We travel all day.  First a big, long, 5-hour-and-40-minute flight from San Francisco to Honolulu.  (They show UP IN THE AIR as the in-flight movie.  Nice.  I fall asleep several times, not because of the movie but because I am so comfortable and relaxed.)

The plane is not packed like Pringles.  We each have our own row.

Bob is two rows behind me.  Glen is by the window in the row right behind me.  My seat is reclined.  Snooze easy.

We get a two-hour layover in Honolulu.  (In one little kiosk, I see a kind of Crocs that I’ve never seen before.  I splurge and buy them.)

We grab a delicious roast chicken and pork lunch in the Hawaiian box-lunch style.

Then a 53-minute flight to Hilo.  This plane is chock full o’ people.

We are here in Hilo to find out about loco moco.  We’re shooting tomorrow morning at Ken’s House of Pancakes.  The last time we were here in Hilo (4 years ago?) we shot a story about the Hilo Farmers. Market, a busy and beautiful market that makes getting here seem worthwhile.  Here’s the story we made back then:

Check out the earlier Who Dat? blog posting too:

http://www.wqed.org/tv/sebak/blog/2010/03/who-dat-its-jodee-at-tybee-da-breakfast-club/

People warn us about the lines at Tin Shed on the weekends.   Oh, long lines.  “Yes, it may be an hour-long wait.”  But Portlanders appreciate a good breakfast and they will wait to get it if they have to.  And you can have free coffee, good coffee, while you wait.  Pour it yourself.  This could be OK.

We get to this popular little restaurant on Alberta Street about 7 AM as the place is just opening, and there is no line yet.  It’s drizzly outside.  One of the servers, Sheree, is getting the place open, prepping the patio, greeting the first few people who arrive, and she welcomes us.

My trusty cameraman Bob usually starts by getting some shots of the building’s exterior, showing the place in morning light, capturing the empty street at that hour, and the first stirrings of the people who exercise, despite the rain.

We interview some of the early eaters, wise to get here before the rush.   The various dishes on the menu have clever names, some with obvious logical reasons, others with more obscure connections to the platter being presented.  When we eventually sit down to taste some of the fare here, I get the Everything Naughty plate, including sausage, biscuits with gravy (but I go with the rosemary-mushroom gravy instead of the bacon gravy), scrambled eggs and one of the famous Tin Shed potato cakes.  Oh people love these potato cakes!

One of the cool things here is if you sit on the patio (and we did — although Pittsburghers might think it was too soon and chilly to be doing so), you are allowed to bring your dog or dogs.  They see to like it.  I haven’t been to a restaurant with dogs since I lived in France.

(more to come)

It’s actually raining pretty hard as we leave the hotel at 6:45 this morning.

Bob’s GPS guides us away from the interstate, down quirky and charming residential streets to our destination:  Helser’s on Alberta.

The Alberta Arts District is a cool, hip, artful section of Portland, all along Alberta Street, a neighborhood that’s apparently bounced back in the last ten years or so from from seediness and slummy-ness to its current state of groovy-ness with small shops, galleries, co-op groceries, and popular breakfast places.

We get to Helser’s a few minutes after 7.  It’s raining still.  We meet Alex Helser.  His hostess/waitress/coffee-maker/bartender Leah says she knew we were coming but didn’t know it would be today (!).  There are 4 or 5 people already there waiting for food.   Glenn starts to get the audio gear together.  Bob and I head outside to get some exteriors of the place.  The neighborhood is just waking up.  An energetic bicyclist — even in the rain — a jogger or two, some walkers and an occasional breakfast eater.

Back inside, as the place starts to fill up, we set up and interview Alex Helser, the owner and founder of the place, a guy with lots of restaurant experience who happened to see this excellent space for rent at the corner of Alberta and 16th Street about five years ago, and he decided to leave high-end dinners behind for the world of breakfast.  He says he doesn’t cook very much anymore (although he did all the hash-slinging by himself for the first year or two as he got established.)  He says he’s just got a great crew now who keep the place humming.  He cares about the food.  We talk of sausage, bacon, local suppliers and salmon hash.

