New Beginnings

About Bivalves Rather Than Barbecue

Yes, it’s December and it’s cold as can be with a wind-chill here in the Triad down to the single digit — or so the radio said. Why, then, would we want to go to a raucous and crowded beach bar — Bimini’s, which true to its Myrtle Beach original location has an island atmosphere that combines a meat market for singles at the bar with a family atmosphere at the table for other lovers — lovers of seafood that’s better-than-Calabash. The answer for me is oysters, maybe my favorite food after barbecue. Yes, it’s a very odd groove, but a lively one to say the least, with kids playing with each other in the middle of the room and adults pretty much doing the same at the bar. Then again, it seemed a perfect place for me to get passionate about bivalves.

Almost as soon as we were seated and without much ado, two oblong gobbler-sized turkey roasters arrived at the table, packed tiptop with oysters. “Good God,” Anne said, seeing how many there were. “Good is God,” I replied. While we had been waiting for a table, I’d crowded up to the bar and ordered a draft beer based purely on the pull handle, which was a wicked looking pirate head with a patch over his eye. I couldn’t understand what kind it was amidst the mating calls all around me, but I felt very old when I couldn’t hear the bar-tender, though I thought she said “Shot-top,” which didn’t sound like a bad concept for a beer in a place where people might be doing shooters. Hey, I knew how to do that and had done it with tequila in Oaxaca. I embarrassingly also ordered Anne a Ginger Ale and also thought my hearing had gone bad when the barmaid told me the tab — $2! This was my kind of place.
We both went right to work and decided that the oysters, based on size and the clustering, were from Florida. They were plump, exceedingly juicy, tangy without any added sauce and almost as salty as Carolina bivalves. What struck us both is how many oysters we had. Our waitress had looked a little concerned when we said we wanted two orders and I guess when you do the math of three times two times a dozen, maybe 72 oysters does sound like a lot, but then again, that’s only 36 oysters a piece, a mere three dozen, which I felt sure I could eat, especially since the only other thing that we got were hush puppies and slaw. After we’d been rather enthusiastically shucking and slurping for a while, someone came by the table and commented that we sure seemed to be having a good time. At least we didn’t have people getting up from their tables and moving as happened once when we cracked crabs in a fancy Charleston restaurant. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen — or dining room, whichever pertains.
I frankly hadn’t looked up except to order another shot-top, which the waitress said was “Shock-top,” which didn’t seem to be a better name than shot-top, but we learned it was imitation Blue Moon, which is imitation Belgium beer, which some would say is imitation German beer since the German’s invented European beer and they were imitating the Egyptians, if my memory serves me right. “There’s not another oyster in the house,” our waitress announced, “and you’re enjoying them so much, everyone’s wanting to order them.” I thanked her for the compliment, saying that I’d had years of practice perfecting my slurp. That, Anne said after the waitress has left, might explain why we ended up with so many oysters and so many small singles. “They just emptied the bag into the cooker and gave us all that was left. I started to count shells, but by then due to the very nature of bivalves there were almost twice as many as we’d started with and I’ll have to admit that my top was a little shocked from the mighty thirst I’d quenched with imitation-imitation beer. “I can’t eat another one,” Anne finally said. There were at least six more oysters left and I was filling a little full, but I used a trick I learned in South Carolina, eating oysters where we buy them by the bushels. I opened all of the oysters first, which gave me time to get a second win. Than I mixed them up with horseradish and cocktail sauce, adding a little Tabasco sauce. As I picked up the bowl, Anne looked at me querulously. “Dessert,” I said.

This Barbecue Joint Is Anything But A Joint

I didn’t mince my words when I called the co-owner, Jonathan Childres, as I recovered from a lunch of lustrous pork ribs, painted in red sauce and cooked to tender perfection: “What’s with a barbecue restaurant smack dab in the middle of the barbecue belt that may very well be better known for its brussells sprouts than for its barbecue?” And what I didn’t say is that from the outside, it looks more like a day spa than a barbecue restaurant.

