Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (25 page)

When I told friends that I was setting out in search of California barbecue,
they reacted as if I had said I was starting a unicorn collection. "There is no
such thing as California barbecue," they insisted.

If you assume that the slight, light, barely cooked aesthetic of California
cuisine defines the cooking of the whole state and not just the style of some of
its most celebrated restaurants, it's easy to understand why the thought of California barbecue would seem like an oxymoron. Who ever heard of free-range
ribs? Who ever bothered to put organic micro greens in coleslaw?

"Barbecue is Southern," my doubters told me, forgetting that both Kansas
City and Chicago are barbecue capitals and that neither of them is in the
South. "Immigrant food in California comes from Mexico, China, Indonesia,
not America," they said, forgetting that while emigrants from Mississippi and
Tennessee brought barbecue to the Midwest, their counterparts in Louisiana,
Texas, and Oklahoma often headed west to the Golden State.

Besides all that, I have been to the places you're supposed to go for great
barbecue. In 1994, I traveled much of the country with Frank Stewart, a wisecracking photographer who prefers his ambrosia smoked. We were writing
Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country, a book
about American culture as expressed through barbecue. We learned quickly
that barbecue authorities are a dime a dozen, and their opinions often are
worth even less.

Oh, for a while we did listen to them. We calculated the number of flies the
restaurants attracted, the girth of the proprietors, even the ratio of rich patrons to poor ones. We soon learned you are just as likely to find bad food at
fly-infested restaurants with fat chefs and diverse clientele as you are to find it
anywhere else.

I also knew that, even when people brag about how great the barbecue is in
their town, they really mean that there are one or two favorite restaurants they
frequent. I went to dozens of restaurants in barbecue-crazed Memphis, but there are only a handful I wish to go back to. And even though barbecue is a
sacrament in Kansas City, with the passing of Otis P. Boyd and the closing of
his restaurant a few years ago, my recent visits to Kansas City have left me feeling that the church has lost its steeple.

So I didn't expect to find a million great places in California. But I figured
that its combination of black immigrants, hard wood, international influences, and great barbecue weather, the state had the ingredients I needed to
prove the doubters wrong.

My conviction that I would find good barbecue in California was not entirely fantastic. For years, I'd been hearing the names of two legendary Bay
Area barbecue restaurants, Flint's and Everett and Jones. My friend Walter
Gomes grew up in Los Angeles, but his barbecue loyalties lie up North. "If you
don't go to Flint's on Telegraph in Berkeley, you have not lived," he told me. "If
you don't like it, you must be dead."

Walter's challenge frightened me. It's scary enough to get tested at your
doctor's office and learn that you have some dreaded disease. But to bite a
piece of barbecue and realize that you're already dead is even worse. So I asked
Nancy Freeman and Tim Patterson, two friends and Berkeley residents, to join
me in sampling the fare in the East Bay. That way, if I didn't like the barbecue
at Flint's, I'd at least have someone around to notify the next of kin.

Flint's epitomizes the look of the urban barbecue joint. It's a shallow, white,
cinder-block building. The counter is but a step or two from the entrance, and
the pit is but a step on the other side of the counter. I was rudely informed that
you can't order sauce on the side at Flint's. I naturally assumed that the sauce
was so good, the proprietors feared their formula would be stolen. My interest peaked.

After leaving Flint's, we ordered take-out a bunch of other places in the
Oakland-Berkeley-Emeryville area. Then we spread the offerings out on the
kitchen counter and dug in.

Biting a pork rib from Flint's, I saw my life pass before my eyes.

What I first tasted was the pleasing flavor of spices and smoke, but the only
moisture emanating from the rib was a small trickle of grease. Then things got
worse. The links were dry; the beef ribs were impossibly tough. Though the
brisket wasn't bad, it wasn't good. Flint's sauce, which I got on the beef ribs,
was very thick, very sweet, and very dark, as if it had been infused with grape
jelly.

Everett and Jones, the other stalwart of East Bay barbecue, has several locations, but they vary in quality. The sausage at the three location we tried was
good. Unlike many of the sausage links you get in California, the meat was ground, not emulsified like the meat in hot dogs. The brisket was bland at
each of the outposts and had almost no smoke flavor at the location on Telegraph. The best offering from any Everett and Jones location was the pork ribs
on Telegraph Avenue, which had a wonderful garlic flavor.

So much for the assumed superiority of Bay Area barbecue.

My impressions about Los Angeles barbecue were formed in 1996 when a
friend and I drove along Central Avenue, the heart of South Central Los Angeles. Though the area is better known for riots than ribs, it seemed to me I
saw nearly a dozen barbecue places then, though I didn't eat at any of them.

Central Avenue is to Los Angeles what Beale Street is to Memphis, the commercial and cultural heart of the African American community. As early as
the 192os, Central Avenue was being referred to as the "Harlem of the West."
In part because racial segregation relegated black musicians to playing on
Central Avenue or in Watts, a vibrant music community developed there.
During World War II, as migrants came west to build military machinery, the
African American population grew. But as early as the 195os, as black Angelenos started moving to other parts of the city, Central Avenue was already in
decline.

I started my search on that street, but I found little sign of the restaurants I
had passed even a few years before. I found one old place near 92nd Street. It
had the look of a good barbecue joint and the smoke to match, but the food
was not memorable. Because of the large number of barbecue places on Slaus-
son Avenue, I was tempted to conclude that I had found my new barbecue
boulevard. But after tasting the food at the first two places I saw, I feared
the avenue was mostly show. Then I stopped at Woody's Bar-B-Que, a take
out place with a gray-and-white bulldog painted on the outer wall urging
passersby to stop. The menu at Woody's included the usual assortment of
barbecue meats: pork ribs, sliced beef, chicken, as well as chicken links, an
unusual addition. I ordered a combination plate and braced myself for more
disappointment.

