Amena Brown:
Welcome back to another new episode of HER with Amena Brown. And, I am back here in the living room with Matt Owen, who is my husband and also my podcast producer, as well, so.
Matt Owen:
He is honored to be on HER.
Amena Brown:
That's right.
Matt Owen:
So I enter this space very tentatively.
Amena Brown:
Okay.
Matt Owen:
Because this is her space.
Amena Brown:
Yeah.
Matt Owen:
It's not his space.
Amena Brown:
That's right. It's very rare that there is a male voice here. So we welcome you here, even though you are kind of a quasi member of the living room, because you help everything sound good here.
Matt Owen:
I can take some of the bass out of my voice.
Amena Brown:
I think your voice is fine as it is, but I think you have already sort of been a little member here with us. You have just been more of a quiet member, because you've been here making sure that all of the guests sound great. That all of the music sounds great. So it's nice to get to hear from you on this side of the mic.
Matt Owen:
Happy to play a part. And it's also nice to be able to look at your face. Usually if we're recording, either your back is to me, or my back is to you.
Amena Brown:
That's true.
Matt Owen:
And so, a little eye contact. Hey, eyes.
Amena Brown:
That's true, we get to do a little flirtation here. Sorry.
Matt Owen:
Little brown eyes. Okay.
Amena Brown:
That's for a different podcast, when we do our OnlyFans.
Matt Owen:
Oh.
Amena Brown:
We'll let y'all know about that.
Matt Owen:
We'll do a podcast called Theirs.
Amena Brown:
Boy, how would y'all feel if we had an OnlyFans for real? If you listening to this, DM me and tell me if we had an OnlyFans, would you follow us? But some of y'all probably don't want to admit that you're on OnlyFans anyway. So that's okay. That's all right. You can just, whatever anonymous way you want to communicate.
Matt Owen:
We were in a meeting one time and someone was telling me about some service that we should have been on for invoicing. And I don't remember what it was, but when I was typing it into my phone, autocorrect changed it. It was something close enough.
Amena Brown:
Close enough to OnlyFans.
Matt Owen:
OnlyFans. And I typed it in and the site comes up while you're sitting in this meeting, you're looking down. You're like, "I don't have a, that's not, I was trying to type in the."
Amena Brown:
Please. Yikes. It's just difficult. Okay. It's difficult. So we are talking about our favorite food cities from the road. We talked about Chicago last episode. So New Yorkers, I would not leave you hanging out there.
You are also one. I really have to stop for a moment and speak about New York, because I just feel that of all the cities I've traveled to, New York and I have a very special love affair. It is just a city that I have always loved. I traveled there by myself before Matt and I were dating, almost moved there many times in my life. So that, New York is my mojo city. I love to be there at any time. Anytime there's an excuse to be there, near there, close to there. I'm trying to be in New York. So shout out to my New Yorkers listening.
Matt Owen:
Makes sense.
Amena Brown:
Let us discuss New York as a food city. Listen, I really feel, I know there's a lot of conversation around Chicago pizza versus New York Pizza. For me, it's not really a versus, because I just feel like we are talking about two very different things and it feels strange to me to compare them. Either city I'm in, I'm going to eat that pizza, is the thing. So I'm going eat Chicago pizza in Chicago, and when I'm in New York, I'm not going to be like, "Why New York Pizza ain't Chicago Pizza?" I'm going to eat New York pizza.
Matt Owen:
It's like trap music and boom bap. Both in the genre of hip hop, but two whole different types of music.
Amena Brown:
Very different, very different. Different uses, just different everything. So I want to give a shout-out to that New York slice. I want to give a shout-out to being able to fold that pizza up in your hand. I want to give a shout-out to those flimsy paper plates that the pizza slice typically, comes on.
Matt Owen:
Yeah, grease comes through.
Amena Brown:
Man. Really, that's one of my favorite things about New York. Because Matt and I are true to form, hip hop heads musically, but also just the culture generally. Definitely had to go to Junior's and get that cheesecake. Shout out to making the band.
Matt Owen:
We didn't walk there.
Amena Brown:
No, we did not.
Matt Owen:
We took the train.
