Poured Over: Mason Hereford on Turkey and the Wolf

Miwa Messer

“I think about food constantly, but more so than anyone else it’s the people I work with who are inspiring me now…. I’m always inspired by the people I cook with, and the people I work with in the restaurants, and they’re, you know, they’re the ones who are inspiring me most right now, because they’re making it all happen” Chef and restaurant owner, Mason Hereford’s new cookbook Turkey and the Wolf: Flavor Trippin’ in New Orleans is full of flavorful, fun recipes and beautiful photos that will delight any appetite. Mason talks about cooking with nostalgia, vintage McDonald’s plates, what his day in the restaurants looks like, what’s inspiring him in the kitchen now, and more with Poured Over guest host Kat Sarfas.

Featured Books (episode)

Turkey and the Wolf: Flavor Trippin’ in New Orleans by Mason Hereford

Without Getting Killed or Caught by Tamara Saviano

This episode of Poured Over was produced and hosted by Kat Sarfas and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode:

B&N

Hello, I’m Kat Sarfas, forever bookseller at Barnes and Noble today we are joined by Mason Hereford Mason is the owner of Turkey and the Wolf and Molly’s Rise and Shine in New Orleans. His debut cookbook, Turkey and the Wolf: Flavor Trippin’ in New Orleans, brings the delectable down home Southern food from his award-winning restaurant straight to you. Mason’s style is irreverent, fun and joyful and I’m so happy he’s joining us today. Mason, welcome. Thank you so much for being with us.

Mason Hereford

Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor, I’m pumped.

B&N

I love that you begin your cookbook with this sort of origin story that centers around, like, a bad sandwich and it’s a sandwich that I think for many of us was like a staple growing up. Obviously for you here it’s this like basic bologna sandwich made with white bread, floppy meat, yellow mustard. When I read it, I like laughed out loud because it was, like, for me it was this tuna sandwich that I ate. It was like this tuna sandwich, white bread. It was always my mom made it with either not enough mayo or too much mayo. I think I ate it, like, every day. I think that, you know, whatever it is, for better or worse. I think we have these sort of like food memories of our youth and how they kind of shaped how we eat today. You know, how we make food for the rest of our lives. So tell us about this sort of evolution you have from gas station bologna sandwiches to the bologna at the Turkey and the Wolf.

Yeah, so the sandwich I grew up with, the crappy one. For us yeah, you know, if you like on the way to swimming in like this swimming hole we used to go to this one gas station, we’d stop and get this bologna sandwich and it was just like, you know, the flabby, cold bologna not fried in a pan which, even as a kid didn’t bother me as much. With yellow mustard, which for some reason I only liked yellow mustard on like, on McDonald’s burgers. I had it on other stuff. But like I just I hadn’t grown into it yet. Now I like every food. But yeah, bologna and yellow mustard on, like soft, like stick to the roof of your mouth white bread, I just could not get behind as a kid and kept popping up. So to make it choke-downable, I would put as much potato chips because I think I saw my mom putting chips in her hers or something and then I realized that like that was the way out of this mess was to put so many chips in there that I could just think about crunchy chips and you know, the other flavors would fade away a little bit. But fast forward 30 years or whatever, open Turkey and the Wolf with my buddies. We had a list in my phone of like tons and tons of dishes that we wanted to serve. Some of them made it on the menu, some of them had to be tweaked dramatically in order to be ready to serve to the general public. The bologna sandwich as written was good to go. And basically what it is, is we got a bologna made by a friend that doesn’t taste anything like the bologna you’re used to. It kind of has these cool pate spices. It’s almost closer to what you think of mortadella. But it’s smoked in it’s case like bologna, and it’s just super good. It’s made by some friends of mine, Leanne and Dan, who have a butcher shop and restaurant called Piece of Meat in New Orleans. So good bologna, we got a mustard recipe from my friend’s mom, that’s the best mustard I’ve ever tasted that I’ve been able to recreate using her recipe. We got the chips in there, American cheese and lettuce, some usual suspects. And then we got a really awesome bread that a local baker named David Weiss based off of our old white bread recipe that he recreated for us. We cut the bread really thick and we butter it. So basically we took that idea of the sandwich that didn’t appeal to me as a kid, and we decided to make everything the best we could make it with the help of a lot of different people that are good and talented in their own fields. And when we put it together, it was like finally we got out of where we started when I was a kid. The long answer is we used really awesome ingredients and it turned out alright.