“I think our sides have a lot of notoriety because that’s what Rachel Ray had when she came,” Childres said without being the least bit defensive. “We only use fresh vegetables and we get them when we can from local farmers. I spend most Saturday mornings at the farmer’s market.” He gives his co-owner Damon Latas credit for the sides and for most of the cooking: “Damon’s a real chef. I’m a cook.”

Take the brussels sprouts, which they were regrettably out of when I took my wife there specifically so she could try them. They slice them about 3/8-inch thick and blanch them before putting them on ice. Then just after someone orders sprouts, Damon gets a pan going with some of their house-smoked, molasses-cured bacon and sizzles them up with a little garlic. “Put bacon on cardboard and soften it up and it’s good,” says Childres.The result, trust me, would make anyone eat their vegetables without encouragement from their momma.
The sensational tamales come from a Guatemalan cook, who used to cook some of her native treats for the staff before being asked to cook them for patrons. She also makes empanadas. This willingness to stray from traditional barbecue sides came from Childres’ experience running Backstreet Cafe and Latas’ years at Henry’s Bistro, both well-known Chapel Hill eateries.

Then I dropped the big question, even though I already knew the answer to it and my friends from Greenville have already guessed: the method of cooking. “I have all the admiration in the world for anyone who does pit cooking, but I don’t want to do it.” And Childres says that with a little expertise, good barbecue can be made with a gas-fired cooker with a fire box to give the cue a smoky taste. “We’re trying to let the sweetness of the pork come through and we want you also to taste and smell the wood.” Which is where oak and hickory chips come in. Then there’s the mild and subtle vinegar sauce: “We want the sauce to be a counterpoint to that and not cover up the sweetnesss of the meat and the taste.”

I told him that I thought that the pulled pork was excellent for not being pit-fired, but that the ribs were where the Joint really shined, especially the sauce. “Let me tell you about that sauce,” he said. When he was working at Backstreet cooking Cajun and Creole, people kept telling him they wanted some barbecue. He had a sauce recipe of his own, he said, that was so-so and he asked the chef, Bob Bridges, whether he had a sauce recipe.”Chef said he had a pretty good sauce recipe, and then he said, “You know my family are the Bridges that do barbecue down in Shelby, don’t you?” And so was born the red sauce, which goes on the chicken, ribs and brisket — tangy, a little bit spicy and not too sweet.

To me, barbecue is more than meat and if I had to lodge a single complaint against the traditional barbecues in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, it’s that their sides, for the most part are entirely predictable — frozen french fries and hush puppies, same-old slaw, beans right out of the can — and in Western North Carolina, few bother to offer collards or greens. But maybe that’s the definition of traditional.

I should add one thing, though. The Barbecue Joint is not cheap. It’s easy for two people to run up a $30 check. I totally understand that using fresh ingredients, many of them local grown, is the cause and I’m all for it, but don’t go expecting fast-food prices because it’s not fast food. Also you should know The Barbecue Joint is planning to move around the end of this year, at which time they’ll be expanding the menu and their space. But the old favorites will all be there, Childres assured me. And, yes, they’ll have brussells sprouts.

Beer, Barbecue and Beach

In 2002, Roger Hardman got tired of working for the man: “I wanted to start making some money for myself,” he says. And he sure does earn it. Arriving at Beachcomber Bar & Grill (319 Arnold Rd., St. Simons Island, Georgia; 912-634-5699) at 7 in the morning, Hardman gets the oak and pecan (“It’s sweeter than hickory”) going in his firebox — and so begins another long day that ends for his customers with fiery, hand-crafted barbecue and ice cold beer.

