I would like to say that divine inspiration led me to Prayer Assembly Church of God in Christ, on East El Segundo Boulevard, on that hot Saturday afternoon. In fact, though, it was Woody Phillips's 34-year-old son, Roderick, who did it, after I had promised to bring him back some barbecued turkey necks. But it must have been divine inspiration that led the Reverend Clevester Williams Sr. to add a bar-becue stand to his stucco-and-stained-glass edifice. "I started forty years ago because I had built a church and I needed ten thousand dollars to buy some pews," he told me. "I went to bed that night and asked the Lord how I could get the money. And the Lord revealed to me the barbecue, the spices, and the wood."
There was fine barbecue packed into my Styrofoam container that day. In the case of the ribs, which had a wonderful smoky sweetness, the simple seasonings had become one with the meat. The turkey necks were fall-off-the-bone tender, although they lacked a deep smoke flavor. The sauce, one of the best I had in Los Angeles, was neither too thick nor too sweet. Well spiced with chili powder and flecks of red pepper, its heat was just right. I had to admit, however, that standing in line in a church parking lot on a broiling afternoon is not for everyone.
But I was there on a mission. When I told friends that I was setting out in search of California barbecue, they reacted as if I were off to hunt unicorns. "There is no such thing as California barbecue," they insisted.
If you presume 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 "California barbecue" would seem like an oxymoron. Who ever heard of free-range ribs? Who ever bothered to put heirloom cabbage in coleslaw?
"Barbecue is southern," my doubters continued, conveniently forgetting that 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 from Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma often headed farther west, to the Golden State.
Besides all that, I have been to every one of 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 our nation's obsession with smoked meat. In the course of that trip, I quickly learned that barbecue authorities are a dime a dozen and that their opinions are often worth even less.
So I didn't expect to find a million great places in California, especially once I had discovered that in the Los Angeles Yellow Pages there is just a small listing for takeout "barbecue stands" and practically no listing at all for sit-down barbecue restaurants. It's as if all the barbecue places are located in alleys between pawnshops and filling stations—just on the outskirts of respectability. I can't imagine barbecue being slighted this way in Kansas City or Memphis, towns whose whole identities are wrapped up in their reputation for smoked meat. But I figured that with its combination of black immigrants, hardwood, and great barbecue weather, California had the ingredients I needed to prove the doubters wrong.
My hunch that barbecue existed there was formed in 1996, when a friend and I drove along Central Avenue, in South Central Los Angeles. Back in those days, only five years after the beating of Rodney King, the area was better known for riots than ribs. Still, it seemed to me that I saw nearly a dozen barbecue places.
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 1920s, Central Avenue was being referred to as the Harlem of the West. In part because segregation relegated black musicians to playing on Central Avenue (or in Watts), a vibrant music scene developed there. During World War II, as migrants came west to work in arms factories, the African-American population grew. But in the '50s, as black Angelenos started moving to other parts of the city, Central Avenue began its decline.
I started my search on that street but found little sign of the restaurants I had passed years earlier. Because of the large number of barbecue places on Slauson Avenue, however, I was tempted to conclude that I had found my new barbecue boulevard there. But after tasting the food at the first two places I saw, I began to suspect that the avenue was mostly show. Then, one Saturday, I stopped at Woody's Bar-B-Que, a takeout place whose outer wall was emblazoned with a gray and white bulldog urging passersby to stop. Owner Woody Phillips's menu included pork ribs, beef ribs, sliced beef, chicken, and—an unusual addition—chicken links. I ordered a combination plate and braced myself for more disappointment.
First, let me digress. The tasting of barbecue is a precise affair that involves an assessment not only of quality but of authenticity as well. Good barbecue must be smoked over hardwood or charcoal, and the flavor of the fuel must penetrate the meat. Barbecue should be tender. Brisket and pork shoulder should yield to the fork with little effort, and ribs should separate from the bone without excessive pulling and tugging. The difficulty lies in 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 up and char the meat. 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 both ways.)
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.
I confessed to Moore that I'd been disappointed that there were so few good barbecue places in California, and asked if she could offer an explanation. For her, she said, the most obvious cultural manifestation of the change that took place in the black community in the 1970s was heard in the music. Blues gave way to rhythm and blues, and rural music gave way to an urban sound. Extending her analysis, I see the impetus for the decline of California barbecue as well. As younger people, born in California, created a society that was more reflective of their own experiences, the remnants of southern tradition that had flourished in California in the '40s and '50s lost much of their potency.
Just as the South no longer holds the depth of cultural significance it once held, the meaning of the food and the people that serve it has been chipped away by time and circumstance. What we are left with are not the vestiges of southern barbecue, but the vestiges of the vestiges. And while these Californians may be that many steps removed from the divine inspiration that fired the pits of their forefathers, they are keepers of a sacred flame nonetheless.
LOS ANGELES
Prayer Assembly Church of God in Christ
442 E. El Segundo Boulevard 310-327-9474
Woody's Bar-B-Que
3446 W. Slauson Avenue 323-294-9443
Phillips Bar-b-que
4307 W. Leimert Boulevard 323-292-7613
BAY AREA
Memphis Minnie's
576 Haight Street, San Francisco 415-864-7675
KC's Bar-b-que
2613 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley 510-548-1140