And we’re impressed.  With both the food and the service.  Leah handles all the tables by herself for the first hour or so till Emma arrives.  The food looks beautiful.  Perfect poached eggs.  Bob has no trouble finding stuff to shoot.  Leah pauses at one point to get her picture taken with two hot “Dutch Babies” ready to be served.

Me, I don’t know these Dutch babies.  They are a sort of German pancake that I wasn’t familiar with, but lots of people here know them and love them.  Served usually with lemon and powdered sugar (and syrup too if you’d like), they’re an unusual looking variation on a crepe.  Sort of.

We alternate between talking to customers, trying to capture the scene and learning what makes this place special.

Shortly after 9, Paul Gerald arrives.  He’s the author and publisher of Breakfast In Bridgetown (Portland is sometimes called the City of Bridges – ha!), he runs a website and tweets as “pdxbreakfastguy” (Portland often uses PDX, its airport code, as shorthand for the city.)  He’s fun and quick, and he’s thought a lot about breakfast.  He says he’s not a food critic at all, but a travel writer who learned to describe a place effectively by describing a meal, often breakfast, in that place.  And he tells us how he quickly learned when he moved here from Memphis that Portland is a city that loves its morning meal.

We had planned to follow Paul to the studio where he tapes a podcast radio show, but there’s so much to shoot (and we don’t want to leave without eating something here ourselves), so I change our plans and decide to skip the podcast taping (even though it’s a show about breakfast!) and finish up here in style.

We spend a while in the kitchen watching the lead cook Mark and his Merry Men as they create all the beautiful plates. Mark is fast and efficient, and he makes me laugh.  He isn’t hoping to be as wicked as Anthony Bourdain or as tireless as Bobby Flay or any of the Iron Chefs.  He is just sad that he isn’t as smooth and sensuous as Giada DeLaurentiis!  Oh, the Food Network!

It is a very busy day at Helser’s, the place is packed much of the morning.  Bob and Glenn just shoot and shoot and shoot, and listen listen listen, climbing step-ladders for new higher angles, holding the boom above all the action, trying to capture some of the constant work both in the front of the house and in the kitchen.  They are a great team.

[Sometimes Bob wears this utility belt, and today it sort of catches on his shirt, pulling up the bottom of his T-shirt, exposing some flesh on his lower back.   It isn't as revealing or gross as "plumber's crack" or anything like that, but the goofy people at one table decide that Bob is their newest victim, and they start laughing and making merciless fun of our poor cameraman, even posing for mock Abu-Ghraib-style photos behind his back!   Nothing is sacred these days, not even the mighty cameraman.]

When we’re nearly done, we stop to eat some breakfast.  Those aforementioned Scotch eggs for me, salmon hash with poached eggs for Bob and spinach-mushroom-tomato Benedict for old Glenn.

Oh yes, the food here is good.  We split a Dutch baby for dessert.  Yes, this is the kind of restaurant that offers a variety of breakfast desserts, but we go for the baby instead.

We figure Leah is doing a bit of everything, so we ask her also to take our picture, sitting at the counter, our favorite seats in most of these breakfast places.  At the counter, you get some of the making-of as well as the grub.

We set up some group photos of their crew too.  A few of the shots are sedate and cool.

And a few are not so serious.

What could be better?  Leah makes us a “nudge,” a coffee drink with brandy and creme de cocoa and kahlua, whipped cream and a wee bit of coffee.  (She pronounces it not as “nudge” but “noodge” which makes it sound more potent, and she mixes a mean drink.)  We split it three ways and go on our merry way, noodged out the door.