B&N

So you talked about these muses and this you know this evolution of the sandwich but you also talked about some other muses: junk food, fancy grandma, grandmommy, your mom. So what are some of your favorite memories with them, and sort of creating these food memories?

Yeah, there was kind of a dynamic there. My dad grew up in a family a little more highfalutin, I think is the word I use in the book. My mom came from southwest Virginia, and grew up,I don’t know, in a different setting. And I guess the way we ate at the house fell somewhere in between but at my dad’s mom, my grandmother Anne, at her house, we’d have fried chicken and mac and cheese and corn pudding. And a lot of, there’s a chapter in the book that sort of pays homage to that dining style, like the Thanksgiving type sides that I’m obsessed with thanksgiving, or I like to call it Thanksgiving, I feel like we’re getting past Thanksgiving, all that but whatever. That holiday that is currently based around food. And then my mom, a really key memory is her mom, Grandmommy, who’s still kicking at 90 years old, she is a total badass. We went all the way up to Virginia to her recent birthday party, at which she just got in her truck and drove home, like two hours. And I was like, wow, that’s a badass 90 year old woman. She was like the life of the party. Very, very impressive. But she used to do this thing where she would stroll by the fridge, open up the door and grab some like, hamburger meat, like from the grocery store, and just put salt and pepper on it and eat it by the hunk. I just didn’t know that that was the thing that you’re allowed to do when I was a kid. I still I’m not sure I completely recommend it even at this time. But I do I mean, as a fan of beef tartare at restaurants, it was a thing. But that kind of shows the, I don’t know, that dynamic. But my formative food memories I think we’re like on the way to school if we missed the bus and didn’t have time to you know— we’re missing the bus we already late so there wasn’t some breakfast, amount of time to figure out what we’re going for breakfast. And we would stop at the country store near her house. And my mom would be like get in there and get some stuff let’s go to school. And she wouldn’t ask any questions and she kind of looked the other way on the way to school and I’d always get Doritos and a Snickers bar and Dr. Pepper and these types of things and eat them at 7 in the morning and it was just the greatest thing ever.

B&N

Of course because I feel like if you’re just given free rein as a kid to go and be like get what you want like of course that’s what you’re gonna get.

It was the best, I loved it so much.

B&N

I feel like every morning, I go through these motions even though like, I know what he’s gonna say and then I have this like, argument with him like, can we have can we have fruit? Can we have something else, to my son, I’m always like, what you want for breakfast. And right now we’re in a Ritz crackers phase, like, that’s what he wants: Ritz crackers, and like apple juice. And I’m just like, Okay, can we add like a fruit? Can we do like, we gotta do something else and it’s like, that’s what he wants. And I imagined like, if I let him, it would be like Ritz crackers, apple juice.

Perhaps one day he’ll be, you know, cooking in a perhaps domestic or professional setting and be like, you know, I really want to reproduce this flavor from my youth, then there’ll be Ritz crackers, and he’ll be like chasing that Ritz crackers dragon. As he as he figures out what he’s going to eat when he discovers substances that make you starving or whatever. What I will say about the junk food thing is obviously, you know, a lot of people like to cook with nostalgia, and I’m gonna fall in that category too. I don’t know if you can hear that my neighbor’s doing something wild. But it’s not like I’m just like, oh, I grew up on Doritos so everything I cook is gonna be garnished with Doritos. But I will say that I think it has informed my cooking style, which is like flavors dialed up as high as I can get them more like loud flavors, than sort of a more refined approach that I also have done in the past, but it’s not where I find myself cooking for myself with the house. It’s not like, having cooked and fine dining for, you know, 12 plus years. I’m not super technique driven, despite how much experience I have. And I like to sort of ditch the extra steps and go straight for the Doritos, if you will, or something that’s like really big in flavor. That’s sort of more my style.