Amena Brown:
We did not walk to Junior's. But I did feel, shout-out to dial on, dial on, dial on, that we needed to have that cheesecake. And Junior's, I mean, I'm not sure why Puff wanted those kids to walk over there. I'm not sure that's why, that's the way they needed to show they were hardworking. But when we took our cab ride to Junior's, that cheesecake was delicious.
Matt Owen:
It sure was.
Amena Brown:
I love it.
Matt Owen:
Speaking of dial on, dial on, dial on, that's kind of interesting moment. You know what I mean? That's a phrase I use pretty regularly. And as I get older, now, I'm starting to wonder how many times I'm making that reference to something. Yeah. My top five, dial on, dial on, dial on.
Amena Brown:
Dial on, dial on, dial on.
Matt Owen:
I'm saying that to somebody and they just looking at me. I wonder if they even get it.
Amena Brown:
I have certainly made reference to, I have been in meetings, in various conversations and said, I mean, it's not like we about to walk to Junior's. I've said it, and now I'm like damn, I don't really know. I don't really know who there in the meeting was laughing because they assumed I was being funny, or was laughing because they actually watched Making The Band.
Matt Owen:
Yeah, Making The Band. Yeah.
Amena Brown:
On MTV. So shout out to you who remember that. If you don't though, it's a good google. It's a good google rabbit hole to go down. Making The Band as a series on MTV is, it's akin to me in a pop culture sense into what The Godfather is to film culture. Because there's certain references of The Godfather that show up in so many movies, that if you'd never seen The Godfather, you're like, "Why is everybody laughing about the horse in the bed?" And why did they say, "Sleeps with the fishes?" And why did they say, "Go to the mattresses?" It's a whole lexicon you're missing. And if you were to go down the rabbit hole of that, Making The Band, Sean Puffy Combs edition, it's some references that you'll be like, "That's why people saying, dial on, dial on, dial on."
Matt Owen:
I get it.
Amena Brown:
Why? Okay. Other than Junior's, other foods that we remember having in New York?
Matt Owen:
Oh, first of all, to me, New York is such an interesting place because you have so many different people groups from where they're from, whereas in the South, we have Southern folk.
Amena Brown:
Right? Right, right.
Matt Owen:
And so we have Southern food. And so there might be, my Mammaw might have fried chicken this way, and so that's why my family fries chicken this way. And then your family might have fried chicken that way. But really, if we're being honest, all their secret ingredient was sugar, you know what I'm saying? Be like, "I got my secret ingredient." Now, I know why they'd always kind of laugh and be like, "The secret ingredient's sugar."
Amena Brown:
And I'm like, it's definitely sugar.
Matt Owen:
They'd be like a little chuckle.
Amena Brown:
Oh my gosh.
Matt Owen:
It's everybody's secret ingredient.
Amena Brown:
So many foods. Spaghetti, fried chicken, everything. The sugar.
Matt Owen:
So it's like Southern folks found a Southern way of making Southern food. And so that's what we know down here. And then we'll get a watered down version of something by a company. We really don't have great tacos in Atlanta. I know some people fight beyond that, but being from Texas is, we know the difference. And then Texas tacos are different from California tacos. You know what I mean?
Amena Brown:
Right, right.
Matt Owen:
You learn that the hard way. But it's interesting, you can go be in New York and go to a Pakistani restaurant and you getting that food. You go to the place where they were making the duck pancakes, and you're like, "Oh." And then you might see some ducks hanging.
Amena Brown:
From the ceiling in the restaurant.
Matt Owen:
Yeah. Oh, okay. That's different. Shout-out to, what was the place where they made, was it a Pakistani Big Mac or something like that?
Amena Brown:
Oh, man. I wish I knew the name of the restaurant, but I do need to shout out Famous Fat Dave.
Matt Owen:
There we go.
Amena Brown:
Because this was a splurge of a food tour.
Matt Owen:
Worth it, do it. Book it now.
Amena Brown:
That I had wanted to go on for so many years when I was a journalist. I'm going to see if we can find the link to add to the show notes, if it even still exists online anyplace. If it doesn't, then I'll try to put the image of this on my social media so y'all can see it. But many moons ago when I was a journalist, one of my first cover stories, I believe it was for Creative Loafing Charlotte, which was Charlotte's Alt Weekly, any of you that are familiar with Alt Weeklys. Is sort of like your irreverent paper that you have in town. It's not the straight lace newspaper.
