I always get an assortment of whatever beef, pork, and sausages are available. But after eating the amazing barbecued Cornish hens at Cozy Corner, in Memphis, I've learned to bend this rule whenever I see something out of the ordinary on the menu. And one more thing: Concerning sauces, I have one overriding prejudice against the particularly silly brand of chauvinism demanding that men prove their masculinity by ingesting the most fiery sauce available. Why should a chef even bother to fine-tune his seasonings if the final component is a truckload of crushed habaneros? The more heat you put in a sauce, the harder it is to taste the other ingredients. Also, 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.
Out 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 had a smoke ring, a pink layer that meat gets just below the surface when it is smoked. My tongue made the acquaintance of the seasonings on the outside of the pork ribs and sliced beef, and then met the mellow smoke flavor as my teeth plunged deeper. The beef ribs were tender and marbled like the top of a rib-eye steak. And although I was suspicious of those chicken links, my misgivings disappeared when I tried them. They were light in color and heft but had a surprising peppery kick.
At Phillips Barb-B-Que, which is owned by Woody Phillips's cousin Foster Phillips, the meat had a rich, blackened crust of smoke-seared dry seasonings with just a hint of sugar. I also liked the ketchup-based sauce—at once very sweet and very tangy. The cousins hail from Keatchie, Louisiana, a small town about 25 miles southwest of Shreveport. Woody Phillips developed his barbecue concept before arriving in California. "But I had to leave Keatchie to come to California and make some barbecue," he says. (He opened his place in 1975.) Foster Phillips soon followed, encouraged by a Keatchie restaurateur to go into business for himself.
Although Foster's barbecue is a little spicier than Woody's—in terms of the sauce as well as the dry seasonings—they are similar enough to share a space at the top of the Los Angeles barbecue rankings. Interestingly, both include greens on the menu, a curious mingling of traditional barbecue with pot food side dishes more typical of soul food restaurants. By the same token, many West Coast soul food restaurants offer barbecue instead of the oven-baked, sauce-smothered meats typical in black southern-style restaurants in other parts of the country. It's as if the California places are one-stop repositories of black southern culinary traditions. In fact, maintaining the tastes of the South was a conscious effort on the part of transplanted black southerners. Historian Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, author of To Place Our Deeds, a history of African-Americans in the East Bay, told me, "They brought with them their expectations of advancement and a freer life than in the Jim Crow South, but they didn't want to leave their cultural traditions behind."
Up in northern California, I found quite a different barbecue scene. The 'cue culture there reflects the fact that as barbecue becomes more popular across the nation, sophisticated restaurateurs are designing menus not just for homesick Texans and Tennesseeans but also for people whose loyalty is to good food, not regional accuracy. The best such restaurateur I met in my explorations was Bob Kantor, a former New Yorker who owns Memphis Minnie's, in San Francisco. It may well be the finest barbecue restaurant in the state. The restaurant is named not for the late blues singer but for Kantor's mother, who grew up in Memphis before moving to New York City. Though Jewish, she loved pork; her idea of dietary law was not to fry any bacon when she knew the rabbi would be visiting.
Kantor preaches his philosophy of barbecue with all the fervor of a recent convert. His first rule—and I was thrilled to discover this—is not to serve sauce on his barbecue. Sauce is available on the tables if you want it. "I'm just trying to get people to look at barbecue as something other than sauce," he explains. "Why else do I spend sixteen hours working on my brisket?"
His combinations and juxtapositions are neither unsettling nor inappropriate, except perhaps to people for whom the regional authenticity of barbecue is sacred. I'm not that kind of a purist. While Kantor may not slather sauce on his finished product, part of his technique includes putting a South Carolina-style mustard-based sauce on the raw meat before adding the dry seasonings. His brisket, without a doubt the best I tasted in California, was fork-tender, crusted on the outside with spices and slightly charred meat. Most importantly, the flavor was complex all the way through.
My luck held. I was also happy to find another standout—pork ribs from KC's Bar-B-Que, across the Bay, in Berkeley. They were succulent, densely smoked, and mildly sweet. The initials refer to the hometown of the original owner, who, in 1968, after two years in business, decided to move back to Kansas City and sold the restaurant to the father of the current owner, Patrick Davis. "The Bay Area has quite a few different barbecue places," he tells me. "But the style is all based out of the South."
I finally had to admit that even though there is barbecue in California (and thank goodness for that, or I never would have lived it down), there is nothing that can be labeled "California barbecue." Most menus mirror those found in Louisiana and north Texas: pork ribs (not pork shoulder, the staple of Memphis and elsewhere in the Southeast), chicken, beef ribs, and sliced beef. There are no distinct California barbecue sauces the way there are in the southern Barbecue Belt, either. The essential balance that California cooks strive for is between sweet and sour, not hot and mild. Kantor's sauce aside, it's generally tomato-based.
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