B&N

No, but I love it. I think that it is and there’s like that, you know, that mix of having having those memories and it’s like, you know what, that foundation, whatever it is, whether it be junk food, whether it be you know, higher, I don’t know, what do you say highfalutin, you know, like, kind of style and then, you know, skills and things you pick up along the way and it just kind of all comes together beautifully. I have so many, I mean, I grew up, my friends who had these, you know, like wonderful Italian grandmas and they would cook these insane meals. And I would come over and I wouldn’t even like know how to make heads or tails of like everything that was in front of me. It’s like that and like everything, you know, come comes together, I think about like when I’m cooking now, it is, you can find like traces of all that stuff. So okay, so those, you know, early inspiration, early muses so who’s who’s inspiring you now?

I think a lot of people, I think about food constantly, but more so than anyone else it’s the people I work with are inspiring me now. Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed this about chefs or restaurant owners that the longer they’re in the game, and the more they end up on Barnes and Noble’s podcast, the less they are actually able to, you know, cook on the line. So we have lots and lots of meetings about food, we talk about dishes, but more often than not, it’s the people I work with who are coming up with them. I’m in the conversation, but they’re leading the charge on some of these new ideas we come up with, so I’m always inspired by the people I cook with, and the people I work with, in the restaurants. And they’re, you know, they’re the ones who are inspiring me most right now, because they’re making it all happen.

B&N

That’s awesome. And that is actually what I was going to talk about, I want to talk about next, was one of the things that really stuck with me with this book is this sort of sense of family that you have in your two restaurants. So I love that you call out—

One thing I will say is any workplace that says they’re a family is suspect. So I’m trying to put that out there without saying it because I don’t trust people that say, you know that sometimes, but yes. I hope we all love each other as I seem to think we do.

B&N

There you go, so this sense of community with this, I think you phrased it like it’s like it’s a community of misfits, you know, cooking in the kitchen. Take me through, like an average day, if you’re not doing a Barnes & Noble podcast, and you’re going into the restaurant, take me through sort of what’s your day? What’s what’s going on?

What’s my day? Man, I guess it really depends on if, you know, the grease trap is messed up like it was last week, like on a really good day where my involvement is limited, which is very possible, because as I said, the people that run the restaurants now are no longer so much me. And they’re better at it than I ever was. So it’s, it’s a good situation for me. But I’d start my day you know, wake up next to my wife, maybe do a Wordle, get the Wordle out of the way. We have a group text of the cooks at Turkey and the Wolf who also do Wordle, it’s a group of five of us. It’s an accountability text.

B&N

So it’s a competition, then?

Ah, no, no, not so much a competition as when somebody gets it in like two tries or something really good like that. Or, God forbid, one try. That probably wouldn’t, that you know, you get like a clap or whatever. And then if you know, the rare time where you don’t get the word, there’ll be some gifs like a patting you on the back. I think it’s about making sure everybody gets to their Wordle. And then feeling celebrated when they do well and supported when they fail, which is inevitable that sometimes you’re gonna miss your Wordle, and you got to you got to get there, you gotta understand that

B&N

it happens, it happens.

