The Worst

Four years ago, I set out on a voyage...a porktastic voyage...across the American nation. Since then, a lot has happened. I took a job in Oregon. Got a lot of dental work done and damn near earned a Masters Degree. The economy collapsed. And I was accused of not knowing anything about barbecue. By a Texan.

Well, opinions, as one of my stepmothers used to say, are like assholes. Everybody's got one and they all stink.

So, for what it's worth, here's my stinkin' opinion on the worst barbecue sandwich I ever had, and why I should've known better.

No need shaming the purveyor by name, more than to mention I was at the foot of Mt. Tabor in Portland, Oregon, and had just been turned away hungry at 2:02 from the Country Cat who stop seating lunch at 2:00 and will never see my face again. I walked down the street, saw barbecue on the menu, and went in. Like I say, I should've known better. The Four Horseman Pulled Pork sandwich was the only barbecue-related item on the menu, which tells you and should have told me they don't make their barbecue on-site, but buy it, probably in plastic pails, from God knows where. It claimed to come with cole slaw on it, which I like, and choice of hot or bourbon sauce, which I ordered on the side. I've always thought good barbecue should be good without sauce and wanted to give it a go in its primal form.

What came was a pile of pre-sauced pulled pork on a ciabatta roll and not a shred of slaw in sight. The absent slaw was easily remedied with a reminder to the server, but I knew, when I saw that pre-sauced meat, the most I could hope for was to not be hungry when I walked out the door. I realize, I truly do, it's a blessing, to not be hungry in a world where so many are. But I had hoped for more more when I sat down and ordered that day.

Sadly, pre-sauced barbecue is often assembled off-site by Cisco or some other vendor, and leans on the sauce to make up for the total lack of give-a-damn by whoever "made" it. The slaw was a tawdry attempt to fancy up a standard with chunks of green, red and yellow peppers, lettuce and other odds, ends and sweepings. The fries were good.

I walked away wiser, and that's worth something, even if I was only reminded of something I should've known. Don't order barbecue at a joint with one barbecue option. It's most likely shipped in and sorry.

Save yourself the heartache. Order the hamburger.

...that does sound pretty good...

Gentle reader,

What follows is an account of a journey I took in the late spring and early summer of 2008, across the north end of the South, America's barbecue belt. The trail took me from Wilmington, North Carolina, through Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas to Kansas City, Missouri. Along the way I met lots of nice folks and ate about three dogs-worth of meat.

Bear in mind, this wasn't a competition. I never set out to say who has the best barbecue, though in my opinion some stars did shine a little brighter than others. The beauty of the trip was seeing and experiencing for myself all the regional differences that came up as I made my way East to West. Carolina vinegars, dry rubs, sauce on, chopped, pulled, and sliced. On a bun, or on the bone. All these things mean something more to me now, no longer just words on a page. Speaking of which, the entry just below is actually the end of the line. If you want to experience the trip in the order I did, start at the bottom and work your way up. Like with socks.

Why did I do it? Why did Tenzig Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary drag their asses up Everest? Because it seemed like a good idea at the time, I suppose. Looking back, I bet they have fond memories, as do I. As do I.

Happy Ending

Fiorella's Jack Stack Barbecue
13441 Holmes Road
Kansas City, Missouri

I arrived, road weary, at the last pork-related stop on my journey on a Thursday evening. All day I'd been passing through the evidence of heavy storms that had swamped the American Midwest's farmland, and seen new crops dipping down below water gathered in low spots in the fields, rows rising again in the distance.

A call to the Kansas City Bullsheet, a KC rag devoted to all things barbecued, and a quick conversation with Ms. Carolyn Wells, who herself was on her way out the door the next day to a barbecue-fest in Des Moines, was all it took to get the lowdown on local mowdowns. She told me about Arthur Bryant's, about Stroud's out in Fairway, but the one seemed to fit me best was Fiorella's. When I say fit me best, I mean was closest at hand, cause by this time of the day (sun up) I was fairly hungry. The praises Ms. Wells sang of their sauce-on pork ribs, cheesy corn bake and crown beef ribs just threw gas on the fire.

Kansas City straddles the lefthand side of Missouri and the righthand side of Kansas, and this comingling of ways comes across on the plate as well. I'd traveled largely through pork country, which was fine by me. In fact, I'd always been a little hurt when Texans of my acquaintance, who are otherwise fine people, would dismiss pork barbecue offhand, like it was a redheaded stepchild. Beef was their bag...and that's cool...to each his own. But KC walks the line, giving equal time to both our four-legged friends, and I have to say I'm a believer.