It’s Thursday, March 11, 2010, and we leave WQED at 5:12 AM for the Pittsburgh airport.  We have a 6:55 flight to Dallas to catch.  We haven’t flown for a shoot in over a year (we drove all the time for A RIDE ALONG THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY) so we’re rusty at this jet-setting stuff.  We have to pay massive fees for the equipment we’re lugging, and air travel seems more dismal than ever.  All the beauty and fun and magic of soaring through the sky has been boiled out of the process.  Take off your shoes.  I need to see your photo ID one more time.

I worry about being too fat.  That goofy, chubby movie director Kevin Smith was recently asked to leave his flight on Southwest, and I think I’m bigger than him.  Now there are new embarrassments to anticipate and fear on airlines.  What joy.

We have a 3-hour layover in Dallas.  Blah breakfast in a concourse eatery.  Chain food.

Finally on the flight to Oregon, I fall asleep often.  I’m trying to work on my upcoming back page article for the May issue of PITTSBURGH magazine.  I’m listening to my iPhone’s iPod.  I watch a bit of the digital version of the animated movie CORALINE on my iPhone.  I’m falling asleep.  I’m working today’s New York Times crossword (HOCUSPOCUS, ABRACADABRA and OPENSESAME are the big words.  SAYTHEMAGICWORDS is the long diagonal clue.)

I also read the review of a new book titled Next by James Hynes.  It includes a mention of his image of an airliner:  “A Pringles can with wings, packed full of defenseless Pringles.”  It’s a potent and perfect image.

Twelve and a half hours after we left WQED, we get to Portland.  All of our bags and equipment cases show up.  Ahh.  Bob and I go to get the rental minivan, and Glenn sits with our bags.  It’s raining and gray.

But the world seems exciting after the plane.  People are chipper here in Portland.  The young woman at Budget Rental says there’s great breakfast at the Tin Shed.  That’s where we’re going Saturday. Everybody seems intrigued by our project.   Our Dodge minivan is brand new.  It has 5 miles on it!  It’s modern and loaded with gadgets and gimmicks.  We return to Terminal and get Glenn and the stuff.

Our route to the hotel takes us along Route 30.  This is the same US 30 that goes through Greensburg to Pittsburgh, the same US 30 that is basically the old Lincoln Highway from Philadelphia to western Wyoming.   In western Wyoming, 30 leaves the Lincoln Highway and turns north to here, to Portland.  It’s like the lost extension of the Lincoln.  We like it and feel connected.

We check into our hotel.  We’re tired but decide we’re all hungry.  We get some swell fried halibut and salmon at a little place called Halibut on Alberta Street, a cool and hip little neighborhood here where we’ll be shooting for the next couple of days.

Just for fun, I ask our saucy waitress (whose Ukrainian family is all from Pittsburgh and Indiana, PA) where we can get some good breakfast around here.  She sways and says, “Oh there are many great places to get good breakfast near here.  Helser’s is probably the best.  It’s really good.”  We’re happy because that’s where we’ll be shooting in the morning:  Helser’s on Alberta.  Salmon hash on the horizon!

“…He’s just another Pringle in the Pringles can gliding belly down out of the sky, with no control over the plane, no say over his fate.” — James Hynes, Next

It’s Friday, March 5, and we’re in Allegany County (that’s how they spell it in south central New York state.)  We spend the day at a rural restaurant called Cartwright’s Maple Tree Inn.  Incredible.  At a relatively slow moment in mid-afternoon, Ryan Krumm tapes me doing a quick “stand-up” in the kitchen, and tonight before dinner, Glenn Syska edits it together.  After dinner, we finally figure out a way to get it up on YouTube, and it’s hot off the griddle!  Watch!

I’d found this place while researching grits on-line, and it looks pretty interesting.  Careful attention to the old ways of doing things.  Grits are an important part of the southern breakfast, and I hoped to see how they get from the ear of corn to the tasty treat on the plate.  The Anson Mills website is full of info.

I talked on the phone a couple of times with Glenn Roberts, the man behind Anson Mills, and he agreed to show us how his small milling operation makes some of the best grits in America.  It was a quick morning.

We shot a long interview with Glenn, assorted b-roll shots around the small plant, and we were out of there by 11:30.

