NOVEMBER 2018 71THERE’S A CERTAIN DICKENSIAN grandeur
to Ed Lee’s style of storytelling. here’s the
one about scaling the steam machine at
the garment factory where his mother
worked, his playground as a kid in 1980s
New York City. The one about the smell of the hogs
drifting off the JBS Swift kill floor on those hot, windless
days in Louisville, Kentucky. he saleswoman who took
pity on a know-nothing kid and let him pay off his first
bow tie in installments. hose five months he spent
shoveling elephant dung for the circus. Turns out when
you’re trapped in a car for two days with a jug of
moonshine, a case of sorghum syrup, two barrels of soy
sauce, your mother, and a journalist, there’s a lot of time
for recollection.
Soon Ja Lee (that’s Mrs. Lee to you and me) has the same
storytelling gene. When I ask what her son was like as a
baby, she shares an elaborate dream she had just before
he was conceived—a lake, a three-headed dragon, a
prophecy. She and her husband came to the U.S. from
Seoul in 1970; they settled in Canarsie, Brooklyn, and into
a life of hard work familiar to many immigrant families—at
various times, there was the garment factory, a diner, a
dry cleaner, a travel agency. Ed and his sister didn’t see a
lot of their mom growing up, and as the chef’s star rose
in the restaurant world, time he might have spent with
her as an adult started to slip away, too.
hese days Ed spends a lot of time in the car as he travels
between his restaurants MilkWood and 610 Magnolia in
Louisville and Succotash in Washington, D.C. And so, on
a muggy July day, Mrs. Lee and I boarded a plane to
Louisville to take the drive with him, in a rented supersize
Denali, through the hills of Eastern Kentucky, the kudzu-
choked trails of Appalachia, and the foggy stretches of the
Shenandoah Valley.
But first, we needed to see a man about a barrel. Matt
Jamie ages his own soy sauce in spent whiskey casks at
Bourbon Barrel Foods in the Butchertown Market, and
the pungent, smoky results are a pantry staple at Ed’s
restaurants. “I like when people take a tradition and bendT
TASTEMAKER
it to their will,” Ed says. “The world is split between
preservationists and innovators. One needs the other to
continue the dialogue.” Inside, he crouches by a barrel
and snaps off one of the blackish spears seeping through
the staves. “his is my favorite thing. It’s like a soy sauce
icicle,” he says, offering a piece to Mrs. Lee. (“Too salty.”)
We haul two barrels into the car to mule to D.C. and take
off, the soy sloshing precariously in the way-back seat.
here’s no music on this ride—Ed stopped buying tunes
around the time the rest of the world stopped buying CDs.
So instead, we talk about how the Brooklyn-raised son of
Korean immigrants with a past that includes bartending
at an S and M nightclub could possibly wind up leading
the culinary conversation in Kentucky. “It’s a border state.
It has something of an identity crisis, and I function well
in that,” he says. “I like things that are in flux—that exist
in a gray area.” We get pulled over for going 80 mph in a
70 mph zone, but the cop lets us off with a warning. “Can’t
catch all the fish, so he just catches one,” says Mrs. Lee.
We pay a visit to Danny Townsend, a fifth-generation
sorghum farmer in Jeffersonville, Kentucky, who takes us
on a bumpy pickup ride through the tall grass. Mrs. Lee
hasn’t seen sorghum before, so Townsend bends a stalk
and twists it, letting the sweet green nectar dribble into
her palm. She takes a stalk for the road.
here’s another first for Mrs. Lee two hours south in
Corbin, Kentucky: fried okra. We taste it together at he
Wrigley, a taproom and restaurant from Kristin Smith,
Ed’s pal, a sixth-generation farmer and missionary turned
chef. It’s too crispy on the outside and too juicy on the
inside according to Mrs. Lee, but Smith rolls with it and
shaves us a few wispy slices of her 8-month-cured ham.
She serves us stack cake bound with sticky apple butter
and tells us a sweet story about the regional dish: Poor
families in Appalachia would each contribute one layer
on special occasions. We hold that story in our hearts for
the three hours it takes to find Travis Milton.
“hat story is bullshit,” Milton tells us after we arrive
at his restaurant, Milton’s, in St. Paul, Virginia. Milton
grew up near this small coal-mining town in the shadowe Long Road Home
Soy sauce, stack cake, and a
three-headed dragon—just a few
of the mile markers on a road trip
with chef Ed Lee and his mom
By Jordana Rothman
photography by JASON VARNEY