Colin Marshall

Before arriving in Raleigh, the final destination of this cross-country road trip, we stopped in Asheville, one of those places often found alongside the likes of Athens, Georgia and Marfa, Texas in clickbait slideshows about America’s Coolest Cities of Under 100,000 People. It didn’t answer my long-standing question about who’s doing the clicking and why (coolness or low population; you kind of have to choose one), but I could see why it impresses visitors: it has well-regarded bookstores; it has an architecturally sound and human-scaled downtown (still an astonishing novelty to so many Americans); it has a pinball museum (closed, alas, when we passed by); it has a confectioner who makes shoes out of chocolate.

I didn’t leave with a chocolate shoe, but I did leave with a copy of Lawrence Osborne’s Paris Dreambook purchased, after flipping through it over a generous cheese plate, from the well-curated and highly explorable Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar (the name alone…), located in a restored shopping arcade somewhat reminiscent of the Bradbury Building back in Los Angeles. Despite having sworn off purchasing books in the months before my move to Korea, I do make exceptions for volumes on cities (professional interest, surely you understand), especially when I personally like the writer (and my interview with Osborne about his Bangkok book remains one of my very favorites from the Marketplace of Ideas days).

Apart from Quail Ridge Books, an event-intensive strip-mall bookstore beloved of no less a locally raised man of letters than David Sedaris (whose signed portrait, hung in the bathroom, reads “I was a monster in 2009”), Raleigh, or at least my experience of Raleigh, seemed to me less about books than about food. Calvin Trillin wrote at length about the struggle for the soul of North Carolinian barbecue in the New Yorker just the other day, naming Raleigh as “the line of demarcation that separates the two principal schools” of that culinary art form.

But ironically, North Carolina counts as the sole barbecue-oriented state we passed through on our road trip in which we ate no barbecue at all: we had it in Texas, we had it in Arkansas, and we had it in Tennessee, but we wholly missed out on both eastern North Carolina’s version, “where barbecue means the whole hog, chopped, with a vinegar-based sauce that is flavored with pepper,” and western North Carolina’s version, which “uses only pork shoulders, chopped (or, sometimes, sliced), with a sauce that is also vinegar-based but has been turned pinkish by the addition of ketchup or tomato sauce.”

We did, however, eat Korean food, or in any case an intriguing local version of Korean food. After ten days on the road, I’d worked up a mighty craving for even a simple kimchi jjigae (or especially a simple kimchi jjigae), and so we stopped in for lunch at Kimbap, a “Korean-inspired” cafe in what I understand to be the Raleigh’s most interesting current food neighborhood outside downtown. If the menu offered kimbap I didn’t see it, but the dishes we did find provided a tasty experience at the intersection of traditional Korean food and hardcore North Carolina locavorism. (Its kimchi had a refreshingly vinegary taste — a distant echo, perhaps, of the eastern North Caroninian love of the stuff in their barbecue?)

We had a chat with the chef, a Korean-born, Michigan-raised adoptee who surprised us with the revelation that she’d never once set foot in the land of her ancestors (not to mention the land of our next residence) after her adoption. I insisted that she visit, if only because she seemed like the ideal person to enjoy a food tour there, but Kimbap has cleared the bar of two and a half years in business, keeping her busier and thus less able to travel than ever with its ongoing demonstration of the apparent viability of selling Korean cuisine to Raleighites.

But the market hasn’t yet reached a saturation point, as indicated by the restaurant’s chopsticks, which come in sleeves printed with directions for how to use chopsticks. If I’d seen that in California, I’d have taken it as an attempt at irony, but North Carolina didn’t strike me as a particularly ironic place. Even there, though, I wonder how long we’ll see this sort of thing. I can’t think of a single American friend of my generation unable to eat with chopsticks, but I get the sense that Asia itself hasn’t yet got word about how thoroughly their stateside usage has spread.

My own unhesitant (if not unusually skillful) chopsticking has drawn expressions of astonishment from certain Koreans in both their homeland and mine, a reaction often revealing more surprise than the one I get when I actually speak Korean — though I did score a twofer once when, at a Koreatown Korean Chinese restaurant (a distinct variant of Chinese cuisine, with dishes as signature as though much more defined than American Chinese food’s orange chicken and chop suey), I explained in that language to the middle-aged lady who suddenly appeared at my side two-handedly proffering a fork that, thank you, but I didn’t need one.

