseball aesthetic, with mostly brick interiors and signs with Copperplate Gothic Bold typeface. It’s not a large park, so there aren’t really any bad places to sit. Everybody gets a decent view of the action. And there’s no shortage of food stands, so it’s unlikely you’ll go hungry. Broke, maybe, but not hungry.

Last night was Museum of Discovery Night (my in to the game in the first place) as well as Bring Your Dog to the Park night, so they appear fairly lax with bringing animals in if only for an evening. Unfortunately, we had no dog to bring, and those who did have dogs who were also enjoying the “suite” life (shoot me now) could not bring dogs into the luxury suites. It was understandable, however, as the room was certainly too small for all 24 of us two-leggers to stay in at once. There was also the concern of dogs tearing up the leather couch, the centerpiece of the room.

We got there a few minutes late, but there was plenty of food and drink left. A mini fridge under a counter secreted shelves of beer, soda, and bottled water. Given that the heat and humidity lately have been oppressive, I needed cold liquid nourishment. I needed a beer. At the time, I was given the choice of Bud Light, Michelob Ultra, and Summit IPA. I wasn’t quite ready for an IPA, and I refuse all things Bud, so I went with a Michelob. Their cans have apparently been redesigned to the dimensions of a Red Bull can: slender, towering over their 12 oz rivals. Still tastes like the same old Michelob.

Our menu was simple, but in the best way: hamburgers, hot dogs, baked beans, potato chips, and potato salad. It was everything you could want for a cookout on a hot summer day. The food was provided by the park itself, so these weren’t gourmet burgers or anything of the like, but they were pretty good. And best of all, they were free.

A flatscreen TV was mounted in the corner of the room, tuned to a Cardinals game for those who weren’t content enough watching the minor league game outside live. It was oddly comforting to hear the others here admit to be Cards fans, not because I myself am one, but because so many back home are. Home felt closer in the room of strangers.

In spite of the horrid humidity, we sat outside with the rest of the group. I did my best to pay attention to the game, but in truth I spent most of the time taking in the sights and sounds and a Summit IPA and Stella Artois. 

Burger Lab: Experiment #1

This past week, I had a burger craving. I didn't want a fast food burger, and I didn't want to put up the scratch for a burger at one of the classier joints here in town, so I decided to Build-A-Burger. Kroger is just a five minute walk from our apartment, so I took a trip to pick up a few of the necessary items. I stuck to the basics: Kroger-brand hamburger buns, 73% lean ground beef, and Kraft Deluxe American singles.

I considered truly making this an experiment, grabbing what spices and ingredients I could find in our tiny kitchen and infusing it with the ground beef. I'd made Ernest Hemingway's manburger a few months back, but the recipe called for all things exotic in the land of the burger like red wine and relish. But, like all good experiments, I needed a control group first. I went completely plain.

No salt, no pepper. Nothing at all in the burger patty except the meat itself. I formed three patties out of the one pound of hamburger meat. Two I wrapped in parchment paper and placed in Ziploc bags in the freezer. The third was mine that day.

Spraying down a thin layer of canola oil on a skillet, I let it heat at medium-high. As soon as I dropped the uncooked meat onto the skillet, the sizzle let me know I was in business. Four minutes seemed an ample time to let it cook on one side. Then I remembered the inherent problem with using the skillet: the hot splash of grease that bursts forth like a small stinging fountain. Spots of sepia dotted the white surface of the stove, forming a silhouette around the pan. I cleaned as I went, unable to cover it because there was no lid for the skillet. I was focused--determined to cook a basic burger.

Four minutes up and I flipped the burger with difficulty. My spatula did not slide under the burger as easily as I had imagined it would, so it pushed it up to the edge. Pangs of panic shot through me as I dreaded pushing the half-cooked patty onto the stove, causing further mess and inconvenience. Finally, I gritted my teeth and used my free hand to negotiate the patty onto my spatula, hot needles poking at my skin.

Four more minutes. Almost home. The outside was black and brown, but mostly black from the skillet. I wondered if it wasn't as cooked as I had hoped. I wondered if I'd be missing a day or two of work because of a burger blunder. What joy.

Three minutes in and I took a slice of cheese I had at the ready and blanketed the burger's naked surface in processed yellow. Heat made the slice wrap itself tighter across the surface, almost to the point where the four corners touched the pan. By that point, the final minute passed and it was time to enjoy the product of my labors. Bun opened, I lay the burger down. Juices ran down the bottom half of the bun. The top half set itself on top like it was destined to stay there. I dug in.

The charred black from the skillet made the burger crunchy but not inedible. I saw that the burger was pink but reasonably cooked, so it was unlikely to cause me much grief in the following days. Overall, I was satisfied. I'm easy to please when it comes to my burgers. But there is more to be done in burger science, a frontier not yet fully discovered.

