Chapel Hill/ Carrboro Write-up in "Garden & Gun"

The newly published article, "Life on the Hill," comes from Garden & Gun, the Southern interest magazine. Messieurs Tower and Brown get much right in their piece, including their observations on how Chapel Hill and Carrboro have an identity crisis -- is this or is this not a Southern town? -- and how the town's denizens benefit enormously from this and other such tension: rural and urban, provincial and cosmopolitan, town and gown, old and new.

What does this have to do with food? Because of the tensions above, we are all proud owners (figuratively, of course) of restaurants serving up on any given night Pho, tacos with tripas, neapolitan pizza, sole meuniere, shrimp 'n' grits, goat curry, and quail stuffed with foie gras. We are a town with many types of people who contribute both the know-how and the market to make such food offerings possible. One group comes from North Carolina towns, many smaller than Chapel Hill/ Carrboro, and this group is usually excited to live in a town as cosmopolitan as Chapel Hill/ Carrboro, and they are open to trying whatever they find here; another group comes from cities outside North Carolina, maybe California, the Midwest, or wherever, and they seek the variety of foods here that they had back at home; there are also those who love Chapel Hill/ Carrboro's very manageable size, but who have traveled widely in the US and abroad and who don't believe our town's small size locks us into a provincial menu. We are a small town with a tight community, but we have much to offer and a world of experience behind our offerings.

This is not to overstate our case, though. I must admit I am envious when friends from New York relate stories of avant-garde theatre and ordering Ethiopian food at 4 a.m. Yes, we are certainly lacking in some areas of food and culture, and although we have much that is to be envied in some respects-- try finding decent NC barbecue in NYC -- we will also always be playing catch-up in others. What I wouldn't give for a Carrboro Arthouse Cinema or a decent Cuban restaurant! But to have what we have in Chapel Hill/ Carrboro, with great public schools and affordable housing to boot (I didn't say "free housing"), we can be pretty proud of ourselves. "Life on the Hill" should appeal to Chapel Hill/ Carrboro residents, ex-patriots, and future citizens.