Posted on 09/16/2003 8:45:32 PM PDT by paulklenk
THE smoky romance of the barbecue pit, with its dry rubs and wet mops, its fruit woods and burnt ends, has long been a New York fantasy. But real barbecue has proved harder to produce locally than baguettes, baba ghanouj and banh mi put together.
Food-obsessed New Yorkers harp on the diversity of the city's kitchens and the excellence of their offerings, but most are unhappily conscious of barbecue as a magnificent native dish that is perpetually out of reach. Would-be pit masters have tried to please them but have had to contend with emission-control laws, strict fire codes and a general lack of faith that real barbecue could exist in these parts. Local fans have been reduced to mail-order ribs and the occasional binge weekend in Memphis.
But this fall, the stars have aligned for real New York barbecue.
Whether it's the arrival of newly efficient smoke-scrubbing technologies, a growing outdoor-cooking industry fueling national interest in barbecue, or a local economy that makes a $10 entree almost irresistible, the number of places making pit barbecue in Manhattan — and making it well — has suddenly tripled, and a good, old-fashioned barbecue war may be in the offing. There will be no unhappy victims.
Daisy May's BBQ USA opened in mid-August to instant success; the pit master there, Adam Perry Lang, is already planning an expansion. The Queens barbecue legend Robert Pearson, after a decade of false starts, has entered into a partnership with the restaurateur Ken Aretsky to smoke his signature Texas-style beef briskets on the Upper East Side, in the space that formerly housed Mr. Aretsky's Butterfield 81. And at Blue Smoke, after tantalizing Manhattan with two years of up-and-down results, Danny Meyer, the owner, and his pit master, Kenny Callaghan, seem to have finally wrestled their technical problems to the mat.
Will smoke-sensitive neighbors, the ever-critical barbecue crowd and New York's famously demanding customers (who generally expect restaurants to keep regular hours, provide plates and serve vegetables, all in direct conflict with barbecue tradition) give them all a chance at success? We'd better hope so; this has been a long time coming.
The city has no shortage of so-called bar-b-que and chicken-and-ribs joints, but aficionados know: that's not real barbecue. What is?
According to the mission statement of the Kansas City Barbeque Society, the closest thing the quarrelsome barbecue world has to a governing body, barbecue is meat cooked by indirect heat and smoke.
But each expert interviewed last week found something to disagree with even in that bare statement. The world of American barbecue, whose members come together at thousands of team competitions each year (and on countless Internet forums each day), includes professionals, amateurs and, seemingly, every resident of Memphis, Kansas City, Texas and the Carolinas. Each of those regions is fiercely committed to its own barbecue style, with completely different ways of seasoning and spicing the meat both before and after it is cooked.
Herewith the short list of what is universally agreed:
Grilling is not barbecue.
Smoking is not barbecue, although it is a close relative.
Barbecue sauce, while it has a place at the table, does not make barbecue barbecue.
Mr. Callaghan, who has been the pit master at Blue Smoke since it opened in 2001, offered a test: "How about this," he said. "Once you've been to your 50th or 60th barbecue joint, then you just know what barbecue is."
In Manhattan, only Daisy May's and Blue Smoke cook their meat exclusively with wood, making them the sole local claimants to the real barbecue throne. (Pearson's Texas BBQ on the Upper East Side will join their ranks soon.)
Shortcuts practiced by the others — including Virgil's in Times Square and Tennessee Mountain in SoHo — include parboiling meat before cooking it over charcoal or gas, supplementing wood heat with gas and, some say, the occasional drizzle of liquid smoke. These can sometimes result in passingly good barbecue, at least by New York's former standards.
But according to Bobby Richter, a native of Rego Park, Queens, and pit master of the Queens-based barbecue team Big Island Barbecue, "Once you've had real barbecue, you can't enjoy yourself at those places any more." (In another sign of life for New York barbecue, Big Island just became the first New York City team ever to qualify for barbecue's most prestigious competition, the annual Jack Daniel's Invitational Championships, to be held in Lynchburg, Tenn., on Oct. 25.) In short, the path to barbecue greatness cannot run through a gas oven.