We ate more often downtown, and you can’t talk about downtown Raleigh food, so I gather, without taking about Ashley Christensen, the well-known chef who runs seven popular bars and restaurants in the city. We got to four of them in the span of two days without really trying: Beasley’s Chicken + Honey, a sort of North Carolinian Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles; Chuck’s right next door, a specialty hamburger joint boasting myriad French-fry dipping sauces; Fox Liquor Bar, a brick-walls-and-bare-bulbs sort of place underneath Beasley’s and Chuck’s; and Poole’s, a new-wave diner open late enough for us to hit up after an event (although “late” in this case means midnight, a sign that downtown Raleigh has a little way to go yet, though huge swaths of Los Angeles suffer exactly the same problem).

Of course, I imagine that some hardcore Raleigh eaters and drinkers disdain Christensen’s restaurants in the same way that some hardcore Portland eaters and drinkers disdain the McMenamin’s establishments. But you know what? I’ve drawn great pleasure indeed from every McMenamin’s place I’ve visited, and at this point a visit to Portland wouldn’t feel complete without at least one. (It does boggle my mind, though, that with the Anderson School they’ve expanded into Bothell, Washington, the crappy suburb next to the crappy suburb where I went to high school.) Maybe, a few Raleigh trips from now, I’ll come to feel the same way about the Christensen empire.

Raleigh’s other urban amenities I find it a bit harder to judge. Like many midsize American cities, it lacks even the most basic rapid transit system, though discussions have begun; in the doorway of a gift shop I found brochures detailing the pros and cons of rail versus bus rapid transit, though nothing will actually happen until 2026 at the earliest. I didn’t get the chance to ride the R-LINE, a nifty-looking free downtown circulator bus (albeit one that only goes in one direction and only comes every fifteen minutes). But we did stop by the also-free City of Raleigh Museum, whose maps and models on display give a sense of the city’s layout and how it developed. (I wish every city had one of those; I’d make them the first stop as a rule.)

As always, on American road trips or any other form of travel, the most memorable things come unexpectedly. I put the call out on Twitter for recommendations from Raleigh urbanists, and someone replied to suggest the Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh’s kissa, held weekly on the building’s bottom floor and modeled after the 1950s Japanese kissaten, “bars and cafes where music lovers could share their record collections with devoted and curious listeners.”

On the week we happened to attend, we drank wine while listening to selections from the formidable collection of Marshall Wyatt, proprietor of vintage-Americana label Old Hat Records, concluding our journey through America’s present with a plunge into America’s past. Toward the end of the evening, Wyatt pulled out a piece of vinyl to which he said he wanted to give a special introduction, one that would let him “say the three words every collector longs to say: only. Known. Copy.” Misuse of the word “unique,” a habit common to American speech, has started to grate on me after thirty years here (maybe that along has driven me to Korea), but here we had a genuine opportunity to use the word: a unique recording in a unique country.

We pulled into Memphis at night and drove to Knoxville the following day, stopping in Nashville somewhere in the middle, then rolled on to North Carolina the morning after that. If you need to see the three biggest cities in Tennessee and have absolutely no more than 36 hours in which to do it, I can tell you how we did it.

We began with a bracing shot of déjà vu, dragging ourselves into the lobby of the Memphis Courtyard by Marriott that looked and felt in all respects identical to the lobby of the Oklahoma City Courtyard by Marriott in which we’d drank away the vibrations of the road the day before. At first I assumed the details would differ. Surely the Memphis instantiation of The Bistro wouldn’t have the same folksy chalkboard with its handwritten imperative to “Try Our Classic Oatmeal.” But it did indeed have the same folksy chalkboard — just propped up on the opposite shelf.

I never tried their Classic Oatmeal. I always get excited about complimentary continental breakfasts at hotels (despite seldom eating anything from them but Raisin Bran), and at this point in life have come to expect them as a standard offering of the traditional hotel industry, perhaps the sole remaining reason not to go with an Airbnb 100 percent of the time (though I’ve noticed many Airbnb hosts raising their breakfast game lately).

