Capital Q - Barbecue D.C. Style

BACK TO WHAT'S SMOKIN'

Barbecue D.C. Style
Beef or Pork, Dry or Wet, There's Something for Everyone

The Washington Post - June 2003
By Dan Gilgof, Page F01

Sunny Kim peers through a crack in the blackened steel doors of her arched brick barbecue pit and lets out a gasp. Inside, a dozen slabs of pork ribs sit sweating on a flat metal grate as flames leap from a pile of cherry wood logs to lick their undersides. "Too much wood!" Within seconds, Kim's husband, Kenny, is rocketing toward the pit with a deep aluminum pan filled with tap water. He unloads the pan, the flames fizzle, but it's too late.

"I told him not to touch the fire," Sunny says later, as her husband quietly stacks the charred ribs into another pan, this one destined for the scrap heap. "But he went and tried it this morning."

The Kims are still dogged by the occasional rookie error at Ben's Whole Hog Barbecue, the Manassas restaurant they bought last winter from its founder and namesake, Ben R. Morris. Like the proprietors behind some of the Washington area's other barbecue joints, the Kims didn't have the benefit of coming up in the shadows of the Deep South's barbecue kings.

"I understand fire because most Korean people cook with it," Sunny says. Growing up in South Korea, her mother cooked on a small outdoor stove heated by pine. When she and her husband first took over Ben's, she tried serving ribs Korean-style -- seasoned with sugar, pepper and sesame oil -- but they garnered weak reviews from customers, who hadn't come to a barbecue joint to expand their palates.

So Kim quickly evolved into an American-style pit master, experimenting with different combinations of cherry, oak and hickory woods in her brick barbecue pit. She arrives at Ben's early to build slow-burning fires that last much of the day. Ribs smoke for five hours, brisket and pork shoulder for nearly 10, emerging from the smoker juicy and baby food soft. The slide-off-the-bone spare ribs are cough-inducingly smoky.

Just the thought of them makes Nick Fontana squint. "We don't serve fall-off-the-bone ribs here," Fontana says inside Capital Q, his Chinatown restaurant. "What's the point of eating ribs if you're not picking them up and biting them?"

While the fault lines in the long-simmering debate over what constitutes real barbecue usually correspond to state borders -- Texas beef eaters vs. Carolina pork snobs, "dusty" Memphis dry rub ribs vs. "sticky" Kansas City wet ribs, for instance -- Washington's patchwork of barbecue joints puts sweet Carolina vinegar sauce a car ride away from feisty, tomato-based Texas barbecue sauce. At Ben's, both are within arm's reach, in a bouquet of plastic squeeze bottles that includes a South Carolina mustard sauce.

The melding of distinctive regional peculiarities, taboo in much of the South, is the mark of Washington-style 'cue.

Born and raised in east Texas (with a seven-year New York absence that stole all but a trace of his Lone Star drawl), Fontana is one of the area's barbecue proprietors native to stalwart barbecue country, and it shows on the menu. At Capital Q you can get smoked sausage from Elgin, one of a constellation of towns outside Austin settled by German immigrants and still home to legendary butchers and smokehouses.

Capital Q's dry rubs (spices dusted onto meats before they hit the smoker) and barbecue sauces (ladled over the meats just after they hit the plate) also claim a Texas birthright, with ancho and chipotle peppers giving the Q's tomato-based sauce a south-of-the-border kick. Fontana developed his recipes in consultation with "Barbeque'N With Bobby," a cookbook by Bobby Seale, Black Panthers co-founder and native Texan.

But the Q's menu also makes some concessions to Washingtonians that wouldn't pass muster in Texas, where no-frills barbecue means brisket on white bread, topped with onions and a pickle. Two years after opening in 1997, Fontana added Carolina-style pulled pork to the menu, a decision that still makes him uncomfortable. "Pulled pork to Texans, it's not barbecue -- it's pork with vinegar on it," he says, lighting a Marlboro. "There's no smoke to it. It's a nice item, but it's not barbecue."

