H-E-Double Hockey Sticks: Has Mia Gaines-Alt Stopped Feeding the People?

We must confess, possums, to having a bit of a soft spot for Season 2 cheftestant Mia Gaines-Alt, whom we likened to celebrity hairdresser Jose Eber based on their shared love of cowboy hats.

When Miss XaXa paid a call on Mia at Feed the People!, her barbecue restaurant in Oakdale, California, Mia was kind enough to autograph a menu for us, which naturally endeared her to us (and the food was pretty good, too). In addition, Mia was an entertaining contestant who did a gutsy thing by taking the fall for fellow contestant Elia Aboumrad, and that also endeared her to us.

We hadn't heard anything about Mia after the season ended, and she is absent from Bravo's cheerful online "Where Are They Now?" round-ups. However, we did think of her a few months ago, when a friend sent us a newspaper story about mysterious, random power outages in Oakdale (a rural, cowboy town in the process of becoming a Bay Area bedroom community). Eventually, much to people's amusement, the outages were traced to a bull rubbing himself against a utility pole, and we wondered whether Mia's restaurant had been affected.

Then, after the start of the current season, we received an email from someone trying to contact Mia for a fundraiser. The person had tried the phone number for the restaurant, but it had been disconnected.

And then today we received an email from Amuse-Biatch reader Gary that may shed some light on the matter:

Just a side note I live in Modesto Ca. a town just west of Oakdale Ca. where Mia restaurant "Feed the People" is located....Also as of 8/28/07 the landlord has place a big foreclose note on the door for lack of paying rent in short he says he is taking the place as being abandon equipment and all. Including the cowboy hat that Mia wore in her photo which sits on top of an empty cash register.

It's quite a sad state of affairs. If anyone has further information, be sure to let us know.

Mia Gaines-Alt: Is Hindsight Really 20/20?

That's what we wondered when we read these excerpts from a December 16, 2006, article in the Modesto Bee by Christopher Caskey about cheftestant Mia "Josette Eber" Gaines-Alt:

Mia Gaines-Alt got a belated birthday surprise Wednesday, though it wasn't a good one. Two days after she turned 33, she watched while she kicked herself off the Bravo network reality cooking show "Top Chef."

She knew what was going to happen because most of the season was filmed over the summer. She just wasn't expecting the world -- or at least a small slice of it -- to see her get kicked off the week of her birthday.

"(My family and I) all cried and watched it together," Gaines-Alt said. "I knew it was coming, but we figured it was not going to air until Christmas week."

In this week's show, Gaines-Alt was on the losing side of a two-team challenge in which each team attempted to outcater the other at a cocktail party. Just as it looked as if the judges were going to give her team leader, Elia Aboumrad, the boot, Gaines-Alt stepped in and offered to go home instead.

Even after watching herself give up a chance for $100,000 and a feature in Food & Wine magazine, she still believes it was the right call.

"I always have to be satisfied with the decisions I make," said Gaines-Alt, who owns Feed the People, a barbecue restaurant in Oakdale. "I realized that there was no way they were going to give (Elia) a second chance. I understand it is a competition, but I'm only human. … She may not have even had a job to go back to after the competition. I already have something to go back to."

One bit of good news for Miss Josette Eber is that "the exposure from the show has improved business at Feed the People. 'Even before the show actually aired, the buzz went out and the place was packed,' Gaines-Alt said. "A lot of that has died away, but we are consistent now. … If anything, I might need a bigger location. It's kind of frustrating for people who come out here from Modesto but can't get in right away because there is a line."

As Miss XaXa found out in person, those Modestans are in for some good beans and 'cue.

Miss XaXa v. Mia Gaines-Alt: Battle of the Fag Hags

Well, Miss XaXa prefers "fruit fly" as an appellation (not for nothing is her middle name "Drosophila"), but you get the drift.

It is no secret that Miss XaXa has had a crush on former cheftestant Carlos Fernandez from the very beginning. It didn't matter that Carlos is gay and is married to a lovely chap named Chuck (she even found it vaguely endearing that they both have the same name, albeit in different languages).

Indeed, despite Carlos' married gayhood, it had always been one of Miss XaXa's wine-soaked fantasies--visions of sin stoked by Zin--to tuck her chulo chef into bed and read him excerpts from Diana Vreeland's D.V. as a bedtime story while the strains of Grace Jones doing her take on "La vie en rose" played soothingly in the background.

