October means several things around here.  The weather gets cooler.  It also starts to rain again although its been unusually dry around here lately.  Then there is Octoberfest.  I’ve written about it before.  Every year around mid-October the town of Cleveland holds a big barbecue competition downtown.  Winners go on to participate in the World Barbecue Competition in Memphis.  There is also a street fair to go along with it.

Once again I volunteered to assist the judges.  The work mostly involved clearing tables and cleaning the rooms where the judging happened.  As a perk the officials give free food to those who help out.  Thus I had some of the best barbecue seafood, chicken, ribs, pulled pork and beans of my life.  Cooking really is an art form.  In the hands of a skilled chef, otherwise bland piles of dead animals can turn into pure gold.   The South is the home of American barbecue and it shows.  Down here, they take it seriously and the results are fantastic.  Its one of the major perks of living in this part of the country.

Most folks around here probably see things differently.  Octoberfest is one of the few times in the year when people gather and do something not related to Delta State or any of the other schools around here (with the Crosstie festival in April being the other).  Sure there’s Otherfest, the big music festival held every year on the edge of town.  However you have to be in to live music.  Plus most of the crowd is young, which means lots of students.  So its understandable why some people would not be enthusiastic about it.  The young and hip side of Cleveland, such that it is, is not for everyone.

In the past I’ve written about how cool Octoberfest is.  Within the context of Cleveland it certainly is a great event.  There is literally nothing else like it any other time of the year.  The Crosstie Festival is similar, but much smaller and there is no barbecue.  Its all about art and jazz.  Certainly there is plenty going on related to Delta State, especially in August and September.  However while the university is a big part of life around here, Cleveland is not entirely a college town.  So not everyone wants to attend the Pig Pickin’ or the football games (especially when Mississippi State and Ole Miss are playing – you can’t compete with the SEC around here).  But Octoberfest is a neutral event and held right in the center of town between the white and black parts of Cleveland.  There’s food vendors, beer, and live music.  Arts and crafts vendors line the walking trail.  Even though not everyone knows someone on a barbecue team it doesn’t really matter.  People who live around here can walk around with their friends and enjoy the festival.

In other words Octoberfest is a release.  Cleveland can be very dull at times.  Its not that there’s nothing to do, its that the things to do are limited and repetitive.  On any given Friday night I can go to Hey Joe’s and drink, go to Delta Meat market to eat and drink, maybe go to a restaurant for and hour or two and … well that’s it.  It gets old, especially when your not very sociable in the first place.  To be fair I have a strong preference to have pizza and go grocery shopping on Friday which predates my move to Mississippi.  All the same the variety of social activities around here is not great.  Partly for that reason people tend to stick together because the only other option is to sit quietly at home watching Netflix.  Not everyone wants to do so and in any case it gets old too.

Such is life in a small town.  Still I’ve managed to carve out an existence.  You have to in order to survive.  Being part of Delta State helps immensely.   So too does having a career in library information technology.  A lot of professors can’t easily find a job elsewhere.   But that’s how it goes in academia.  You go where the work is.  Life in Cleveland has its ups and its downs.  Soon the damp cold of Mississippi winters will take hold.  In the meantime us Clevelanders will bide our time waiting for the next festival.

In other words, I had high expectations.  There are a few reasons why it took me two years to actually get to Lost Pizza.   For the most part I don’t eat out.  And the few times I passed it, the place looked crowded.  My assumption was Lost Pizza was a sit down place like Pizza Hut where one could only order a whole pie.  But also – let’s be real – I couldn’t imagine it being all that great.

Eventually I realized I had to try it.  Lost Pizza is a Delta establishment and the purpose of my blog is to seek out the whole experience of living in the Delta.   So with my birthday being on Friday, I decided to give it a try.  With Delta State out of session and TFA long gone Cleveland is practically a ghost town.  Besides, it couldn’t be worse than the $1 flavored cardboard I usually buy from the supermarket on Friday night.