It's not your conventional media. It's the Alt Weekly, which means it covers more art stuff. It covers things that maybe your regular type of newspaper or media outlet would miss. So back in the day for Charlotte, that was Creative Loafing Charlotte, and I knew the editor in chief there, shout-out to Carlton Hargrove, actually. And he was like, "Hey, we just had a writer not be able to finish this story." He was like, "Can you finish this cover story?" And it's about asking different folks from different cities, their recommendations of stuff to do in that city.
So basically, the story, the sources and everything were already there. I just had to interview them. And Famous Fat Dave was the person that I had to interview for New York. And if you're not familiar with Famous Fat Dave, he has one of those classic checker cabs that he owns, actually. One of the vintage ones. So you can literally do this tour in a cab or you can do a walking tour. And I'd always wanted to do one. And the other times that Matt and I had been to New York, we didn't have time. Well, at a certain point, we had gotten booked in Philly to support the project of our artist friend, Red Baron. He was releasing some work, and so we went there to support him and we were like, "We are three hours from New York? Should we? Yes." So we went ahead, took a train, stayed in Brooklyn, which was amazing. And while we were there, we were like, "We're doing this with Famous Fat Dave."
Matt Owen:
Stayed in a brownstone.
Amena Brown:
Stayed in a brownstone in Brooklyn. Yo.
Matt Owen:
Every time we walked out of there, it felt like if you grew up watching the Cosby Show, it looked like what you saw when they showed the outside of the house. You're like, "Wow."
Amena Brown:
And I want to shout out to, I'm trying to find the correct name for it, y'all, because we used, at that time there was a service where you could find out people of color who were offering their homes or portions of their home for you to rent, similar to some other services you might use now. But because there were so many racist things happening with some of those other services, we used one where we could actually support this. So the one that we used, it was called Noirbnb at that time. So this Black woman owned a brownstone and she had converted the basement of the brownstone into a little mini kind of apartment thing where people could come and stay. And so that's where we stayed, which was fabulous. I mean, she had a beautiful courtyard that you could walk out.
Matt Owen:
It was gorgeous.
Amena Brown:
On the basement level, I mean, it was fantastic. So we stayed there. We decided on the walking tour because I kind of felt like as much food as you was going to eat with Famous Fat Dave on this tour, kind of felt like walking, at least you're burning something.
Matt Owen:
Something. And we were walking fast. It was, it did the thing. Yeah, for sure.
Amena Brown:
So he took us to a Pakistani restaurant to have their version of a Big Mac. Which was amazing.
Matt Owen:
Incredible.
Amena Brown:
We ate Japanese food, we had Chinese food. We went through Chinatown and Little Italy. I mean, we ended the tour having this wonderful cannoli. We had, oh, a slice of pizza. So we are not getting paid in any way to share this information with you. But I'm telling you, if you want to go to New York and do a food splurge for any of my foodies listening, Famous Fat Dave got you.
Matt Owen:
You got to do it. It's a must.
Amena Brown:
It was fantastic. And getting a chance to see all of these different areas of New York, different neighborhoods and stuff like that. That's one thing I love about New York that's just different from a lot of cities, the different boroughs. And even inside the boroughs, the different areas where there are different cultures and people living, and their food traditions. Love to see it. That's one of my favorite things about New York.
I feel like all my other things about New York are not food related now, because I'm like, "And I love just walking down the street and seeing all the people, even though I go slow because I'm from the South."
Matt Owen:
But it is, the food goes with the neighborhood though. You know what mean? Whatever part of town you're in, there are certain specific things that are there. It's different. It made me also love the side of Atlanta that we live in, because the side of Atlanta that we live in, we live ITP. For those of you not from Atlanta, that's inside the perimeter. There's 285 that goes around ATL. And there's always, long as I've been Atlanta, there's always a thing, whether you're ITP or OTP, and people argue about, who's the real Atlanta? And then now we're arguing about is old Atlanta, the real Atlanta? Well, which old Atlanta are you?
