Homecoming Queen

It's late August, which for Americans means one thing: back to school. And with back to school comes homecoming. For those of you who didn't grow up with it, homecoming is a week or so at the start of the school year built around one football game, the one you play on your own field. There's the homecoming game, the homecoming dance, the homecoming court, and a homecoming king and queen. Football is a big part of American culture, and homecoming is the part that welcomes everybody back. End of summer, start of fall, everyone home again.

So why throw a homecoming in Hong Kong, in a flat, with no football in sight?

Social Currency, an IG account I follow, posted about the Return of Civic Pride back in June. Their argument: the internet was supposed to make geography matter less. Instead, it may have made it matter more. When everyone has access to the same content, the same shows, and the same Odyssey memes, where you're from becomes the one thing the feed can't flatten.

This summer was the proof. The Knicks won their first title in 53 years and New York didn't just celebrate a basketball team, it celebrated itself. The World Cup landed in North America and the best content of the tournament wasn't the football. It was the Japanese discovering Texas, Scotland outdrinking Boston, and Germans calling Taco Bell the holy land. From Yankees hats to your local coffee shop's merch, wearing where you're from is cool again.

The post's takeaway is that none of this is really about sports or clothes. It's about belonging. In a world where everything is available everywhere, people want to feel connected to something that is specifically theirs.

So that's the why now. And if you're going to throw a party about being proud of where you're from, there's really only one American format built for exactly that: homecoming. The whole ritual is a town welcoming its own people back and saying, "Haven't seen you in a while. Welcome back."

That was the idea for this edition of the Backyard Izakaya Potluck, and the brief was simple. Bring a dish that tastes like home: your home country, your hometown, or your childhood. A family recipe, the thing you ate every day after school, whatever comes to mind. Plus the short story behind it.

Every homecoming has a court, and ours had about ten people on it.

The table ended up more international than your average alumni weekend, where you say hi to people you haven't seen since the last time you set foot on campus. Then again, that's Hong Kong. We had civic pride from America, Italy, Romania, Switzerland, South Africa, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, the UK, China, and of course Hong Kong. I'd argue I've done more for US-Sino relations in one evening than anyone since the bilateral effort known as Rush Hour, led by Ambassadors Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker.

Raluca brought the one prop that made the whole thing click: the royal blue backdrop that every American school portrait has been shot against since roughly 1985. Put a group of adults in front of that color and they turn sixteen again. The price of entry was an embarrassing high school photo, which we compared against the retakes below. Some of us have improved. Some of us peaked.

Yearbook done. Now for the part every homecoming is actually about, which in our case was the food, not the football.

Appetizers

Mains

Desserts

We were stuffed, to say the least. But the brief wasn't just bring a dish. It was bring the story behind it. Everyone told theirs at the table. Here's mine.

This one is nostalgic for me because it's probably the first thing I ever cooked for my family, and the dish that made them realize I could cook at all. The recipe is Chef John's, from Food Wishes, and this is the original 2007 version. Nineteen years since I first made it. YouTube was barely two years old, and this was about as informative as the platform got, at a time when the big hits were Potter Puppet Pals investigating the Mysterious Ticking Noise and kids across the nation cranking that Soulja Boy.

I watched it and thought: wait, that's it? Sear some meat, throw it in a slow cooker, walk away, and dinner is ready when you get back. I mean, how easy is that? He's since redone the recipe as a slow cooker version, and that's the one I actually use now. The video quality is better, but more than that, it hammers home the one step that matters: sear the meat properly before it goes anywhere near the oven or the slow cooker.

The pivot this time was the cut. A proper chuck roast is surprisingly hard to find in Hong Kong. What I could find was beef heel. So, as we all do, I worked with what I had: a lower temperature and a longer time in the oven. It came out as fork-tender as you could ask for. Good enough that a fellow homecoming guest asked for the recipe, which is how you know it's real good.

No football game at this homecoming. But if pot roast were a sport, this one made varsity.

Every homecoming has a queen, and I can't think of anyone who embodied the title better than Dolly Parton.

I had to sit with whether she really belonged in an essay about a Backyard Izakaya potluck. But this dinner was about being proud of where you're from, sharing it with people, and giving some of it back. Nobody did that better than Dolly. No matter how big a star she became or how many ventures she started, she never left her corner of the Smoky Mountains behind. She built Dollywood in Pigeon Forge to bring steady jobs to Sevier County, the place that raised her. As if that wasn't enough, she started the Imagination Library, which has mailed over 200 million free books to kids, because she grew up with a father who never learned to read. She was the homecoming queen who kept coming home.

The funny thing is how we found out. Two days after the dinner, it was a South African guest who broke the news to the rest of us. That felt right, somehow. Dolly crossed borders the way she crossed genres, on the strength of the music and a larger-than-life personality. At a time when the headlines out of the U.S. can show the very worst of us, Dolly was the very best of us. And for that, Dolly, we will always love you.

Savoring this moment with you,

Kevin L