Bizarrely, Courtyards by Marriott don’t offer a continental breakfast, an unexpected point of tackiness I pondered while drinking my three-dollar coffee from The Bistro. But the lack of free Raisin Bran meant a chance to eat at a downtown institution instead, and so we ended up Sunday-brunching at the Blue Plate Cafe, where we put away a few omelets under the happily vacant gaze of dozens and dozens of dog portraits, their painter one of Memphis’ very own.

I find few activities as pleasurable as discovering an unknown downtown on foot, and I looked forward to seeing what Memphis’ had to offer with the aid of its historic streetcar lines. Alas, I found whole system shut down for renovation since a fire in 2013, and its rails and stations remain silent today.

So instead of my usual improvised downtown tour, we opted for a tour of the official variety: specifically of Sun Studios, which some might know as the place Elvis got his start, but others, people like me, might know as the place to which Youki Kudoh and Masatoshi Nagase make their pilgrimage in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train. Only one member of our tour group had managed to put together a credible 1950s rocker look for the occasion — pompadour, sideburns, cuffs, Converse — and he, not that surprisingly, turned out to have come all the way from Switzerland. Lucky nobody Japanese had turned up; they’d surely have eaten his subcultural lunch.

Tennessee ranks as only the 36th largest state in the Union (and actually, it roughly matches the size of South Korea, though Indiana, number 38, gets closer), but it still takes between three and four hours to drive from its first city to its second. The high-rises and elevated freeways of Nashville (not to mention its scores of construction cranes, hard at the apparent work doubling the size of the city) came into view just as the desperation for some urbanity was about to get the better of me.

We’d also felt a desperation for nachos for some miles, and so made for an oasis in Midtown (not to be confused with Oklahoma City‘s MidTown) called, simply, Tavern, whose staff, seeming to sense our weariness, seated us in a corner circular booth of our own, poured us some restorative cider and sangria, and served us a heap of tortilla chips, cheese, guacamole and something called “angry chicken.” On the table stood a variety of hot sauces, three of which came in brown eye-dropper bottles labeled only “X,” “XX,” and “XXX.”

After dinner we took a walk through Music Row (small speakers embedded in whose sidewalk utility boxes pipe out the hits 24/7), ending up at the kind of third-wave coffee shop, built in the comparatively cavernous space of a renovated garage, that makes you wonder not whether you could move to its city, but how soon you should. It helped that, from what I could tell through their illuminated floor-to-ceiling windows, all the nearby condos (whether still under construction or very recently finished) looked comfortable indeed.

Part of me wondered if I’d see anything like it in Knoxville, but a bigger part of me — just like any thirty-year-old American male, and thus exegete of The Simpsons‘ 1990s golden era — wondered what I’d find when I made my own pilgrimage to the Sunsphere, at which Bart, Milhouse, Martin and Nelson once arrived fourteen years too late for the 1982 World’s Fair (and ultimately knocked over).

I enjoy old World’s Fair grounds, and the park Osaka maintains at the site of Expo ’70 remains, for me, the old World’s Fair grounds to beat. Knoxville’s modest but pleasant equivalent doesn’t beat it, but there you can visit the Sunsphere’s observation deck and behold all of Knoxville laid before you for free, each vista’s accompanying display informing you of, say, the city’s title of red panda capital of the western hemisphere. (It reminds me of the non-free towers that overlook some Asian cities, especially Busan’s, though the Sunsphere boasts something called the “Icon Ultra Lounge” — currently closed, like Memphis’ trolleys, for renovation.)

If I lived in Knoxville, I’d live in the condo building with the best Sunsphere view, a converted candy factory from the turn of the 20th century with a chocolate shop on the bottom floor. As I stocked up on Sunsphere bars there, the owner excitedly told us about the coming developments in Knoxville’s own downtown revitalization, working in a sentiment I’ve heard in almost every city on this trip, and indeed almost every city in America from Los Angeles on down: “If you’d told me this place was going to come back to life ten, fifteen years ago, I’d never have believed you.”