Mr. Pearson is the only New York pit master whose product is respected throughout the city, on the Web and even in Texas, and his second coming to Manhattan is eagerly anticipated. Mr. Pearson's previous, brief foray into Manhattan involved trucking precooked briskets from Queens to the Upper West Side; needless to say, this did not do much for the flavor of the barbecue, which should be eaten as soon as possible once it comes off the pit.
A profoundly unlikely barbecue legend, Mr. Pearson was brought to New York from his native England by Vogue magazine as a hot London hairstylist in 1966. As an avatar of chic, he was often invited to Texas to teach new techniques to stylists there. From them, he said, he received a crash course in Texas barbecue. "Those girls would take me from cow palace to cow palace all night long," he recalled.
From Texas, Mr. Pearson embarked on a barbecue education that included posing as a journalist at Arthur Bryant's in Kansas City, in a vain attempt to get a look at the legendary pit. (Mr. Bryant saw through the ruse immediately, Mr. Pearson recalled, but granted him a one-minute audience anyway). The style he eventually developed, and brought to Queens in 1992, is even more spare than that of Texas barbecue purists.
Mr. Pearson puts absolutely no seasoning on his whole briskets before putting them in the pit. His recipe — if you can call it that — calls for just the 14-pound slabs and smoke: no rub, no sauce, not even salt. The resulting meat, in addition to being outrageously flavorful and juicy, boasts a clear red smoke ring around the edges of each slice. The smoke ring is a universally recognized sign of real barbecue, though Mr. Pearson says ruefully that New Yorkers sometimes mistake it for excess barbecue sauce or underdone beef.
Mr. Pearson will soon be opening up shop on East 81st Street. In 1998, he closed his original and still-mourned Long Island City location, on 51st Street, with its back garden and prowling cats, and moved his pit to a Jackson Heights sports bar. (That location will remain open.) The Long Island City lot was taken over by Philly's Smoke House, a multilevel barbecue palace that smokes over wood.
In an attempt to forestall complaints from neighbors (the new location is in the heart of the Upper East Side, just a few blocks from Junior League headquarters), Mr. Aretsky has fitted Pearson's roof with a $36,000 electrostatic precipitator that filters out the smoke, vapors and grease that are inevitably exhaled by a barbecue pit. But he will be working the same no-frills pit, shipped from Mesquite, Tex., that he has always used.
"People ask to see the pit," he said. "And then they're surprised when it's not a big hole in the ground."
These days, a barbecue pit — even in barbecue country — is most likely an above-ground brick oven encased in steel, about the size of a refrigerator. According to Mr. Pearson, the art and craft of the pit master takes place not in the cabinet (where the meat revolves endlessly on racks) but in the pit's separate, tiny firebox.
In the firebox, hickory logs burn all day, every day, giving off a controlled, intense heat and, surprisingly, almost no smoke. Mr. Pearson said the goal is actually to produce as little smoke as possible. "There will always be some smoke," he said, "and that's enough to flavor the meat. But the less smoke you can see, the better the barbecue." In an efficient pit, he continued, you can cook 700 pounds of meat for 14 hours using only seven logs.
Green, or moist, wood is the key to a fire that burns low and slow. "You can't throw a couple of dry pine two-by-fours on a fire and expect to cook barbecue," said Chris O'Neil, the executive chef at Virgil's. He said that in the winter, when fresh wood is scarce, some pit masters resort to soaking split logs in pickle juice and apple juice to moisten them.
Mr. Lang, who came to barbecue via his Long Island childhood and the kitchens of Le Cirque and Daniel, has already learned enough about the competitive side of barbecue to keep quiet about his methods. "Part of barbecue's appeal is all the secrets and mystique," he said. Mr. Lang's pit, operated with a computer keypad, looks more like an oversize cellphone than a barbecue pit. But except for his automated humidity controls — the absolute latest in barbecue technology — the cooking principle is the same as Mr. Pearson's: wood smoke and heat, steadily applied to large pieces of meat.