So after that, me or the wife, or ideally, both of us, which never ever happens would take the dog, Darla, for a walk, she’s over there. And then I would go check in at Molly’s I spend more of my time at Turkey and the Wolf, our sandwich restaurant than at Molly’s, our breakfast place. Because my wife was the front of the house manager up until recently at Molly’s so she was the other owner. So there was like, you know, she’d be at one and I’d be at the other. And we’re trying to eventually expand to a new restaurant. And we want to make sure that she’s fully replaced. So that’s not what’s happening now. But the people that run Molly’s do such a good job, and I just I get in the way. And if they’re really busy, they asked me to get out of the way, if they’re a little less busy, we have a nice conversation, I get a sweet tea, and then I’ll run food to a couple of tables, talk to some people. And then I’ll head over to Turkey and the Wolf where I spend most of my time for the day. Right now we’ve been recipe testing fried chicken. So the first thing I eat almost every day is fried chicken for the last 10 days in a row, which is equal parts wondrous and sort of like, terrifying from a health perspective. And then Nate, who’s like sort of the co-chef and I talk about why the chicken still isn’t where we need it and what we did wrong this time around. And then Phil who’s working on more refined dishes for a future restaurant project, we’ll meet and talking about the dishes that he’s working on. And yesterday that was a chicken piccata flavored butter for a bread and butter plate, which was really cool. And he’s crushing it and that dish is literally blowing my mind and I’m really proud of that. And then by 11 o’clock, they’ll be ready to have the line set up, I’ll, you know, say hi to the front of the house and do some high fives and whatever, they’ll tell me what’s going good or bad. And the restaurant will open, at which case I’ll walk around and look busy or disappear and go run errands. And then a bunch of stuff will happen between 11 to four or until 2 at Molly’s, when Molly’s closes. There’s service you know, yada yada, I either am a part of it or I’m not. And then at 4, 430 When the kitchen is clean, the front of house is swept and mopped, etc. We, we sit on a patio and have beers and make jokes. Sometimes it’s two of us, or 10 of us, the whole team. And then they usually go down the street to Barrel Proof, the bar where they continue to have fun and we continue to sort of half talk about work half not, you never really escape it. But you know, you always kind of want to talk about it. And then that’s like an average, really good day. Bad day. It’s like grease trap overflows. It’s like a health disaster. We want to shut down the restaurant forever. There’s a hurricane, we want to move to Maine. And you know, but that’s those are a few between.

B&N

Yeah, those are few and far between. But no, but those are always interesting days. All right. So I don’t know how, like, I can’t, I gotta ask you this question. Because it’s been it’s been like killing me. I need to talk about the plates. I need to talk about McDonald’s plate. I ate off those plates for like the entirety of my childhood. I’m pretty sure my mom still has them although I think that my sister may have stolen a few before I was able to steal them. That’s the downside of being the baby of the family. I feel like I get like, you know, like the dregs. So I don’t know. I need to know everything. I need to know like, the why the where, the how. How’d you get them? Where did you find them? What made you decide to have them?

Um, well, it’s the easy answers. Where’d I get them was eBay. So that’s one word answer.

B&N

Yeah, figuring I was like eBay.

We do have 200 of them. So I would not be surprised that we have one of the larger collections of vintage plastic McDonald’s plates that exists in the world. I mean, I’m sure somebody has more. But generally, you know, I just look for good deals on like, lots of plates on eBay. And you know, if I’m lucky, I can find them for less than five bucks apiece. But yeah, now we’re up to 200. We’ve been collecting them for you know, we’ve been open for six years as of a month ago. The original idea came from our glassware. So we opened with just buying plates from thrift stores, there’s a lot of restaurants do, you make like a cool hodgepodge set of dishes that if they break, it’s not the end of the world. Low investment and they look neat and they’re in histology etc. So we started out that way as a lot of restaurants do. And all the furniture from inside Turkey and the Wolf and the opening glassware, my mom, my mom bought all of it at thrift stores and antique shops. And you know things such as this in and around Virginia where I’m from so in like rural Virginia outside Charlottesville. I went up there for Christmas and she was like, What do you want for Christmas? Everybody gets something that’s $200 for Christmas. And she bought me a $400 table for Turkey in the Wolf, which was double what you’re supposed to get for Christmas which was pretty cool of her. She kept texting me pictures of tables. What do you call that stuff, Formica tables with via a lot of times with the chrome edges, we found one and I was like, that’d be so cool. If all the tables were these colorful tables. She continued to find them one at a time and store in like this dilapidated shed outside of her house. She would text me and be like, how do you feel about this one? A couple of them, you know, I sent her money for, a couple she just bought on her own, which was very kind of her. And she collected all the opening tables and chairs for the entirety of the opening of Turkey and the Wolf. And she put it on the back of a pickup truck with rope. And her sister and her drove down from Virginia, 15 hours to New Orleans looking like what is like the Clampetts truck. She drove all the way down there with a you know, like 20 foot high stack of tables and chairs and then it started raining halfway through and she had to get a tarp and all this stuff. And then all that stuff lived in the hallway of my apartment for six to eight months while we’re trying to open Turkey and the Wolf. We put it inside, it looks really great and it’s all still there today. And all of Turkey and the Wolf sort of came together this way of people adding in and it all just, you know, it’s kind of just found objects everywhere. But she also found a lot of cups at a store that are the old that you could get at fast food restaurants that have the cartoons on the glassware, the old Disney characters and Looney Tunes and these type of things. She found someone who was selling them, and they had 80 cups, and she was able to buy all 80 of the cups for $1 or $1.50 or $2 apiece, depending on you know how they valued the cartoon on the outside of the glassware. And so that was our opening glassware and like, people were taking pictures of them, they thought it was really neat. We were all obsessed with them since then they’ve all broken or, you know, walked out the door. People would bring in those glasses, they had some at their house. They’re like, Oh, I don’t need this anymore. You guys have this cool collection. And then someone eventually brought in a McDonald’s plastic plate that I was so into that I was wondering if there were more out there because I didn’t know the Ronald McDonald ones we had like some Disney ones and some other ones that we had bought at McDonald’s. But I didn’t know that there was these really awesome ones with Ronald McDonald’s face on them and like Grimace and all these characters interacting. And it turns out there’s hundreds of different designs.