So now there's so many different iterations of, but it makes me love the side of town that we live on because it's still mom and pop restaurants. It's still small. You're not going to find multiples of these out there. We still have some of that thing that's not insert whatever, when they're building the suburban town, and they're going to put this restaurant beside this restaurant, beside this super cuts, beside this whatever. Walmart, Target, whatever. So it was really cool seeing all these types of restaurants, eating the, was it? The Chechoan?
Amena Brown:
Oh, the Cacio e Pepe?
Matt Owen:
Yeah. I don't know how to say it.
Amena Brown:
I think it's Cacio e Pepe.
Matt Owen:
Is it Cacio, is it Checho?
Amena Brown:
It's Cacio e Pepe. Anyways, it caught me.
Matt Owen:
Either way. That Pepe was delicious.
Amena Brown:
It catches me. The Pepe catches me every time. Yes, I do remember, that was a part of our food tour.
Matt Owen:
It was amazing.
Amena Brown:
And we were experiencing that dish eaten out of ... Not eaten out of, but made out of a wheel of cheese. So those of you that are familiar with this dish know what I'm talking about. It's pretty much pasta, cheese and pepper. But this particular restaurant, the Famous Fat Dave took us to, they would take the pasta and swirl it around in the middle of this wheel of cheese and then put the fresh cracked pepper.
Matt Owen:
The Lord's work.
Amena Brown:
I was going to give a special shout out to the pasta in New York because that pasta was amazing. I went there for my 30th birthday, and my best friend Adrienne and I went to New York. And she actually just text me. I guess it sent her memories of her having emailed me or messaged me, to tell me that she had booked her ticket. Because we were like this month, all those years ago, she had booked her ticket for us to go for my birthday in May for our 30th.
And we went to see a Broadway play, went to see Fela Kuti. We went to see Fela, which was about Fela Kuti, which was on Broadway at that time. And we left there and just happened to find this little Italian restaurant in New York, not far from where the play had been. And it was very small. Only 12 people could sit inside the restaurant. It had a long table and that's it. And we sat there and ordered this pasta, that was some of the most amazing pasta I've ever had in my life.
So I think that's the other interesting thing about New York, kind of similar to what you were saying, is when you go to a city like Dallas for example, everything's big. The restaurants sometimes have three floors and 400 people can fit inside the restaurant. But to be in a city like New York, which doesn't have massive amounts of land available like that, so there's a lot more little small hole in the wall, small spots like that, where you could go in a restaurant and eat that type of pasta. Or go in a restaurant that can only seat 16 people, and you can eat sushi there.
Matt Owen:
Go in that bodega and get it, yeah.
Amena Brown:
Right. I also want to shout out to Chinese food in New York, because let me tell y'all how I had to learn my lesson. I went to New York once without Matt for a business meeting and I was there. New York for me is an introvert's dream, because it's somehow you can walk around this city that's very busy and full of people, but no one talks to you.
It's just, it's a perfect place to be in your head, but also not be alone because there's all these people around. So I'm a very much a Yelp person. I trust the stars on Yelp. So I found this Chinese restaurant and went by there, ordered myself a noodle dish, and ordered myself some vegetables to go with it. But let me tell y'all how the chefs in New York are not playing games. They were not. This particular restaurant I went to, they were not about serving Americanized Chinese food. Whatever, we grew up going to our Americanized Chinese restaurants where the chefs there were like, "We know these Americans ain't going to eat the Chinese food that's really like, that we know from our people. So we going to throw some honey in here, and let's throw some sugar on that."
Matt Owen:
Secret ingredients.
Amena Brown:
Exactly. And help them eat this. This restaurant was serving Szechuan Chinese food. And I'm not a person that can handle huge amounts of spice anyway, but I'm going to tell y'all that I got them noodles home and it's a very wild experience. Not home, home, but hotel home. That's how Matt and I would refer to it when we were on the road.
Matt Owen:
Hotel Home.
Amena Brown:
Yeah. Sometimes we would sing that, what was that song that they redid for? There's a show that Gordon Ramsey had. Oh, Gordon Ramsey had a show called Hotel Hell and they had redone a song for the theme song where they were saying, "Hotel, Hotel Hell." So I would take that and I would say, "Hotel, Hotel Home," when we were going home.
