Deep Fried Kudzu

Bedazzled
Birmingham AL, 2026.

This was our first visit to Pastis in Nashville, and there are so many terrific places there, this may be our one and only visit — not because it was subpar, it just wasn’t the standout experience I was hoping for.

Pastis Nashville opened in June 2025, the outpost of the NY Pastis that Keith McNally first opened in 1999. It’s true-to-form — the tile, the globe lights…

We decided on two items first: the deviled eggs and the sardines en conserve

These were a tin of Mouettes d’Arvor, sardines au citron, and they were nice. I’ve actually always liked tins of sardines even since I was little — the cheap ones with the heavy mustard back then especially. These days I’ve grown my repertoire to Patagonia‘s flavors and Fishwife (wow, the Fishwife smoked salmon and smoked rainbow trout are so, so good)…we have no Fantastic World of the Portuguese Sardine here; I make due with whatever’s at Fresh Market mostly. Wirecutter has a piece here on the best sardines of 2026. And today’s NYT has this piece on…a LOT of tinned fish.

Then we had the cheeseburger, and a chicken paillard.

finished with a nice sticky toffee pudding.

I was thinking of better restaurants in New York that have branched out to Nashville — besides Pastis, there’s STK,  Philippe Chow…who else? Carne Mare closed. There have to be more. Now, Atlanta is much larger than Nashville but if we did this exercise with Atlanta, there’s STK, Nobu, and I had no idea  ’til now that Atlanta has its own Beauty & Essex! One of my faves in Las Vegas. Positive I’m leaving out several here. Who else started out in NY and has only a few outposts with one of them being Nashville?

Last year, Brent and I wanted to have lunch at the new Pastis in Nashville, and Hermes had also just opened. I thought about running in, but there was a line, and really, the Hermes bags aren’t my favorite in general and I’m not a scarf girl. I have a Hermes bracelet but I’m not a huge jewelry person. So I appreciate the brand more for the equestrian side and especially their aesthetic around that part of the line. It’s very sharp.

Hermes hired Nashville artist Herb Williams (who’s from Prattville AL) to make these incredible birch trees and this horse from his media, Crayons.

It can be viewed so much better at night:

 

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The Montgomery Museum of Art has his Black Poodle in its collection:

and I think I’ve seen his Ripple at the Atlanta airport.

a new interview with him from Nashville Public Radio:

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A couple of years ago at King of Prussia, I was able to see these Hermes windows.

So many more gorgeous high-end window displays from TwoSeven.

I’m so taken with these Heavy Eyes pieces for the KoP Hermes, especially the desert scene with the ant colony too.

Crystal Preserves
New Orleans LA, 2025.

In and around Birmingham, Walker Evans made images of more than just the fish market — he made photos of workers’ homes, a boarding house with some really nice architectural detail, and the billboard above.

That turns out to be the non-extant J.W. McDonald Furniture Store, on 3rd Avenue North in Bessemer. The main part of the image has some sort of Goodnight Moon vibe; one of the only things in the area I can think of depicting an interior scene within an era of 20 years of the furniture store billboard would be this in downtown Birmingham:

Trying to imagine what the furniture store billboard really looked like, I had it colorized — but let’s get this straight — AI (yeah. I did.) did the thing. J.W. Westatd is nothing close to J.W. McDonald — but it does give a sense of what the billboard may have generallly appeared.

Looking closer:

The items here are so out of scale that it’s actually terrific. The telephone table is at the same height as the people’s heads on the sofa. The angles of the top of the window and the ceiling are off. The door is completely wonky. The amount of disorder here actually makes it charming. It’s Grandma Moses had a dizzy spell. This was grassroots advertising in the 1930s.

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I briefly tried to find the boarding house Walker Evans had photographed in Birmingham from the house number, but came to the same conclusion as so many of the historians — it’s gone. It was likely very close to downtown and those homes are just about (really, probably, completely) gone now.

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I was thinking of other billboards from this era — in 2022, the Huntsville Museum of Art had an exhibit, Dorothea Lange’s America, that included this photograph of “Rural Landscape with Grapes of Wrath Billboard, California”

…which seems one of the most meta things ever, since if one considers the Great Depression, likely one of the very first images that comes to mind, her Migrant Mother photograph of 1936:

From the Kennedy Center on Lange:
“I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent [shed] with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. The pea crop at Nipomo had frozen and there was no work for anybody. But I did not approach the tents and shelters of other stranded pea-pickers. It was not necessary; I knew I had recorded the essence of my assignment.”

The subject of the photo, Florence Leona Thompson, has a different recollection of her interaction with Lange, and later had grown to be embarrassed by it. The photo documented a particularly hard time of her life, and made it famous. Thompson’s family, though, found strength in it.

And on her cemetery monument, the phrase:
Migrant Mother: A Legend of the Strength of of American Motherhood

One of the best-known photographs from Walker Evans‘ time in Birmingham for the FSA is this:

Roadside stand near Birmingham, Alabama
Digital ID: (digital file from b&w dup. neg.) fsa 8c52874 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8c52874
Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-fsa-8c52874 (digital file from b&w dup. neg.) LC-DIG-ppmsc-00239 (digital file from print) LC-USF342-T01-008253 (b&w film dup. neg.)
Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

For a number of years, the business at 1928 Vanderbilt Road has been known as River Fish Market, and the building just this year was torn down.

From October 2025:

…and now.

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From a Christie’s sale of this image in 2018 originally from James Agee’s own collection:

Roadside Stand near Birmingham is rich with so many of those essential visual qualities that most interested Walker Evans. The ample inclusion of signage and of the written word in this image is a shining example of Evans’ unique presentation of rural American society of this period…

In the exhibition catalogue for the retrospective held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2000, Jeff Rosenheim suggests that this very image may have been the first taken by Evans during his trip to the American South with James Agee in 1936. Early images from this project documenting this region do indeed include heavy emphasis on roadside signage and storefronts along small-town main streets. The rest of the duo’s trip, eventually centering on Hale County, Alabama, would ultimately lead to the images of the Burroughs and Tingle families and environs, subsequently included in the collaborative book by Agee and Evans Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, published first in 1939. (Portraits from that series can be found in Lots 23 and 119.)

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Ah, I actually don’t generally enjoy this but couldn’t help but wonder what it would look colorized, and this is how it turned out (if this is cringe to you, I promise it is to me too…but…still.). Now I can make out so much clearer the girl in the background, the cannas in bloom…the chairs behind the facade and the bicycle…

The striping on the watermelons is a little too elaborate/imagined here, but you can really take in how well done the fish painting is over the opening. This is part produce stand, part fish market, part come-see-us-about-moving-a-house. And the “honest weights, square dealings” is just perfect.