B&N

So what other 90s nostalgia are you gonna bring back? I think I saw a photo of you with some sort of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle wall or a curtain behind you.

Yeah. So over the quarantine part of the current COVID pandemic we had to, you got to stock up on a lot of to-go stuff. Now our dining room was closed for a long time. So it was just sort of the dining room evolved into a massive closet to get back open we had to rectify that situation. And we basically bought you know, a massive shelving, shelf I guess, to put boxes, to-go boxes and other like to-go silverware because we knew when we opened we were still going to have like a high percentage of to-go business. So to cover it up, to block it from the dining room we got the big Ninja Turtle sheet that a lot of people recognize from either their bed or sleeping in a friend’s house. Everyone’s seen it if you didn’t have it, you saw it. I found that sheet of this amazing store in Mid City, New Orleans called Junks Above. This guy collects all these really cool toys. We use them a lot to decorate our breakfast restaurant, which is sort of like a totally inspired by 80s and 90s toys. But yeah, we got it at Junks Above and that’s the Ninja Turtles 90s sheet that is just so epic and so nostalgic.

B&N

I love it. I love it. Okay, all right, I’m gonna get back. I’m gonna go back to the cookbook. What was the inspiration to create it? So you collaborated with the great, JJ Goode, your brother did the photography. So this is obviously a personal experience for you— how’d that start?

I guess we had some pretty good accolades at the beginning of Turkey and the Wolf, which was, you know, we, we didn’t know it was coming. And it was sort of a really special thing for us. And after that people were like, Oh, you’re gonna write a cookbook? And I was like, No, I don’t. I mean…

B&N

that’s just like the next step?

People that sell cookbooks were the ones asking, like, Hey, are you interested? They saw an opening there, I guess, because we had received some fanfare. Fast forward a few years, I’m already friends with JJ Goode because he moved to New Orleans for a while and he would eat a Coquette a lot and he was friends with my brother. So there was a connection there we’d go hang out and go out to dinner from time to time. And I just looked up to him, I thought it was so cool. He had written the Pok Pok cookbook when you know, and some other books that I had in my collection as I was just starting to cook so he was sort of like a celebrity in my eyes when we became buddies. And he was friends with my brother who’s done a lot of photographs for cookbooks and he’s a photographer, a professional photographer, more talented and more established than I am a cook. So it was very natural that if we did a book it would be with my brother Will and Will and JJ basically said hey, it’s time like you’re in a position where you got something to say, you have enough recipes. We all want to work together let’s do it. And I was like, you guys say so. Let’s do it. So it wasn’t some burning desire within me to create a book even though creating is very fun. They said I was ready so then I was ready. JJ worked on a proposal using some photos my brother had already taken for a couple of articles that we had done together. And for some pictures that he had taken for me to use on our website. And we shopped it around, we used JJ’s agent, Kim Witherspoon, and she got us hooked up with 10 Speed and then you know, we made a book. But yeah, it came into being because two very talented people told me that it was time and I said, Okay, well, you guys are both saying it. Um, I guess I guess I’ll do it.