Matt Owen:
So, I told y'all she could sing.
Amena Brown:
Bloop. So I went to Hotel Home and y'all, I've never eaten something that was the most delicious thing that I'd had, and burned me the most in every regard. It was so spicy.
Matt Owen:
In comparison to the hot chicken we had in Nashville?
Amena Brown:
It might have been spicier than that.
Matt Owen:
What was the spot? Junior's?
Amena Brown:
Prince's. Yeah, Prince's Hot Chicken.
Matt Owen:
Prince's Hot Chicken in Nashville.
Amena Brown:
It might have been spicier than that. And it was very hard on me, because sometimes a thing can be spicy but not tasty. And so then you're kind of like, "I don't really want to push myself to get through this."
Matt Owen:
Because Prince's, it hurt but I wanted to keep eating it.
Amena Brown:
It was so good. That's how that Chinese food was. Yo. And I was like, "That's on me," because I had never really been to a restaurant that wasn't Americanized Chinese food really. So yeah, it burned the hell out of everything, but it was good. So shout out to New York.
Matt Owen:
Got to pay the cost to be the boss.
Amena Brown:
Well, you have brought up Prince's and I feel we should discuss our Southeast tour that we typically took every year.
Matt Owen:
Every year.
Amena Brown:
And we never planned this y'all. But there was a period of time that Matt and I were doing a lot of youth events and a lot of college events. And that, number one, because I'm Black, made our Black History Month very busy, because a lot of the colleges would want to book me during Black History Month. And then youth events get real busy around March time, because there's a lot of spring break, camps, and different little weekend things and stuff to do. So inevitably, we would end up with a run through the South. And when I say through the South, I don't mean through New Orleans, through Atlanta, through Charlotte. I mean through all the little bitty towns in between them places. You didn't hit a major city, no place. Durham might be the closest.
Matt Owen:
Maybe.
Amena Brown:
Maybe.
Matt Owen:
You might have to drive.
Amena Brown:
Two hours from where we would've been, to get to a major city. During our Southeast tour, we took it upon ourselves to partake of the South's delicacies. A lot of that was fried food.
Matt Owen:
A lot of fried food.
Amena Brown:
There was a good bit of fried chicken. Shout out to Prince's, which is really the inventor of the hot chicken. I just want to put that out here. Prince's and Bolton's, originators and innovators of the hot chicken. I know there are some other names out there and I'm not going to say them, but y'all know them. But I'm telling you, these two Black-owned establishments indeed deserve to get their props on this.
Matt Owen:
She ain't going to say any other names on here, but I will say that every time we drive past the one in Atlanta, she gives a, "Hmm."
Amena Brown:
I'll never go in there. But anyways, y'all go to Prince's and Bolton's when y'all in Nashville and stop playing games with me. Okay. Fried catfish is something I enjoyed on our Southeast tour. You get up in through the Carolinas, the South Carolina, the North Carolina, if you're looking for a vegetable, we are not sure.
Matt Owen:
Green beans. What's important?
Amena Brown:
I ordered a vegetable medley several times in a restaurant in the Carolinas, and received what looked like the frozen veggies you can get where the-
Matt Owen:
The little small, little-
Amena Brown:
Yeah, it's like the carrots are like a cube. It's like a little cube square and the peas, in a little dish. That was the veggie.
Matt Owen:
I wish y'all could have seen how Amena cocked her head and did her face and her hands to show y'all how small the little cubes are.
Amena Brown:
It's like a little small, I'm trying to show y'all the cube is like, it's less than a baby carrot. The cube is, it would take 12 cubes to make a baby carrot is what I'm trying to tell y'all. So we don't know about where those veggies are at. If you go to a soul food spot, you going to have some collard greens there. Now it depends on the soul food spot. Them collard greens, might be a little ham hock mixed in. Might be a little smoked turkey situation. You can kind of get that. But if you go into your traditional Southern spot, not soul food, because I think there's differences in that.
Matt Owen:
There's some intersections, there's some differences.
Amena Brown:
Right, and there's some differences. But if you go to a traditional Southern spot, that catfish going to be fried to perfection. But if you were asking for a fresh vegetable, nobody knows. Nobody knows where that's at. So I wanted to, that was my time of the year where I eating.