Let’s start with the basics.  Lost Pizza is actually one of those fast casual type of places.  You order at the counter and they bring your food out.  As it turns out they offer individual sized pizzas.  So while you have to order a whole pie, the smallest is only 8 inches wide.   Unfortunately pizza by the slice is rare outside the Northeast.   My guess is there just isn’t enough demand in places like Cleveland for the business model to make sense.  Yet given the size of a New York slice the actual amount of pizza in an individual pie is probably the same.   Lost Pizza also does take out so you don’t have to sit there if its too crowded.

The ambiance is good.  The place is set up like a sort of junkyard with all sorts of “lost and found” things hanging from the walls.  On one side they have a VW bus where kids take pictures.  Next to it is a Nintendo Wii hooked up to one of the TVs on the wall.  Many restaurants have televisions, but I’ve never seen a video game console before.  Its a nice touch.    The downside is the place does seem to attract a lot of families and kids.  Thankfully it was not crowded, but I’m not sure I’d want to be here on a busy day.  Fortunately there is always to take out option.

Ultimately I came to Lost Pizza for the food.   It was certainly edible.  I’ve always had a thing for thick crust and ordered their version of the meat lovers’ pizza, known as The Otis.  It packed plenty of flavor with ham, pepperoni, bacon, sausage, ground beef, and chicken.  The size and thickness were perfect.

That said, I’ve had better pizza.  First of all, putting so many toppings on an eight inch wide pizza was a bit much.  The cheese, which for some reason was on top of the meat instead of the other way around, slid off easily.  I don’t mean to say the cheese was in the semi-liquid state it usually is on pizza.  Rather it simple came off the bread along with most of the meat.  Lost Pizza doesn’t say what kind of cheese they use, but it tastes different than what I’ve had up North.   Thankfully they gave me a fork, but pizza is supposed to be a hands on experience.  The bread was better.  It was plenty soft with a crispy outside, but it was kind of dry.  All the meat also made the pizza very salty.  I spent the rest of the night drinking glasses of water.  Admittedly I’d had a salami/pepperoni sandwich for lunch.  So take my complaint with, well, a grain of salt.

Probably the item which stands out the most is their dessert pizza.  No you did not just hallucinate those words.  Lost Pizza has several dessert pies.  They had a standard crust, but rather than cheese and sauce were topped with fruit and icing.  I had their Strawberry Fields pizza.  It was the same size as my dinner.  Surprisingly it was not very sweet and simply topped with strawberries and what tasted a little bit like cream cheese icing.   The concept is innovative.  I liked it.

Overall it wasn’t a bad experience.  Lost Pizza was on par with Sbarro and  Uno Chicago Grill.  Most people from New York would consider those words an insult, but this is not the Big Apple.   Its not reasonable to expect people with no history of pizza to make the best slices on the planet.  The same holds true of barbecue up North, which I suspect many Southerners would not be impressed with.  In the context of the Delta, Lost Pizza is good.  I put it in the same category as the Italian ice one of the local establishments sells from its ice cream machines.  Perfectly acceptable given where we are, but not the real thing.

Some may disagree which is perfectly fine.  As I said earlier the only other pizza available is from fast food places and Pizza Hut.  In my opinion the actual food is not much better at Lost Pizza.  However the place has character the other ones don’t.  It’s also a locally owned and operated establishment.  Down here, that counts for a lot.  Any locally owned business is something to be proud of, especially in a place as impoverished as the Delta.  So while it may not be Valley Pizza or Turiello’s its still a good establishment, one worth visiting again.

Social life down here tends to go as follows. There will be long periods of little activity. Then all of a sudden there’s an event or two and the whole town comes out.  One of those happened last week.  On Thursday the Chamber of Commerce held the first ever Cleveland Bites Food Festival.  It attracted a surprisingly large crowd and really drove home how much the town has to offer relative to its size.

The festival was setup in an alley way downtown.  Each restaurant had a table or booth with samples of what they offer.  There were about ten and the range of food varied from pulled pork to chili, shrimp and grits and pumpkin cheese cake.  It was mostly of the sample sized variety, but there was enough to fill an entire plate.  Sadly I did not take pictures. Live music, courtesy of Delta State, provided an excellent compliment.  I saw some friends and had a good time.  They even had outdoor heaters which made the chilly night more

pleasant. The only downside was the shortage of tables.