After Carlos was eliminated on the Thanksgiving episode, Miss XaXa was disconsolate and inconsolable. Now that a month has elapsed, she finally brought herself to read her chulo chef's blog, only to encounter this statement by Carlos about Mia Gaines-Alt:

And I will always remember the time you tucked me into bed!

We have rarely seen Miss XaXa in such a state. The outraged arias of "How could he?" gave way to a kind of understanding. Her fruit fly qualifications are second to none, but, she wailed to us, "I never stood a chance!"

We gave her our nun-embroidered Irish linen handkerchief. "I suppose I can't blame him. I mean, gay culture wouldn't even exist if it weren't for fierce black women singing in earthshattering tones some combination of the words 'love,' 'pride,' 'party,' 'deep,' and 'show' against a thumpa-thumpa beat, so how could any gay man resist a fierce black woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to celebrity hairstylist José Eber and dresses like the wardrobe mistress on Brokeback Mountain?" she queried rhetorically as she sobbed in the women's shoe department at Neiman-Marcus.

Now it's true that when Miss XaXa visited Mia earlier this month at her restaurant, Feed the People!, she found Mia to be gracious and warm, and her food delicious. But how differently things might have been if Miss XaXa had known about the tucking in. And now she has a message for Mia: "You know what? Your cornbread wasn't very good! So you go ahead and 'feed the people,' but keep your hands off my gays!"

Just the Tri-Tip, We Promise (Now, That's More Like It)

A salacious headline having restored our sense of self-respect, we now present to you the tri-tip dinner that Miss XaXa purchased at Josette Eber's restaurant, Feed the People!

Now, Miss XaXa, being a flower of the South (though not a rose; she's more like the Yellow Venus-Flytrap of Texas), knows from barbecue, and she found the tri-tip superb, flavorful and juicy. She positively raved about the beans, with their complements of herbs and cheese, declaring them possibly the best she has had at a barbecue joint. However, the cornbread was merely average, which was rather surprising, as we have seen Josette Eber making cornbread on the show several times.

And so, whatever one may say about the woman's resemblance to celebrity hairstylist Jose Eber, her propensity for throwing people under buses, off buses, from buses, and against buses, her murderous stares at judges and cheftestants who thwart her, her quaint argot, and her way with the backstabbing girl-hug (et tu, Josette?), the woman can cook.

Feeding People Inside and Out (God, Did We Really Write Such a Cheesy Headline?)

This is the sight that greeted Miss XaXa when she went a-calling, the pale yellow and ocher front of Feed the People! , with the smoker right out in front, like a family pet; come to think of it, a lot like George Clooney's potbellied pig, the one that just made its way to the great Niman Ranch in the sky.

Mia cooks for cowboys, Oakdale is a cowboy kind of town, and the restaurant certainly has that look about it, Edward Hopper meets "Deadwood." The interior is very simple, to say the least. The walls are decorated with family portraits and memorabilia, and the chairs and tables covered with Southwestern-colored chintz (in fact, we found the slip covers on the back of the chairs inexplicably poignant). The point of the restaurant, then, is not ambiance, but food.

XaXa, Mia: Here We Go Again

As promised, here is the second installment of our little tale, Miss XaXa Pays a Call in Cali.

After a leisurely drive through the almond orchards of California's Central Valley in the conveyance hired from Avis Rent-A-Barouche, Miss XaXa arrived in the hamlet of Oakdale, and thence to Ms. Josette Eber's restaurant, Feed the People! (Previously, we were remiss, as was Bravo, in not including the "!" in the restaurant's name. It's like writing "Oliver" or "Star" or "Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down"--it's just not the same. As Mia has it, the name of the restaurant isn't just a statement; it's an exhortation.)

Miss XaXa found Mia to be warm and friendly and welcoming (drat!). Mama Mia was a bit of a different story; no "Maman with a gleaming gloat" was she. But, as Miss XaXa put it, "If a grinning white girl with a camera and a hankering for 'cue came in off the street asking to take my daughter's picture, I might be a little wary, too." Consequently, Miss XaXa, ever the lady, refrained from asking Mia to do a little Patsy Cline duet with her.

Mia graciously consented to have her picture taken (Mama Mia ended up doing the honors), and offered to pose in front of her grandparents' portrait (a bit of which is visible to Mia's right). She also autographed a menu for us, and Miss XaXa left with a tri-tip dinner, pictures, description, and review of which will follow shortly. (Yes, yes, you'd better believe we're gonna milk this for all it's worth, so go ahead and harrumph.)