He tried skipping wood cooking way back when: “I got one of those high-dollar gas cookers and I used it one summmer. I haven’t touched it since. It’s for sale. Take a picture of it for me.”
But the barbecue didn’t taste as good to him, and from the number of customers wolfing down his chicken, ribs, pulled pork and beef brisket, he made the right decisions. “It’s a little more labor intensive” he says, the sweat rolling down his forehead and darkening his t-shirt. But the tradition in nearby Brunswick, where he grew up and learned the restaurant businesss running a Pizza Inn, is to cook with wood, using a firebox to produce indirect heat and carefully controlled temperatures. The meat sits on a mesh under a drip pan, with the smoky swirl of super-heated air caresssing it for 10-12 hours. Call it a pecan-powered convection oven, if you want.

The ribs are nothing short of text-book. Lightly coated with a tangy rub, they don’t melt in your mouth (as anyone who knows a thing about barbecue realizes they shouldn’t). Beachcomber ribs are moist and meaty and require an ever-so-slight tug with the teeth to separate the meat from the bones, which are well worth gnawing on. (my plate is below and, yes, it’s a bit crowded, but those were also my ribs, most of which she ate)

Hardman’s father-in-law is from Texas and helped him get started and it shows with the beef brisket, which has a beautiful smoke right and is fork tender. The pulled pork is similarly tender and smoky.

(Yes, that’s “her plate” below and, yes, it doesn’t have as much food on it as my plate. And, no, she didn’t eat any brisket or brunswick stew, but I saved some of the brisket and had it for breakfast this morning, which sure did beat the fancy-dancy croissant they had in the restaraunt)

Me, I like pulled pork that’s been cooked over coals and has a barbecued taste from the fat hitting the fire, not to mention bark or crust. I’m also not partial to the Georgia sweet sauce, but there’s hot sauce on the table.
Homemade potato salad with boiled eggs in it is a nice touch, aloong with brunswick stew that had lots of vegetables in it, just the way I like it — peas, limas, potatoes, corn and lots of chicken and beef.
Hardman says he got the restaurant for a bargain, almost at a, whoops, fire-sale price. The beer he sells (He’s got imported, domestic and microbrews) sure helps with the overhead, he says, especially on football weekends (Go Ga.!)
Maybe some N.C. cue joints ought to consider adding beer to the menu rather than going over to gas or electric cookers to save money. Yes, they’ve have to get up at 7 in the morning like Hardman, but “It’s fun runnihng your own place,” he says, wiping his brow, “and a lot better than working for the other fellow.”

Reed Their Lips: Try the Backyard Barbecue Pit in RTP

During my not-quite-yet illustrious career in journalism, I’ve interviewed presidents, secretaries of state, Shuttle astronauts, CEOs of every ilk, movie producers and celebrities of the moment galore, but I can’t remember being as excited about meeting someone as when I sat down the other evening with John Shelton Reed and his wife, Dale Volberg Reed. Admittedly, the fact that we were meeting over barbecue that the Reeds had raved about may have influenced my enthusiasm more than a little.

Forget that Reed’s a Kenan professor emeritus at Chapel Hill, arguably the foremost authority on the sociology of the South, not to mention that he is the only sociologist to be included in Roy Blount’s “Book of Southern Humor.” What matters here and to you is that the ink is barely dry on the pair’s forthcoming “Holy Smoke; The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue.” Although I gobbled up its 300 pages with almost the same delight that I’d sit down to a judging of whole hog, you can’t read the book until November — and I promise to tell you more about it in October. However, you can eat at the Backyard Barbecue any time it’s open, and I’d highly recommend your doing so. Reed and I began our visit to the restaurant in the same way that other hardened barbecue addicts sometimes whet their appetite, with a visit to the woodpile and the barbecue pit.

There we saw a big pile hardwood, a chopping block for splitting it . . .

the fire that sent the smoke billowing from the restaurant’s chimneys and huge haunches of pork, sizzling and crackling on its way to the table.

And that’s where we bore witness that the barbecue at Backyard Barbecue Pit has a pit!, where the pork and chicken and ribs are cooked in exactly the same way barbecue has been cooked in North Carolina for centuries — over hardwood coals, slowly for hours and with the administration of a mop, a thin vinegary sauce toward the end of the cooking process. And that’s what Reed found so encouraging about Backyard Barbecue — that it was a new restaurant, and one that served authenthic, true N.C. cue.