The place itself was one of the classier joints I'd been in. Paved parking lot, the whole nine yards. Spot on service, and I pretty much reeled off Carolyn's recommendations, and added in a cold beer. Everything showed up in short order. The cheesy bake was sort of a cheesy corn stew with ham, quite thick and rich. The beans as well had shreds of tasty flesh throughout. They never missed a chance to slip in the meat. You can insert your own fifth grade joke here. I'm too classy for that. The pork ribs were indeed saucy and fine, as was the pile of "burnt ends", bits from the outside of the cut which had gotten charred and smokey. But it was the beef ribs that really smacked me around. They were so good, in fact, that I have to admit that the pork kind of sat there on the plate like a homely cousin. The intensity of flavor on these meaty bones was like nothing I've had before or since. It was like "dating" a stripper...or two. For a moment, I forgot the porks of my past. Flavor from the bone and marbling melted through the tender meat of the interior, balanced by a crisp, savory outside. Now I get what Texans are on about. My hand to God, there was unfinished pig on the plate when I walked out the door, all on account of those beef ribs. I felt satiated yet ashamed, like I'd cheated on my first love...though perhaps found another.

Well, I suppose there are many fish in the sea, and I bet if you barbecued them, they'd be pretty damn good, too.

Sloppy Seconds

Craig's
Highway 70
De Valls Bluff, Arkansas

After driving through a shell of what may once have been a downtown of beautiful redbrick buildings, Highway Seventy took me out to Craig's, a white cinderblock building on th lefthand side of the road. Inside, faded winter scenes on the wallpaper were nothing more than wishful thinking in the blowing heat of the day. There was just one family around a table, and a hip high partition down the middle of the place. I took a table by the window on the other side. There was no sign of a counter or staff...they were all in the back, behind a screendoor.

Out came a lady who seem perturbed by my arrival. No amount of geniality or yes maam's could wrestle a smile from this woman's lips. After a little scuffling, we arrived at my order of a pork sandwich, hot, coleslaw on top, some chips and a sweet tea. For the warmth of the welcome, I felt I'd asked her to wash my socks. Who knows, maybe she'd had a rough morning. Maybe she used to be married to a guy that looks just like me who broke her heart. That's probably it.

Happily, the sandwich made up for it all. I ordered hot, and hot it was, plenty of heat, but not so much that there wasn't also flavor from the meat. It was a sloppy affair on a whitebread bun, but such is the bane of the sauce-on sandwich. You gotta eat fast before the sauce soaks all through. Chopped, i beleive it was, which lends lots of variety to the texture, and the cole slaw coming along just in time to cool things down a bit and with a little crunch to round things out. I got some sauce in my eye and teared up. Funny thing is, I realized after I'd been here awhile that I'd been here before, on a trip to Texas. Lucky me.

Now, i have one thing that is terribly ugly to say, and I hope I'm wrong...the tea tasted like powdered tea mix. There, i've said it. I'm not saying it was powdered sweet tea mix, i'm just saying it reminded me of it. I'd like to believe otherwise.

Every now and then one of the ladies would emerge from the back. The one attending to the family smiled, and mine sweetended up when someone she knew came in. Finished eating, I settled up and read up on the place in an article hanging on the wall. Turns out the partition had been there since segregation. That's hard to get out of your mind.

I went across the street for pie.

Believe the Hype

Charles Vergo's Rendezvous
52 S. Second Street
Memphis, Tennessee

Memphis. I very nearly passed it by, as it's such an obvious stop on the barbecue trail, and I generally root for the underdog. Turns out there's a reason this town in the deep left corner of my homestate is as renowned for what they do with a pig as for being the birthplace of the blues. And Charles Vergo's Rendezvous is a fine place to check out Memphis' signature dry ribs.

Like the Ridgewood back in East Tenn, finding it is part of the fun. As you cruise around downtown looking for a parking place, keep an eye out for the famous Peabody hotel. Anywhere around there will do. The restaurant itself is in an alley on Monroe, next to a parking garage. Hell, looking back, maybe I shoulda parked there in the first place.

So it's down the alley and down the stairs out of the heat of the day into a dimly lit, cool and comfortable cave festooned with sports and farming implements. For a restaurant with plenty of folks in it, it was oddly quiet, people speaking softly as if in church, the hum of the air conditioner just audible over the murmers of a reverent and ravenous congregation. Checkered cloth tables have the menu inset, so you can get thinking, as well as an honest-to-God cloth napkin. The first one I'd seen on this tour, I believe. For myself, it was the dry ribs I'd come for, which comes correct with beans and slaw and a couple whitebread rolls. Since the sun was fairly well up, I rounded it out with a Michelob draft. Being a grownup has its moments.

A word on dry ribs. That just means that the sauce is on the side, not that they're not juicy. Mine certainly were that. On the table were a hot and mild sauce, but I just couldn't bring myself to put them on the ribs, which came beautifully flavored and spiced with a mix of something along the lines of garlic and onion, cumin and paprika. Whatever it is it does the trick with a kick. I did try out the sauce, adding it to the puddle of pork liquor on my plate, and used the whitebread to sop it up. Pretty much any time you sop anything up, it's gonna be good, and it's worth noting that these sauces, if typical of Memphis style, were less sweet than I'd found elsewhere. The beans also were a bit spicy, though the slaw, with a richness and complexity I can't describe well with my state school vocabulary was refreshing. Less so than the beer, of course.