B&N

Well, it’s, it’s great. I mean, like, the photos, the photography is obviously brilliant, the writing it’s, I find myself like reading it like a book. Like I mean, obviously, you’re reading for recipes. And it’s, you know, it’s like fun to be like, I’ve been trying to make this. But there’s so many great stories in there. That I think it’s it’s sort of like transcends just cookbook. So

Thank you so much for saying that, I will add that you can read it cover to cover in like, half an hour. Minus the, minus the recipe steps. There’s a lot of that.

B&N

But no, I thought it was great. I love that. I love the, obviously, the nostalgia of it, the names everything. It’s just really great. So now, you touched upon this a little bit before when we were talking about, you know, what’s your typical day and things that you’re working on? But I was going to ask you, so like, what’s next? And you kind of talked about chicken. Fried chicken. I was like, is it working on new recipes, new sandwich testings, and you kind of touched upon that. So I’m gonna ask you, so what about this chicken?

What’s next? Ideally, we will have learned to make fried chicken. We’re not opening a fried chicken restaurant. But we have a few ideas of how to make our next move as a team. We have two chefs at Turkey and the Wolf and two chefs and Molly’s Rise and Shine, our breakfast, they’re both they sort of co-run the kitchen. And they have put so much in the restaurants, they’re all very good at their jobs and so creative and talented and you know, their managerial skills are also really impressive. And it’s sort of time for everyone to level up, be it move on or do whatever else. And we’ve decided whether that that is the restaurant, sort of helping them, supporting them, as they move on to their next role, whatever it should be, or if we want to open up a restaurant together. And we have decided the latter if all the cards fall into place. So the two chefs at Turkey and the Wolf are Nate and Phil. Nate is from rural Alabama, and is interested in opening up a meat and three style restaurant, what we would call down here a plate lunch joint. And he’s got the culinary chops and the you know, the southern accent and the skill to pull it off. Phil is a little more interested in cooking refined food he took over the kitchen of a fine dining restaurant I used to work at after I did so we have a history of cooking some more refined dishes together. So he’s interested in opening a place that’s a little more wine and cocktail focused but has a menu where you’re charging, you know, 15 to $25, rather than 5 to 12 like we are at Turkey and the Wolf and using some of those ingredients that we don’t have access to because of our price point or the casual nature of what we do. So we’re currently on the hunt for a restaurant location that serves one of those two needs, whichever one we find, that chef will move on, the other chef will sort of take over the lead role, rather than sharing it at Turkey and the Wolf. And then our next sous chef in line will will move up to co-chef, and then at Molly’s because Liz and Colleen already run the place without me, they’re gonna they’re gonna come on as owners so that they, you know, they’ll just own the place and run it without they won’t be like, wonder what Mason thinks about this.

B&N

Yeah, “this is what we think about it.”

And eventually, you know the restaurant industry is tough, it’s a weird time. And this is this could be a two year plan or it could be a 10 year plan. That’s the ideal future as we’re currently discussing.

B&N

That’s amazing. Oh so many good things like future like all good things, sending you all the good vibes. So now I have a personal question. Where does a girl in Brooklyn find Duke’s mayonnaise?

I don’t know, it’s up there though. I don’t know which grocery store has it. But I know the the wholesale purveyors are supplying it to a few restaurants because we’ve now done more than a couple, we’ve probably done like 4 events in New York and each time they’ve been able to source Duke’s mayonnaise, they might sell it at Meat Hook butcher. So we just did an event at Meat Hook and they got us a bunch of Dukes they might actually sell it. They have a retail section at their butcher shop at the Meat Hook in Williamsburg. Maybe try there, if they don’t have Dukes, they have incredible sausages and cuts of meat and sustainable beef and chicken and lamb and pork and etc.