The people who work there do just about everything by hand, from sifting ground corn to separating it into the different size pieces, to mixing the pieces into different blends for different kinds of grits, to packing and shipping the products.   Glenn told us that you can buy these products in some farmers’ markets and specialty stores, but the best way to get “antebellum grits” is to order them from the website.  Some of the best chefs in America use Anson Mills products exclusively.

Glenn emphasized that you have to cook these slowly.  They’re not instant grits.  Glenn didn’t know any local breakfast spots that used his grits, but there are probably many food-loving Southerners who know these carefully created grits are the real thing.

Kevin Conrad is editing them.  We’re using Buddy Nutt music.   And we just added two new “tastes” that feature Carman’s Country Kitchen in South Philly.  You can watch ‘em on our site or look for them on YouTube.  Or watch one right here.

Who is up at dawn on Valentine’s Day?  We are.  Your trusty WQED breakfast crew.

We’ve come to Tybee Island, just east of the city of Savannah, Georgia, to tape a busy Sunday morning at The Breakfast Club, a legendary morning restaurant.  At 7 am, just as The Breakfast Club is ready to open, the sun is ready to jump out of the Atlantic Ocean, and Bob and Glenn climb the dune-walkway closest to the restaurant in order to get some beautiful sunrise shots.

I stick my head in the restaurant and say we’re here!  but we’ll be a few more minutes.  Jodee Sadowsky, the energetic chef/owner welcomes me, shows me that my name is painted on the side window and my picture is on the menu for today!  This could be fun.

The place feels like a diner.  Crowded, lively, lots of chatter.  Glenn puts a microphone on Jodee so we can hear everything he says, but already people are saying, “Oh Jodee is so nice today.  He’s smiling!  You never see that when the TV cameras aren’t here.”   Nothing makes you feel more like home than some early morning taunting.

The pace of the place increases as the morning goes on.  The three cooks (Justin, Chris and Franklin) who work beside Jodee  are the three hardest working men in the food business.  They are fixing eggs, making pancakes, rolling omelets, home-frying potatoes, cooking pork and tilapia, frenching the toast.  Jodee is at the end of the line, assembling the plates, adding the grits, manning the toasters, hollering orders.  It’s a well-run machine.  Great theater.  Better than any morning TV you ever saw.

It’s also Tybee Island Mardi Gras, so there are some people dressed as if they were in New Orleans, and the special today is called Who Dat? (The New Orleans Saints won the Superbowl last Sunday, February 7, and the Who Dat Nation of Saints fans is suddenly everywhere, trying to be as big as the Steeler Nation.)  The Who Dat Special is eggs, homemade boudin and spicy Louisiana chicken and bacon sausages, along with grits topped today with gumbo.  Yum.

As usual, we talk to anyone and everyone about why they’re here, what they think of the food, and what they know about this place.  We talk to one family that’s there to celebrate Dad’s 50th birthday.  The Guedrys have come from Atlanta: Dad Doug, Mom Jules, and their two girls, Laine and Ella, and although they’ve never been here before, they’ve been told it’s great.

We take their picture, then Jules takes ours with the birthday boy.

There is another large side room (where you can’t see the cooks) with more tables, but I didn’t take any pictures there.  (I just wasn’t thinking.)  After about 9:30 or so, there’s a line outside, and everyone says it’s not as long as the summer lines when they stretch back to the beach about a block or so away.  Jodee’s food has the reputation of being worth dawdling for.

Mid-morning, I ask Jodee to make Bob and Glenn and me each a small bowl of gumbo grits.  That’s what I’ve been dying to try.  Good and spicy.  A hearty and flavorful variation on shrimp & grits.  Jodee says he’s used okra and file in the gumbo.  Good and thick.

