The congee came with Chinese sausage, duck and century eggs, chili bamboo shoots, and your choice of a dozen other ingredients such as dried shrimp, pork floss, and condensed milk. “Everything is either cured, fermented, or dried,” Chey said. The salty meal didn’t need any refrigeration: “The perfect food for the desert.”
Afterwards, I made a stop for vegetarian churrasco and caipirinhas at Brasa Camp, built to resemble a boteco, a kind of small Brazilian pub. Then, at Elsewhere Camp where several residents had made the pilgrimage all the way from Chongqing, China, I had impromptu shots of fancy Baiju and Chinese plum wine.
At night, I biked to Golden Guy Alley. Within the two-story maze of tiny bars and restaurants, modeled after Tokyo’s Golden Gai area, I found the Czech restaurant Nanna’s Kitchen. Not sure of what to do with her late mother’s kitchen, Rachel Thiele decided to pack it up from Nebraska and bring it to the playa. Surrounded by antediluvian furnishings, including a rotary phone and a black-and-white television, she and her husband Jason ask diners to share stories about their own grandmothers over kolaches and kielbasa.
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On Thursday morning, I traveled across the playa to the northern part of Black Rock City, where a loose grouping of camps dubbed Breakfast Alley offered beignets, waffles, blintzes, breakfast tacos, and coffee.
The uninitiated might wonder if there’s a catch: Why would anyone take such great pains to tow in commercial-grade equipment and construct elaborate kitchens in order to prepare thousands of free meals in such an unforgiving environment? The event has ten principles, two of them being Gifting and Decommodification. Burners treat these principles as gospel—any exchange of money would be anathema to the spirit of the gathering. More fundamentally, though, the event attracts a certain type of person—those who like to build something from nothing just to watch with satisfaction as it rumbles the ground beneath them.
And even though no money was on the line, I found that a friendly competition among the camps of Breakfast Alley had sprung up.