B&N

Oh, that’s amazing. I’m gonna say my, I think my favorite dish and your book is the Collard Green Melt.

That is one of the more popular things

B&N

For a reason! I was just, I was like when, I was reading it and trying to obviously create it and I love the idea of like the “soaker slice”. This is what every sandwich needs, like anything runny.

The club sandwich middle slice there for a different reason. Yeah, to get soggy.

B&N

I love it. I love it. And also on a personal note. So I’m a vegetarian, and I love that there’s like veggie sandwiches in here and they’re awesome. I mean, obviously the collard green melt but also, like so many ways you can just obviously adapt recipes but then my other shout out has got to be the sweet potato burrito. It’s just delicious.

That one’s got Colleen written all over it. One of the chefs at Molly’s, those that combination of flavors was born in her brain.

B&N

Yeah, I love it. I had ordered, it was like a Mexican restaurant and they were doing it around here and they do breakfast and they have a tater tot burrito. I mean it’s obviously not Mexican but they have a tater tot burrito right now and it’s delicious. So when I opened this and I saw I was like yea, with french fries, like sweet potato waffle fries in a burrito like this is what we need more of.

This was awesome. You know who does awesome Tex Mex tater tots and tater tots tacos is Redheaded Stranger in Nashville. You should check it out. It’s super good.

B&N

Okay, anything. If you’re telling me, like tater tot burritos just blew my mind? It’s now, it’s like tater tot tacos. I should just like continue my tater tots sandwich.

Then there’s the pun, the totchos.

B&N

Just, I’m just gonna, I’m gonna have like a food, a food journey, like a food road trip where I just fine like tater tot sandwiches.

Sounds perfect.

B&N

Alright, so my last question for you. I love to because it’s fun and we’re Barnes and Noble. I believe like, you know, what we’re reading kind of says a lot about us or what we’re watching. I love to absorb culture, whether it be books, you know, other media. So I love to ask people what they’re currently reading, as feels like it’s a little window into who we are. So obviously, you’re very busy. But what are you reading? What are you currently reading or watching or you know, doing when you’re not running two restaurants and everything else that you’re doing?

Well, they run themselves due to the team, but I am there. And I am terrible at reading, my reading comprehension couldn’t be worse. But I listened to a ton of books. And when I do open up a book, I open this one which happens to be sitting right next to me just when you ask Without Getting Killed or Caught. It’s about Guy Clark, who I love. I don’t know if this is appropriate, but I got Guy Clark right here. So you know, there’s that. And that’s pretty amazing. And I’ve been meaning to watch, there’s a documentary that you can only watch by going to a website and renting it on Guy Clark. And I think there’s a really good Townes Van Zandt documentary on one of the streaming platforms that I’ve also been meaning to watch. But I love that old music my old man who is now deceased, he was obsessed with that music. And it’s affected my whole family. And you know, it’s being obsessed with that and the Grateful Dead and stuff like that is a way that we all connect with him still.

B&N

I love it and that photo that you have, it’s in your book. Now I was like I feel like I just have it. And it’s so great just the way the way it’s set up with like the sandwich and him holding the sandwich and the PBR can and it’s so great.

And my brother, if you look at that picture, the way that he composed the photograph, the background behind where the painting is positioned is where the photo was taken. So as the power lines drift off the page, you can see the power lines before it and the top of the house behind it. That’s like a cool little thing. I don’t know what’s the word— meta?

B&N

I wanted to say that and I was like, Hey, I don’t want to say but, but it is sometimes you just gotta you just gotta I call it what it is. All right, Mason, thank you again. This has been wonderful, Turkey and the Wolf: Flavor Trippin’ in New Orleans is out now. I highly suggest you get it and make everything in it. Including the Bologna right here. Lots of chips. No sandwich is complete without without being just stuffed with chips. Wonderful Mason, thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you. Sorry that someone’s been weed whacking outside my window the whole time. So hopefully it hasn’t been so bad but it’s been super fun talking to you.

Poured Over