“One of the things we talk about in the book,” Reed tells me when we get to the table where our wives have ordered us plates of cue, “is what’s going on in the mountains of North Carolina, and on the coast and in major cities, where many of the people grew up somewhere else. Their idea of barbecue isn’t pulled pork with the vinegar-based sauce. And consequently what you’re getting is branches of national barbecue chains. Other restaurants have sprung up from local entrepreneurs, many of them who are coming out of competition barbecue, opening up Kansas City-style or Memphis-style restaurants. I love Memphis barbecue — in Memphis. I like brisket — in Texas. I have nothing against these barbecues in North Carolina as long as they’re labeled an exotic species.” Also sprach John Shelton Reed. Amen.

It was adquately clear that the Reeds relished Backyard’s barbecue. The pork, available chopped, is classic — bristling with pepper and vinegar and embued with that unmistakeable blend of hickory and fat-hitting-the-fire flavor that makes you want to pick it up with your fingers so you can smell it again an hour after you eat it (Unless, of course, you have my wife’s obsession of washing your hand AFTER you eat, something I’ve never understood.) My wife liked the ribs, a style of barbecue that’s not traditional to barbecue restaurants in the state — although I’d love to stand corrected. She described them as almost candied and my little bite of them made me want more (Didn’t your momma teach you to share, I kept thinking) — rich, smoky and tender. But the sides were nearly as good as the cue, prepared with someone’s soul-food recipes. And doesn’t barbecue qualify as soul food, especially if it’s prepared by a black family . . . in Durham . . . using their traditional recipe? The Random House Dictionary defines soul food as “traditional black American cookery, which originated in the rural South, consisting of such foods as chitterlings, pig knuckles, turnip greens and corn bread.” Maybe the Backyard Barbecue Pit will expand their menu as time goes on. I’ll certainly be back to see.

Adriatic Barbecue Fanatic

If Slovenia has a reputation for grilling meat over hardwood, I’ve certainly never heard about it, but then again, there are quite a lot of things I don’t know about Slovenia. But my source, as I said, was a Southerner, and so I respected her judgment, or at least her taste buds. She said knew where the closest thing to a barbecue restaurant anywhere near Trieste was, and I was ready to dive in and give it my best shot.

I hadn’t come to Trieste to eat, though I certainly had dined well, as you do almost anywhere in Italy. No, I was attending the Universitat del Caffe, a java-enabled school run by Illy Caffe, maker of the world’s finest espresso. A tough job, but someone’s got to do it, right? And on a rare free evening a group of us hard-working students escaped across the border into Slovenia by taxi. Our destination was the seaside village of Ankaran, our goal was to try the offerings at Stara Kanava (http://www.stara-kanava.si/index.php?lang=en).

Three high-caliber foodies came along — two administrators and an instructor from arguably America’s finest cooking school, The French Culinary Institute of New York City. Talk about serious eaters –though I’m afraid they were not exactly experts on the finer points of barbecue. Since the expedition had been my idea from the start, my reputation as a connoisseur of True Cue was sort of on the line. After all, what kind of place was this?

The first thing we saw driving up was a huge pile of hardwood — always a promising sign at a barbecue restaurant. Next came the savory scent of sizzling meat and tons of smoke drifting from the chimney. Even the New Yorkers knew this was a good thing. And then the owner, who gave each of us a bone-crushing handshake, looked just the sort guy — big, beefy and sweating profusely — who knew his way around a bed of hot coals and big hunks of meat.

In the distance the dark blue Adriatic met a fiery sunset. Nearby meat crackled and sizzled within a gargantuan hearth. And we’d barely sat down when our waitress brought us two big pitchers of wine drawn from wooden barrels. Yes, things were looking promising.