Wondering About Wiz: A Review of Todd English P.U.B. in Birmingham, AL

Todd English P.U.B. in Birmingham, AL, is attached to a Westin Hotel, which is in turn attached to a Sheraton (which we stayed at). A whole cluster of city blocks are connected by veins of skywalks, no doubt to shelter travelers from the sweltering summer sun of the American South. Because we refused to expose ourselves to the heat after a productive day of sightseeing and museum meandering, we had few choices: Casey’s Sports Bar and Grill, the Atrium Café, or Todd English P.U.B. Casey’s looked hopelessly bland and the Atrium Café looked rich for our blood. So, we navigated the labyrinthine corridors that led from our hotel room on the 15th floor of the Birmingham Sheraton to the very trendy Todd English P.U.B adjacent to the Westin’s lobby.

My first impression of the P.U.B was tainted by the presence of what I imagined was a wedding rehearsal dinner—tables guarded by wine glasses, guests in business casual attire, the nervous atmosphere of a time before the knot gets tied. It elevates a location to a level of sophistication it otherwise doesn’t enjoy. When we returned the next day to dine, I saw behind the curtain.

Now you might notice that not only pub an acronym. If your next question is "Why?", take comfort in knowing that much of this review will be spent on meditating that very question with regards to the aesthetic and philosophy of the restaurant itself. First thing’s first, though: let’s talk about that name.

"Todd English P.U.B." is no doubt a play on the phrase "English pub." But it’s taken a step further. No longer is pub just a word, but now it’s an acronym that stands for Public Urban Bar. Now, any English major or anglophile worth their salt can tell you that pub is a shortening of the term public house. Bar here now just seems redundant since a bar tends to be a necessary factor in a pub setting. Urban, it seems, is unexplainable. I suppose it is located in an urban environment, but there isn’t anything about this place that is distinctly urban. Oh wait. The servers wore T-shirts. Maybe that was the urban element.

The interior decorating doesn’t shout urban, unless urban can be interpreted as an American imagining of an idyllic pub in the United Kingdom. It doesn’t have to be England. It could be Scotland. Hell, why not Ireland? We have a couple of fake dartboards painted on sheets of metal that appear to have dents on them. That’s like an English pub, right? They do darts. Or how about our placemats? We put a bunch of quotes because we’re intellectual, too. We printed them in old-looking typefaces because that’s what an English pub’s printed quotes would look like: fresh off the Gutenberg printing press.

I'm not a stickler on service. You can insult my lineage back to medieval Poland and if you give me good food, I'll still give you a tip. But the service that evening in Todd English P.U.B. was, to borrow very English, very trendy terms, shite and bollocks. After we were sat, we waited a good while before we were asked for our drink orders. In the interim, we subsisted on the complimentary cup of popcorn that the hotel compound seemed hellbent on serving to everyone and Sam left to get ibuprofen from the lobby of the Westin. She took said ibuprofen and returned in time to join me in a game of "Who's Our Server?" in which we craned our necks to figure out who the culprit was. Waiters and waitresses all buzzed by our table avoiding eye contact. It was like Clue except ideally we'd be fed in the end and not dead.

The menu was a collection of modernized pub favorites--burgers, tacos, et cetera--but given that special Todd English touch. What that Todd English touch is I can't quite tell you except pretentiously presented bland food boldly branded with TE before the title. Feeling some Mexican food? Try our TE Tacos. What makes the TE Tacos? They have "wiz." Cheese Whiz but not all share the wiz that makes the TE Tacos oh so TE. A few items are simply branded with Todd's name, like "Todd's Fish & Chips." It's got aioli, just like the TE Tacos, so maybe I'm getting somewhere.

I'm a simple man with simple tastes, so I forewent anything with Todd or TE attached to its name. I ordered the “Pub Burger,” which surprisingly wasn’t the “P.U.B. Burger” in a rare show of restraint for the establishment. An old standard, the fanciest things about it were its “brioche bun” and “fatty fries” (or potato wedges, as we plebes call them). The server asked me if I wanted cheese or bacon. I voted both, with a choice of cheddar. When our food arrived (timely, surprisingly enough), I was presented with my burger atop not a plate but a wooden paddle shaped like a cricket bat with a piece of parchment paper to cover the surface. Cricket bats, as you might be aware, are narrow, not the optimal space to eat anything on at all. Fatty fries came in a small metal pail like one might put peanuts in. The burger was underwhelming, even more so given its $12 price tag. Never before had I been so bored with a burger with bacon on it. I found myself getting distracted by the toppings, thinking that maybe they were to blame for the burger’s poor performance. In truth, it was that “8oz. all beef patty” itself. What happened? I whispered to the burger before I finished it. Expectedly, I received no response.