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André Hueston Mack calls me from his car. “Wherever I go, I get interrupted. I’m paying rent on seven different locations, and this is the only place I have privacy.”
I had met Mack, the star sommelier and winemaker, not because of wine, exactly, but because of ham. More specifically, American ham, shaved to ethereal, prosciutto-thinness, that Mack placed in front of me arranged in fluffy bundles, each floral pink cloud telling a different story of a farm, a breed, a person nurturing and ageing the precious meat into existence.
I was sitting at & Sons, an intimate – that is, tiny – 20-seat Brooklyn bar that everyone, even Mack himself, referred to as the ‘Ham Bar’, and which had opened two months prior to the pandemic swiftly sweeping through and changing the world. But there was no jamón and no prosciutto on the menu, despite the thinness of the ham tricking my eye.
“When we became a new nation, Thomas Jefferson brought a Virginia ham to the King of France. He brought something representative of our new world,” Mack tells me later, from his car.
“That’s how distinctive and how great we thought of our ham back then. But we’ve never been part of the [ham] conversation.”
Mack has a point. I quickly scan the menus of other wine bars specialising in cured meats and their lists read like itineraries to Europe. Jamón iberico, prosciutto di Parma, jamón serrano. You might find a token American ham scattered among these European selections, and maybe their names are somewhat familiar to you – La Quercia, Benton’s – but you are unlikely to find charcuterie bars focused solely on American products.