So I suppose there's a reason why the famous are famous, that the cream rises to the top, why NBA stars get so much money and hot chicks. I'm still down with the underdog, but I would have really missed out had I not taken the time to see what all the fuss was about downstairs and down the alley at the Rendezvous.

Chili Today...Hot Tamale

Dilworth's Tamales
111 Taylor Street
Corinth, Mississippi

Though I came to town in search of slugburger, the folks at the town's tourist info bureau pointed me just down the street to another local delicacy, Corinth-style tamales. "You know about Delta tamales," Ms. Amy Thompson, who was running the show that day, inquired. I nodded and smiled like I always do when I have no idea what somebody is talking about. "Well, we've got our own little tamale pocket right here in town. Southern Living even came and did an article on them." By God, if it's good enough for Southern Living it's probably more than I deserve.

The name of the place I went is Dilworth's, and it's a drive-up, cash only joint just on the far side of the tracks from the square. There's another place, White Trolley, that serves them as well, on 72nd. From what I hear, back in the olden days, a tamale cart used to go through town, and whoever was pushing it would holler "TAMALES" for all they were worth until you just couldn't take it anymore and came out and got some. They were three for a quarter. "You should get a dozen" Amy insisted.

I thought to myself, good Lord, a dozen tamales? That's a lot, even for someone who's pretty fond of them, as I happen to be. See, I'm used to Mexican restaurant tamales, about the size of a Twinkie. I did get a dozen, on good advice. And in fact, the menu listed prices in units of half a dozen right on up into the hundreds. Somebody must be a tamale rolling fool in there. Maybe that's what Tommy Chong is up to these days.

I got em to go, and a cold Coke, and found a place to pull over and settled in on my tailgate for a little treat. It was like Christmas, suspecting, but not knowing quite what I'd find inside. First, the foil outer layer. Then a layer of wax paper, revealing tubes of waxed paper within. Once past these thermal and hydprophobic hurdles, I got my first look at the tamales themselves. A good ten inches long (we've all heard that one before) and about as big around as your bird finger. Steam rose from the cornmeal outers, bringing up a familiar scent of spiced meat and steamed meal. They looked like really long sausages, or those tube worms discovered in the ocean deeps, living off thermal vents. Well, if tube worms taste like this, warm up my wetsuit. Unlike the Twinkie type, there was not so much a clearly defined shell and filling. These were more all mixed up, perhaps a bit more meaty towards the middle. Altogether delicous, the hot hot enough to qualify, and the mild tasty, too. And I can tell you that, unlike the dead, they're nearly as good cold in a motel room the next day.

Sounds Awful

Slugburger
Borroum's Drugstore
On the square
Corinth, Mississippi

Slugburger. Sounds great, doesn't it? French, perhaps. I'd come a fair bit out of my way to find out, and here's why. Back on the East coast at Wilmington, my buddy Eric Parsons recommended that if I was into checking out local foods, I should pull through his part of Tennessee, southwestern, that is, and try a slugburger. He told me a bit about them, and his wife Sarah agreed that they are delicous. And she's pretty much a vegetarian. Eric grew up in Savannah, Tennessee, but a phone call to his Mom secured the tip that the slugburger's actual home was in Corinth Mississippi. Thus informed, I was off.

Corinth itself is a sweet little town just south of the Tennessee Mississippi border. There on the square you'll find Borroum's drugstore, a great big place with arrowheads and indian artifacts on one side, guns and civil war memorobilia on the other, and various taxidermically preserved heads and necks, ribbon racks, candy dispensers and stacks of kids books all in amongst them. I sided with the Indians and ordered a slugburger, onion rings and a vanilla milkshake.

Now, just what is a slugburger? Thankfully, no slugs are involved whatsoever. Probably the menu itself can describe it as well as I can, though perhaps without so many witty asides. Here's what it has to say:

"Slugburgers are a mixture of ground pork, soy flour and spices. The mixture is flattened into a patty and deep fried in vegetable fat. The patty is placed on a hamburger bun with a garnish of mustard, pickle and onion. Developed during the depression when money was scarce and so was meat, slugburgers were made with a mixture of beef and pork, potato flour as an extender, and spices, then fried in animal fat. Mrs. Weeks, credited with creating one of the first, found the "burgers" were a way to make meat go a little farther at the family hamburger stand. Selling for a nickel, sometimes called a slug, the imitation hamburgers became known as slugburgers."

Deep fried meat? Count me in. Crunchy, the pickle and onion doing there part as well. It reminded me a bit of fried Spam, and don't you pretend you don't know what I'm talking about. In fact, it was a lot like the white trash classic, fried Spam on white with mustard, though not quite as salty. The addition of the soy flour gives that grease something more to grab ahold of and crisp up, so it excels in the texture department. Likewise the onion rings, crunch, crunch, crunch. And that shake would take your grandpa right back to the good old days he's always on about. It was bona fide.

Definitely worth the trip. A gracious thanks to Eric Parsons and the people of Corinth, who, it turns out, had more up there sleeve than this little number.