The good news about our Saturday? The Atlantic City Food & Wine Festival was about 1,000 times more appetizing than it was last year. (Without rehashing too much: Last year was really lame. This year, especially if you care about Food Network stars, was quite the party.)
The bad news: We missed Pat and Gina Neely’s brisket and ribs and Robert Cray’s performance at Blues, Brews & BBQ on Saturday afternoon because we were stuck in Jersey Shore traffic. What made this even worse was that friends, including a Texas BBQ fiend who knows good slow-cooked grub better than most, were texting us raves about the quality and volume of food while we crawled along the turnpike and then the back roads and then the turnpike again.
The Neelys, Memphis legends and cable television personalities now set to open up a ‘cue joint on the Upper East Side in the fall and whose food we sampled at a super-double-secret-probation tasting a couple months ago, were one big reason we even made the trip to Atlantic City. So we were a little sad when we finally made it to Atlantic City after a four-plus-hour drive, knowing that the BBQ was ending, just as we approached the Boardwalk.
The terrible news: Plan B was to go to Angelo’s Fairmount Tavern, for some meatballs and red sauce. We had visited this local institution with Water Club chef Geoffrey Zakarian a couple years ago and remember finishing an entire plate of meatballs despite the fact it was our third lunch. On Saturday, we showed up at 3 p.m. and learned that Angelo’s now wasn’t open until dinnertime. (Damn you, Atlantic City. Damn you to hell.)
Cranky because we hadn’t eaten all day, cursing Snooki and the Garden State Parkway and everything else we could think of in New Jersey and vowing never to come back, we went around the corner to the White House Sub Shop. The place is always mobbed and the staff is notoriously cranky, but we were magically seated right away. You don’t normally run into people you know from New York or Las Vegas at White House, but there, at the table next to us, were our saviors, in the form of Cooking Channel programming boss/”Iron Chef America” executive producer Bruce Seidel, dining with Kerry Simon, who just opened up Simon Prime at the Atlantic City Hilton.
Seidel hadn’t realized that ordering a half sandwich at White House is the equivalent of getting two sandwiches anywhere else. They had leftovers. We ate them. In that moment, Bruce Seidel of the Cooking Channel was God. Besides keeping us alive, eating meatball and turkey sandwich extras also proved useful in bringing a server to our table. Previously nowhere to be found and suddenly crawling all over us to get us to buy more food, we cheered her up by ordering four half-sandwiches for three people, the best of which turned out to be a fully dressed cheeseburger sub, although the Italian sausage with hot peppers was pretty spectacular too.
And finally, our date with the Festival, over at Caesars. While Seidel and Simon headed to a Guy Fieri event, we opted to wander the Pier Shops at Caesars instead, taking advantage of the remaindered jewelry pile at Banana Republic and a buy-one-get-one-half-off deal at Crocs. Upstairs later on, in the mall’s glassy (and classy) penthouse One Atlantic event space, suspended over the ocean, we attended the Wine Down Art Show event. More than 25 varieties of wine flowed freely (the Peachy Canyon Cirque du Vin from Paso Robles was a highlight), and “Chopped” host Ted Allen chatted with guests including Simon. Despite the fact that we were still full and about to drive over to Philadelphia for dinner, we stopped by the dessert table on our way out, happily eating the peaches, kiwis and berries on top of a pretty good fruit tart while chatting up various food world bigs and enjoying the view on what had turned out to be a gorgeous day. For a moment, Atlantic City felt like the center of it all and exactly where we wanted to be. Delicious.