Matt Owen:
You got some coleslaw.
Amena Brown:
Okay, we eating catfish. You know what else we going to get? Them hush puppies.
Matt Owen:
Hush puppies.
Amena Brown:
South Carolina and North Carolina got a hush puppy to give you.
Matt Owen:
Yes they do.
Amena Brown:
It's delicious. Sometimes they got a little jalapeno mixed inside the hush puppy. Sometimes there's actual corn inside the hush puppy. Either way, fried to perfection. Delicious. I want to speak a word about barbecue, which we also enjoyed.
Matt Owen:
Yes, we did.
Amena Brown:
In the Carolinas. There's some things about that Southeast tour, because we weren't really people who just ate those things all the time. Now fried chicken, we did eat all the time, whenever we wanted to.
Matt Owen:
I partake.
Amena Brown:
But we didn't really like fry catfish at home, and make hush puppies at home and stuff like that.
Matt Owen:
That was a treat on the road.
Amena Brown:
We were out there on the Southeast tour. Get it in. We about to go, get this barbecue right here. We about to get these green beans that we know got ham inside. These biscuits. That's another thing about the Southeast tour. I want to speak a word about Maple Street Biscuits, which we originally encountered in Jacksonville, Florida. And I don't even know if they have this biscuit on the menu anymore, but they used to have a biscuit that had fried chicken.
Matt Owen:
Yes, it did.
Amena Brown:
It was like a fried chicken thigh and then it had collard greens. And then it had a over easy egg.
Matt Owen:
Yes it did.
Amena Brown:
Ooh, my, my.
Matt Owen:
That thing right there. Ooh, wait.
Amena Brown:
Just thinking about that biscuit today, and I'm not going to lie to y'all. We didn't have Maple Street Biscuits in Atlanta then. So when we were in Jacksonville, we actually went there two or three times while we were there for this.
Matt Owen:
I'm going to go for a jog after this, just to make up for my past sins.
Amena Brown:
Yo. So then they brought Maple Street Biscuits to Atlanta and not me cheering, not me cheering out loud like, Maple Street. Not me giving it that y'all, like that's how good that biscuit was. So you on a Southeast run, which for us was typically somewhere between Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas. It was typically, going to be somewhere. Every now and then edge a little into Kentucky, edge a little into some parts of Tennessee. So you want to go ahead and get your barbecue, which is all going to be different, depending on where you're going there.
Matt Owen:
Whatever type of sauce you're going to get.
Amena Brown:
Right. The barbecue in North Carolina was going to be different from the barbecue you might get between Tennessee and Kentucky, because the barbecue in Memphis is going to taste different from-
Matt Owen:
They going to pull that pork different.
Amena Brown:
You got to get some ribs if you getting close to the Memphis area.
Matt Owen:
Yes, ooh.
Amena Brown:
You got to do that because you got to get the barbecue sauce right. There was a lot about the hotels and things on them Southeast runs that was hard on us. But the food was great.
Matt Owen:
Sure was. And if you were driving to, and you're trying to stay on the road, stopping off at a barbecue spot, trying to eat that barbecue. If you're going to try to eat while you're driving, that's trouble.
Amena Brown:
No, no.
Matt Owen:
But also, getting back in the car and trying to drive after not driving and eating barbecue, that's trouble.
Amena Brown:
We had to learn how to pace ourselves a little bit better regarding that. Because a lot of times, basically how the Southeast run would go is typically we might get one anchor gig. Sometimes we'd get an anchor gig that we flew to. So we might fly to someplace in Virginia and do the gig there, but then we'd have to rent a car to drive because the gig in Virginia, we could get a gig that might only be another two or three hours from there in Tennessee somewhere. And then we got a gig from Tennessee down to Alabama. Then we got a gig from Alabama to South Carolina.
So sometimes, we could have anywhere from four days to a 10-day run on the road, where it depends on how the dates were set up. You're not all in the same place. So it's not like you can buy eggs and things at the grocery store and hope that's all going to last you. You really had to eat out a lot in order to handle the schedule. But I enjoyed that run. I enjoyed every hush puppy and biscuit. I want to give a shout-out to the sweet tea that was readily available, literally at every restaurant you went to. Not just Southern food restaurants and not just soul food. Every place. Every place of the South, you could get sweet tea any time of day.