About noontime, Leon Slotin shows up.  Leon and his daughter Jane, an old college friend of mine from UNC at Chapel Hill, first brought me here to the Breakfast Club back in the 1980s when Jodee was just getting started (although I think he had attracted a crowd and a line even back then.)  Leon and his wife Nancy live in Savannah, and he came out to make sure all was going well for us.  I told Jodee that Leon was the reason we were here, and Jodee declared, “Free breakfast for Leon!”

The place is usually open till 1 p.m. or so, but there comes a time, and Jodee says, “I’m gonna say something that will make everybody who works here happy.  Flip ‘em!”  That means the signs are flipped from OPEN to CLOSED, and the last person in line is to tell anybody else who walks up that the place is closed.  And the crew will feed everybody in line, but it’s time to call it quits in the early afternoon.  There’s still a lot of clean-up and prep to do for tomorrow, and Jodee’s having trouble with one of his heating chests or something.  He smiles with a breakfast sandwich for the camera.

We order before they shut down the griddles.  Glenn gets the eggs Florentine.  I get the Who Dat, and I can’t remember what Bob gets.  Good food.  Fun times.  A great breakfast spot.

If you go, be sure to leave a special tip for the cooks.  Beer money.  If you do, they ring you a big thank you on a triangle above the toasters!

In a bit of weather-weirdness, states across the South from Texas east, including Georgia and the Carolinas, had a snow storm yesterday, Friday the 12th of February 2010.  We start to see cars that have skidded off the highway, some into the gulley beside the highway, some into the grassy median strip.  Cars that look like they just couldn’t deal with the white stuff on the roads.  The roads are clear now, but they must have been dangerously icy in the last 12 or 24 hours — or these Southern drivers just can’t control themselves when it starts to snow and they just go crazy and drive off the road.

At some point yesterday I realized that we’d be driving down Interstate 26 between Columbia SC and Charleston SC, and we could consider stopping at Sweatman’s Bar-B-Que near Holly Hill, my favorite barbecue joint in the Carolinas.

Holly Hill is a small town along SC Highway 176 that runs parallel to I-26 for most of its length.  It’s the old Columbia to Charleston Highway.

In downtown Holly Hill, you turn onto Highway 431 toward Eutawville.  Sweatman’s is out in the country, all by itself, an old house surrounded by trees.

The house is late 19th or early 20th century.  Rustic and country, with lots of weathered wood and creaky old steps.  One on-line review said it resembled the house where they shot “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

It is still so much a house that you almost feel like an intruder when you open the front door, but the aroma of barbecue is everywhere.   (These rooms off to the right of the entranceway were closed off this Saturday afternoon.  A sign said RESERVED.  I immediately thought, It must be a wedding.  Or some other important event.  What a great place to celebrate.

So you’re inside.  Walk through the foyer and then look to your left.

It’s your basic cafeteria-style Carolina barbecue set-up.  Grab a styrofoam plate.

It’s hard (maybe impossible) to find this sort of barbecue up north.  And Sweatman’s has two fine sauces (including a mustard-vinegar that I crave), and it has great hash (the chopped pig parts that are simmered in a kind of soup that is usually spooned over rice), as well as light and dark meat pulled pork, ribs, and banana pudding.  This is heaven. Or lunch in heaven anyway.

After we go through the line twice, the cashier encourages me to wander back into the smoke house with my camera, although we soon figure out that probably not much is happening this late on a Saturday.  The barbecue is all cooked for this weekend.

But we go back anyway and meet Little John who stokes the coals, lays out the pigs, handles the ribs and skins in a separate room, and he’s happy to show us where everything happens even though nothing’s happening today.  He cooks the meat, and he makes the hash in a big metal cauldron in another room.

I’ve never seen snow at Sweatman’s before, and there’s not a lot of the white stuff left in the Carolina sunshine, but the pork here is still as sublime as I remembered.  The prices are still reasonable.

And I will look forward to my next visit whenever that may be.  This was a good stop.

Back in the van, we’re supposed to take I-95 south to Savannah but decide to avoid the interstate (packed with cars on this sunny Saturday) and we take Highway 17 into Georgia.  Good road.