Southern food has a certain reputation.  People say folks down here deep fry everything.  They say the food is boring and generic and unhealthy.  Northerners point to Fried Chicken, Fried Twinkies, Fried Snickers bars, Fried Oreos, and Deep fried steak as examples.

An important point, however, is that barbecue is not about the sauce.  The word really refers to how the meat is cooked and oftentimes it is served with no sauce at all.  The typical ingredients are pork or beef (although that can vary) and they are cooked over wood in a smoker for as long as a day.  That’s where you get that great smokey flavor from.  The sauce is an addition.  For me it’s an important one.  I’m a huge fan of sauces in general because they add flavor beyond the simple taste of meat.  But others may beg to differ.

The equipment is different too.  This is another misconception people have concerning barbecue.   Up North we tend to equate the word with grilling over an open flame.  However grilling is not the same as barbecuing. The basic difference is that the former is done over a fire where as the latter is more about smoking meat at a lower temperature.  So the barbecues down here look sort of like oil drums with exhaust pipes.  And they never use propane.  No one has told me it’s sacrilege, but you would not get the same flavor with gas.

So by now you are probably wondering where the best barbecue joints are around the Delta.  In the last week I’ve been to two one down in Greenville called the Shotgun House and another on the edge of Cleveland called Airport Grocery (at one time it was located over by the airport hence the name).   They did not disappoint.   At APG I had ribs so tender the meat practically fell off the bone as I bit into them.  They cook there’s St. Louis style which means the sauce is one the side and the ribs are cooked with a dry rub. You’d think ribs cooked without sauce would be dried out but they were actually really good.  Sadly I did not take a picture (yes I know shame on me!).   The Shotgun house also served their pulled pork with sauce on the side.  That definitely seems to be the style around here.  It tends to emphasize the flavor of the meat and the smoke above all.   It’s also less messy.

With warmer weather approaching there will no doubt be more barbecue.  And there will be festivals.  With any luck I’ll be invited to one of those parties.  Even if that is not the case a competition needs judges.  In the mean time here are some pictures of place I’ve been to.

This little place is on Highway 49 just South of Jackson.  The food was amazing.

First of all there are the people.   New Yorkers are known for being pushy and aggressive.  Before moving I took that for granted.  But after six months of living in the South I have gotten used to a slower pace of life. The difference was immediately obvious upon getting off the plane.  As I weaved my way through the crowds at LaGuardia Airport the energy and the way people rush about immediately struck me.  Folks in Mississippi, and even the airport in Memphis, tend not to move any where fast unless there is an emergency. Personally I find that refreshing although there is something infectious about New York’s energy.

I’m also going to miss the stores up here.  Ironically I did little shopping, having only a limited amount of money to spend.   But it is incredibly refreshing to know that stores and shops can be counted on to be open past 5 PM and on Sundays.  And the variety is great as well.  You see the Delta is virtually devoid of chain stores and restaurants.  Walmart is well represented and there’s some well known stores down in Greenville. But for a lot if things the only answer is Amazon.

And speaking of restaurants, the New York area simply has much better food.  There’s pizza and bagels of course.  But the incredible diversity means that nearly every cuisine is represented somewhere around here. My personal favorite is Indian food, something which exists no where in the Delta.  Down there, food tends to be relatively homogeneous.  You have your fast food chains and standard American fare.  But a lot of stuff is deep fried, deep fried, deep fried.  That’s not always a bad thing.  For example I am a huge fan of deep fried steak.  But there is no getting around the fact that some of the stereotypes surrounding Mississippi and food are actually true.

So living in Cleveland has required some sacrifices, albeit of things which are not really important to life. Like shopping and eating out.   Still it has a great sense of community and people are very friendly.  And the job is excellent.  But there is a lot the area lacks.  For now that is an acceptable trade off for personal and professional growth.  The future, however, may very well be different.