Let me tell you, you can learn a lot from the professionals. The Culinary Institute crew, taking charge quickly, proved their mastery of the fine art of ordering: “We’ll have one of everything,” one of them said without blinking. Now why hadn’t I ever thought of that? And that’s what we had, beginning with the appetizers: two different kinds of fat and juicy mussels; scallops on the half shell with a sassy sauce; and something called cicale de mari, translated as grasshoppers of the sea, which turned out to be long, skinny shrimp, though much sweeter — all of them prepared expertly over the coals. Then came what looked like grilled grits, bricks of polenta baked over the fire so that they picked up the flavors of the barbecue.

Further appetizers and a couple more pitchers of vino later, the first entree arrived, a T-bone steak the size of home plate and every bit as thick. To say it was huge is understatement. It weighed more than some pets I’ve had. The beef had obviously been cooked over an incredibly hot fire because its juices flooded the plate at the first cut. Our Culinary Institute meat-lover judged it one of the best pieces of beef he’d had in ages — until he tasted what I’d ordered. My cut was a loin steak, dinner plate-sized and covered with a thick carpet of truffles. It was beyond good. In fact my New York tablemates let me know that my moaning sounds were attracting attention. Apparently Slovenians are unaccustomed to Southerners expressing their appreciation for the thrill of the grill.

While my steak was, by consensus, the evening’s piece de resistance, the red snapper that made an appearance at our table was definitely the most dramatic of entrees. Split and flattened with the head still attached, it was food that looks back at you. Judging from the bass I’ve caught, I’d guess it weighed in at something like 8 pounds (Not that I’ve had a lot of experience catching 8-pound bass). One of the classically-trained chefs eloquently observed, in the argot of her trade, “Man, it’s really got a butt-load of salt on it, not that I’m complaining.” Far from it, we all disassembled the snapper like trained ichthyologists and ate it every morsel with absolute abandon.

No, there wasn’t any wild boar on the menu that night, nor goat, nor lamb. Appetizers, entrees, wine and vegetables (grilled, of course) are based strictlyh on seasonal availability. And that was fine with me. Good fresh seafood, expertly prepared, is about as good as it gets, especially if it’s followed by fresh blueberry strudel and a tray of flavored grappa, one of them made from freshly picked blackberries. In my view, barbecue is a universal that spans language and ethnic origin. Some of you might argue that I’m off-topic and what I ate in Slovenia has got nothing to do with barbecue, but when coals, craft and first-rate ingredients come together using traditional grilling methods, if it ain’t strictly cue, I don’t care.

So long as you save me a place at the table.

Got Gas?

Carl Rothrock, my friend from Greenville, N.C., was telling the Road Hog about how good the barbecue was at Boss Hogs (Boss Hog’s Backyard Barbecue 1534 E. 14th St. Greenville 252-758-8880; ) “They cook on charcoal. And The Skylite Inn (Route 3, Ayden, 252-746-4113) and Bum’s (115 E. Third Street, 919-746-6880) cook on wood, but everyone else down east has gone to gas or electric,” he said.

I wrote back to him “I’m finding as much gas-fired cue as you are. My favorite place in Lexington went over to gas. But I’ve recently made an interesting discovery: Gas- and electric-cook cue can approximate decent barbecue. Check out BBQ & Ribs. Co. in Graham (501 S Main St Graham, N.C.; 336-223-9880) though their ribs are better than their cue. And people swear by the pulled pork from Kingstree, South Carolina, which has a peppery vinegar-based sauce. They’ll also swear that it’s cooked over coals, but poke around the perimeter and you’ll find a natural gas tank, and owners will tell you truth when asked directly. I was flabbergasted a few years ago to find that one of my favorite places in Greensboro cooks over gas: Country Barbecue Country Barbecue (4012 West Wendover Ave., Greensboro, N.C.; 336-292-3557). Their trick, I was told when I called the restaurant, is to use lots of hickory chips and to cook the pork low and slow over some sort of artificial coals, so that the fat hits the fire. What I wonder is with the price of natural gas climbing if people won’t go back to good old fashioned hickory logs.”

Know where they’re “cooking on gas” and the cue is good? Or is the idea of any cue not cooked over coals an abomination?