But Mr. Lang's end product could hardly be more different from Mr. Pearson's. Using the palate he developed in those haute kitchens, Mr. Lang slathers his meat with thick spice pastes and complex sauces. He ranges through all regional barbecue styles and heads beyond, into pineapple, ginger and any other ingredient that helps him achieve the explosive blend of spicy, sweet, tart and salty that is barbecue's flavor signature. He home-brews four completely different barbecue sauces, chops up his beef brisket and bathes it in yet another sauce, and makes a mustardy dressing to coat shreds of pulled pork, the Carolina classic. The barbecue itself is good, but it is the punch of the sauces that comes screaming at you across the metal counter, which Mr. Lang said he modeled on the one at Gray's Papaya.
"I hate restaurants," Mr. Lang said last week, about his transition from the likes of Daniel to a no-frills, no-seats barbecue joint on a barren stretch of 11th Avenue. "Great barbecue is just as good or better than anything you eat in a restaurant," he continued. "Besides, these are exactly the same sweet potatoes they serve at Le Cirque." Mr. Lang's side dishes, as might be expected, far outpace those of Mr. Pearson, who eschews barbecue sauce and grudgingly serves coleslaw only in response to customer demand.
Blue Smoke, having spent its early childhood trying to be all barbecue to all New Yorkers, has had time to perfect its side dishes in the meantime (the baked beans with chopped burnt ends, crusty edges of barbecued pork, are exemplary). The original flaw in the Blue Smoke pit, a 15-story chimney that sucked out all the heat, smoke and humidity, has been adjusted. And Mr. Callaghan, sounding war-weary, said he hopes the slashing criticisms leveled by local barbecue fans when the restaurant opened are now permanently behind him. The barbecue is worthy, and occasionally even spectacular.
Why do New Yorkers care so much about barbecue? Mr. Richter of Big Island Barbecue says that barbecue is simply addictive, no matter where you're from. Other New York aficionados cited spicy pastrami, smoked salmon and the glazed spareribs at old-fashioned Chinese restaurants as seminal barbecue experiences. For many Jewish New Yorkers, a weakness for slow-cooked brisket is already a given.
Even as word gets out about the new pits, the nagging question of authenticity will continue to dog New York's pit masters. Will local barbecue be able to stand up to the real thing? Robb Walsh, the restaurant critic for the Houston Press and author of the definitive "Legends of Texas Barbecue Cook Book," said, "Let me put the question in New York terms: If you filtered Houston city water so it was the same as New York tap, and used the same flour, and brought in the same ovens, could you make authentic New York bagels in Texas? Yes, and no."
Speaking of smoking, I discovered a bar and restaurant in Manhattan that allows smoking.
It's called Florino's, and shares it's space with a cigar store called Three Little Indians, in Little Italy, just off Mulberry Street.
During the Feast of San Genarro this weekend, my brother and I popped in for a beer. I was smoking a hand-rolled cigar I had purchased from a street vendor and didn't want to extinguish. They let me in and said I could smoke.
After inquiring politely about this, the guy in charge told me, "The city is scared of us." They've been in business for forty years, and have probably always sold cigars in the bar.
We had a nice glass of Peroni and enjoyed the rest of the festival.
What..no Grey Poupon? What in the devil is BBQ, without some fava beans and a nice Chianti??? sheeesh there is no peace in the hearthland.. :)
Stay Safe Carlo !
BBQ?? Correctamundo, we guru's in the Nutro-nukeit clinic call it Southern health food.. *<]{:op~
These people are charlatans.
Sonny's... a good place to start AND finish. Same location since 1910. If you go there for lunch and don't arrive before 11:30 am, ya better want chicken, because the beef is GONE. It's the only place I know where folks will eat standing up in the parking lot.
TLI
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