Matt Owen:
See, I just grew up, that tea, sweet tea. All tea was sweet. Why would you not? That make no sense.
Amena Brown:
Yeah. That was hard on me when we would go back into Texas and some places in the Midwest, and we would be like, "Can we get some sweet tea?" And they would be like, "We can get you tea and here's sugar." I'd be like, "Uh-huh, no, that's not what we talking about. Uh-huh. That's not sweet tea. Get out of here."
Matt Owen:
When I first moved to Dallas, ordered some sweet tea, they talking about sugar on the table.
Amena Brown:
No, I don't do that.
Matt Owen:
I'm like, "Well, that's why I came here. I didn't, you want me to fry my burger too? You want me to drop the fry basket for you? I mean, what else? That's why I came to you, partner. I came to you, because I don't want to make it."
Amena Brown:
No.
Matt Owen:
Who on earth is putting non-sweet tea in they mouth?
Amena Brown:
I don't know what that means.
Matt Owen:
For enjoyment purposes.
Amena Brown:
To this day, that just sounds I'm, I'm like, if I'm going to have not sweet tea, then just water. It's like give me sweet tea or just give me water. I don't want whatever else you're doing. You can mix the sweet tea and lemonade, also acceptable as a Southern tradition. But anything else, that just sounds like water.
Matt Owen:
I don't think I've tried non-sweetened tea in my forties though. I wonder, because my taste buds have changed. Once upon a time, it was Coke, Dr. Pepper. Whatever. That era has now left me, and I'm in more of a carbonated water for a treat.
Amena Brown:
I never knew this was going to happen to me. Never.
Matt Owen:
And for the most part, had been on the flavored carbonated water. But recently, I can just drink it. Whereas once upon a time, if I would've got some carbonated water, you know how you go to McDonald's back in the day and you order a Sprite and a Sprite thing was out. So you get it in this all carb, you'd be like, "What is wrong?"
Amena Brown:
Boy. Yikes.
Matt Owen:
Oh, it felt offensive to my mouth, but now I'm like, "Yeah. Oh, that's a treat."
Amena Brown:
Oh. So I'm going to tell you what your forties brings you, is drinking sparkling water and saying things like, "Hmm, that's refreshing." That's your forties. If y'all want to know part of what it is, part of it is definitely that right there. But maybe we need to do this as an experiment. I have, because I told y'all, I'm having to count my sugar things. I have gone to a restaurant and asked them to do half sweet tea and have unsweet tea. Now, I'm going to tell y'all, I didn't like saying it. It really hurt my feelings a little bit, because I don't want that. I don't want the half to be unsweetened. I don't want that, but I know I'm going to want to eat some other things in the meal and I can't burn all my sugar availabilities in my sweet tea. So I have tried that, and it was more satisfactory to me than I thought it was going to be. So we might have to try a little experiment and see if we are people that can drink unsweet tea.
Matt Owen:
I guess people can change.
Amena Brown:
Anyways, shout out to the Southeast run for all that it brought us of Southern delicacies. I want to give a shout-out to all the cobbler that we were able to have in various and sundry Southern locations. I want to give a shout-out to New York and Junior's and dial on, but I guess I'm going to shout out dial on. I need to shout out dial on, dial on, dial on, dial on, dial on, dial on. You make sure you get all the, it's like a bunch of dial ons you got to get in there.
Matt Owen:
I think it's five. Yeah. The top five.
Amena Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. Dial on, dial on, dial on, dial on, dial on, that's a lot of dial ons. I'm going to see if we could find a link to put in the show notes for those of you that are not familiar with Sean Puffy Combs, Making The Band. And yes, I did say Sean Puffy Combs because during that era, he wasn't Papa Love or Daddy Love or whatever that is today. He wasn't Diddy, and I don't care what names he decides to be, his grand mama call him Puffy. And that's what I'm doing, too.
Matt Owen:
Okay.
Amena Brown:
Anyways, thank y'all for joining us. We would love to tell you more about our food and road adventures soon. See y'all next week.
HER with Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions, as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.