ran and sweat through another shirt running toward the river. Alas, the guards let me back into the park and I claimed all of fruits of the evening as well as my giant cotton swab.
The ice cream didn’t fare nearly as well. Neither did my shirt.
Eating messy food was one of the extreme joys of the 30-30 MLB #GiveASpit tour. I really didn’t eat a ton of ballpark fare – as you know, it’s pricey and it usually sucks – but I did plenty of eating and plenty of snooping for new favorite restaurants on my journey.
I’d like to consider myself somewhere happily between Guy Fieri and Anthony Bourdain. We don’t miss many meals on the road. And I don’t eat at bad places. It’s kind of a source of pride.
The Graeters joint in Cincinnati is legit but you can get that in your freezer aisle here in Baltimore. I didn’t eat a lot of ice cream on the trip but if you ever get to the south side of Chicago, the unique rainbow cones at the aptly named Rainbow Cone are quite a treat. This came on Day 27 of the tour with my Dundalk High 1985 alum Stan Jablonski.
I felt so guilty that I took Jenn back two days later before we caught our flight to Cleveland because I wanted her to have a Rainbow Cone, too.
I actually didn’t eat enough bad food early on the tour. About 10 days into the 30-30 MLB #GiveASpit tour, I was evaporating. Maybe it was the heat, the crazy travel, my obsession with not gaining 20 pounds on the trip or some combination, but I was definitely losing weight on the front end of the trip. My pants were falling off of me!
But the back end of the tour included some of my favorite eating joints in America and we indulged at every opportunity.
I had two chances to dine at my favorite restaurant in North America – Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant on Geary Street in the Richmond District. If you’ve tuned in at any point over the last 20 years or if you’ve asked me for a Bay Area recommendation, chances are you know about my dear friend Julio Bermejo and his tequila empire and awesomeness.
But for the first time – and after eating this dish a hundred times over the years in San Francisco – Julio and his family have taken me behind the scenes to show me how my favorite dish is prepared.
This is the shrimp veracruzana.
We visited Julio and his family on Sunday night after the Oakland Athletics game and even swabbed a few Orioles fans at Tommy’s. I got a chance to spend the whole evening with Julio and his Uncle Oscar at the San Francisco Giants game on Tuesday night at AT&T Park.
As you saw in my stadium rankings, there are few finer places to watch a baseball game than in the city by the bay. And when you’re rolling with Julio, you don’t go hungry in San Francisco. He took me to Tomasso’s in North Beach for pizza. Trust me, I’ll be returning.
In St. Louis, on Day 14, we spent Jenn’s new “birthday” of June 26th at Pappy’s Smokehouse BBQ just a few miles from the Gateway Arch. Somehow, and with complete serendipity, we were joined by Chicago Cubs pitcher Jon Lester, who also happens to be a cancer survivor. He also likes good barbeque.
This is a really simple story. My partner Peter DiLutis reached to Pappy and told him our story about leukemia, going to 30 ballparks in 30 days and how much we love his barbeque. He met us at the door, was super kind to us and surprised us with the Lester visit and an amazing lunch.
In Kansas City, we just called the Jack Stack carryout window and got a bag full of Flintstones-sized ribs with cheesy corn, the best baked beans on the planet and some garlic steamed broccoli upon landing. Then, we iced down a few beers for the tailgate at Kauffman Stadium and we made a whole night of our trip to another of the finest ballparks in the land.
We ate Jack’s Stack before the Negro Baseball Museum. We ate Jack’s Stack before the game in the parking lot. I ate what was left of Jack’s Stack after the game in the hotel room. Good thing we had a few beers leftover to wash it all down.
And no offense to the folks in St. Louis and Kansas City – and I’m sure the debate will rage – but the best BBQ on the continent (if not the planet) resides in Fort Lauderdale at Tom Jenkins Bar-B-Q on Route 1 just south of downtown.
Ribs. Chicken. Cornbread. Mac and cheese. Baked beans. Collard greens. Iced tea. Peach cobbler.
I asked the kid behind the counter, who was chopping and cutting the daily meats straight from the fire pit, what the secret to the goodness of Tom Jenkins is?
And he summed it up in one word: “sugar.”
Sounds sweet to me.
In Chicago, where we still argue about the questionable merits of deep dish pizza – I still have never eaten a Chicago style pizza that made me want to come back for more (and I’m waiting) – my Dundalk pal Stan Jablonski and his Southside wife Jenny took me into Capone-land for thin pizza at Nick & Vito’s, Old Style beer and the aforementioned Rainbow Cone. I had already begun the tour in
