Steve Ball and I land in Memphis, Tennessee, looking for inspiration ahead of the opening of the Blues Kitchen, our restaurant in Shoreditch in London. We're after culinary inspiration, of course, but also for the essence of the blues, its spirit. Musically, Memphis has embraced the tourist trail a little too enthusiastically, but in terms of food it has a lot to offer. We visit Central BBQ and Charles Vergo's Rendezvous, famous places for ribs, each with their own specialist spice rubs and wood-chip combinations.
From here we cross to Clarksdale, Mississippi. It's a hardscrabble place, desperately poor. On the crossroads where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil there's a place called Abe's. It's dusty and harshly lit, the meat smoker just an old oil drum out in the yard. The ribs come in a polystyrene tray like a cheap kebab, but they are delicious: the meat just falls off the bone. We stay at the Shack Up Inn where the rooms are old cotton pickers' huts, but there's a guitar in each one. And out front there's a pick-up truck with bullet holes in the windscreen. Its motto is instructive: 'The Ritz we ain't'.
The town has four or five proper blues joints. The famous one is Ground Zero, which is co-owned by Morgan Freeman. Every night there's a bluesman playing somewhere, a guy in a dive bar earning nickels and dimes. After four days of nothing but meat we ask the guy that runs the hotel if we can get fruit for breakfast. He laughs. The nearest place to buy fruit is 11 miles away.
Down in Louisiana we visit Cochon for its fried alligator - delicious chunks of hearty meat with a hint of a fish flavour. And the French Quarter of New Orleans turns out to be everything you can imagine. We see a tough nine-year-old kid walking from bar to bar trying to get a gig. Later we see him performing with a five-piece on a street corner. He is one of the best trumpet players we've ever heard.
Flying out from New Orleans we realise that the real spirit of the blues is back in hard-luck Clarksdale. The Bluesberry Café offers warm beer, average food and terrible lighting. The night we were there they were staging a benefit for the celebrated bluesman T Model Ford, who has sadly died since, to raise money after his house had been condemned. The great Watermelon Slim was performing. If he had been playing in London he'd have been headlining Ronnie Scott's. In Clarksdale he's helping carry in the beer, and there are 15 people in the audience. The music is sad, authentic. It's the blues. www.theblueskitchen.com