But first, I digress: The tasting of barbecue is a precise affair involving an
assessment not merely of quality but also of authenticity. While it is possible
to enjoy tender, well-seasoned meat bathed in barbecue sauce, I make a distinction between good food and good barbecue. Good barbecue must be
smoked over hardwood or charcoal, and the flavor of that fuel must penetrate
the meat. Since red meat is emblematic of barbecue, I always get an assortment of whatever beef, pork, and sausage are available. But after eating the
amazing barbecued Cornish game hens at Cozy Corner in Memphis, I've
learned to bend this rule whenever I see something unusual on the menu. Most restaurants simply slather sauce on their meat after you order it. Since I
can slather as well as they can, I always get my barbecue with the sauce on the
side to better taste the meat itself.

And barbecue should be tender. Merely placed in close proximity to a fork,
brisket and pork shoulder should yield with little additional effort. Ribs
should separate from the bone without excessive pulling and tugging. The difficulty is cooking the meat long enough to attain this degree of tenderness and
smokiness without drying it out. Some of the best pit masters cook indirectly.
They separate the meat from the wood or charcoal so that the smoke flavor
gets through, but the grease from the meat doesn't cause the fire to flare and
the meat to char. Other cooks, no less skilled, insist that barbecue gets its flavor in part from the seasoned smoke that rises when the grease from the meat
hits the coals. I have had great barbecue cooked with both methods.

In the matter of sauces, I have one overriding prejudice, and it concerns the
particularly silly brand of chauvinism that demands that men prove their
masculinity by ingesting the most fiery sauces available. Even the dullest of
palates and dimmest of wits can understand that the more pepper you put in
a sauce, the more difficult it is to taste any other ingredient. Why should a chef
even bother to fine-tune the balance of his seasonings if the final ingredient
will be a truckload of crushed habanero peppers?

In the parking lot, I unwrapped my Woody's assortment, and immediately my
rental car smelled like a barbecue joint. Like all good barbecue, the meat at
Woody's has a smoke ring, a pink layer just below the surface that meat gets
when it is smoked. My tongue made the acquaintance of the seasonings on the
outside of the pork ribs and sliced beef and met the rich smoke flavor as my
teeth plunged deeper. I am suspicious of any sausage made from the meat of a
two-footed animal. But I dismissed my misgivings when I tasted these chicken
links. They were lighter in color and heft than their beef counterparts, but
they had a surprising peppery kick. The beef ribs were tender and richly marbled like the top of a rib-eye steak.

California barbecue sauces, even the hot varieties at most restaurants, tend
to be fairly tame. The essential balance that cooks there strive for seems to be
between sweet and sour, not hot and mild. Almost invariably, in California,
sweet wins. But at the two locations of Phillips Barbecue, which is owned by
Woody's cousin, Foster Phillips, the competition between these opposites is
especially acute. The ketchup-based sauce is a jarring combination of very
sweet and very tangy. But the meat has a rich blackened crust of smoke-seared
dry seasonings that contains its own hint of sugar.

Both Woody and Foster hail from Keatchie, Louisiana, a small town about
twenty-three miles southwest of Shreveport. Woody says he developed his
barbecue conception after arriving in California, "I had to leave Keatchie to
come to California and make some barbecue," he says, having arrived here in
196o and opened his business in 1975. Foster's barbecue inspiration came from
Drew Lover, a barbecue restaurateur in Keatchie who inspired Foster to go
into business for himself. Though their inspiration comes from different
places, their barbecue is quite similar. Phillips's barbecue is a little spicier,
both in terms of the vinegar in the sauce and the salt and pepper in the dry
seasonings. But they are similar enough to share a space at the top of the Los
Angeles barbecue rankings.

Both Woody's and Phillips's include greens on their menus as a side dish,
exemplifying a curious mixing and mingling of traditional barbecue side
dishes with pot-food menu items more typical of soul food restaurants that
don't specialize in barbecue. By the same token, many soul food restaurants I
found in California offer real barbecue on their menus, as opposed to the
oven-baked, sauce-smothered meats typical in black, Southern-style restaurants in other parts of the country. It's as if these restaurants were one-stop
repositories of black Southern culinary traditions, while similar restaurants in
the Southeast are more specialized.

In the Pacific Bell Yellow pages, there is a small listing for "barbecue stands."
There's no listing at all for barbecue restaurants. It's as if all the barbecue
places are located in alleys between pawn shops and filling stations. It would
be impossible to imagine barbecue getting such a slight in a place such as
Memphis or Kansas City, where the whole identity of the cities is wrapped up
in their reputation for smoked meat. But the idea of "barbecue stands" conjures up the image of little, out-of-the-way places awaiting discovery. At least
since Jan and Michael Stern began finding good food in such places, Americans have been fascinated with the possibility that they will luck upon some
unsung culinary genius hidden in plain view. So one Saturday, I abandoned
the various guidebooks and recommendations I had collected and took out
for deepest, darkest South Central Los Angeles. I figured that somewhere in
that famed suburban ghetto there had to exist a great barbecue restaurant that
the food experts had missed simply because, despite their lust for great food,
their passion for self-preservation and their fear of urban violence had limited
their culinary explorations to safer neighborhoods. So I traveled through Inglewood, Crenshaw, Baldwin Hills, Baldwin Village, and View Park. At first I
found little of note. Then I found religion.