To appease saladheads, Fontana introduced smoked baked potatoes and portobello mushrooms, which -- Texas be damned -- hold their own next to the brisket. In homage to his H Street environs, Fontana even concocted a "Chinese cowboy platter, " sliced beef brisket over white rice. "DEA and FBI people eat it in their car with a fork," he says. "They don't have to worry about their hands being dirty when they pick up their radios."

Besides the menu, the big difference between Capital Q and its old-school Texas forebears is its combination gas/wood smoker, a huge, temperature-controlled box that channels smoke from a small wood-burning compartment into its cavernous gas-heated belly. Pork and beef brisket are often thrown in overnight, for a completely unsupervised smoke.

Still, Capital Q prides itself on its yesteryear image, with cafeteria-style counter service and the kind of ribs that make you work. "Our ribs aren't yuppie ribs," Fontana says. "Some of our customers have eaten ribs from Bennigan's or Chili's , so when they have to pick them up and bite them and they're somewhat tough, they're like, 'These ribs aren't cooked. We say, 'Here's your money back, that's how they are.' "

Such hell-bent parochialism is the antithesis of Red Hot & Blue, a chain restaurant where waitresses (gasp!) deliver food to the table, and barbecue shares menu space with burgers and salads. "I wanted a place where southerners who wear starched white shirts and crisp chinos could come with their mamas on Sunday for a barbecue sandwich," says Robert Friedman, the restaurant's president and co-founder. "We took barbecue culture and cleaned it up for yuppies."

Fifteen years ago, when Friedman and his partners opened their flagship restaurant and needed recipes, they simply sent a manager into the kitchen at Corky's -- a well-known Memphis-based restaurant that takes its cues from upscale casual restaurants like TGI Friday's -- with a camcorder and a $20,000 check.

It's not the most romantic route to a dry rub, but Friedman has helped build a small empire of restaurants (35 locations nationwide) precisely by taking some of the romance out of barbecue. "The first-generation barbecue restaurants had brick chimneys and the meat cooked over an open flame," he says. "The creosote [from the burning wood] would build up in the chimney, and every year you'd stuff it with corrugated cardboard and burn it off. And invariably, the building would burn down.

"Mom and pop would buy their meats at a local grocery store," he continues. "They couldn't afford an expensive slab so they would buy an inferior cut. They'd chop up the bone and gristle real fine and mix it with barbecue sauce to hide the fact that it was an inferior meat."

Like Capital Q, RH&B's kitchen is home to a sleek metal gas/wood smoker, which cooks meat in about half the time of a brick pit. Meats come out tasting less smoky, of course -- and the barbecue sauces are tame enough not to offend -- but ribs land in the dining room either sticky wet or thickly crusted in dry rub. The fixings give cover to weakly smoked meats, but it's a Tennessee style that's hard to come by elsewhere in these parts.

For ribs that need no sauce whatsoever -- the kind that smoke for nine hours and taste like Cuban cigars -- drive to an oversize, upright shoebox in Leesburg called the Mighty Midget. Housed in a shiny 8-by-6-foot hut built from the fuselage of a B-17 bomber shortly after World War II, it somehow manages to fit husband and wife owners Brian and Robin DeVaux and Robin's 21-year-old son, Chris.

The kitchen is out back: a portable, black iron smoker about 10 feet long that Brian towed up from an ironworks in Tennessee. On the right side of the oil-drum bellied grill hangs an iron wood box, which sends cherry smoke into the grill and up through a narrow chimney on the left. "We do 36 racks a weekend," DeVaux says, pulling the aluminum foil off a pork shoulder in an aluminum foil pan. "When they're gone, they're gone." He nudges the shoulder with a pair of tongs and the solid hunk dissolves into a splintered heap, requiring none of the ripping apart that gives pulled pork its name.

The Midget's dining room is entirely al fresco, roughly 50 plastic lawn chairs spread around tables on a concrete patio. ("When it rains," DeVaux says, "we do a lot of carryout."). The ribs aren't officially on the menu yet, so you have to ask, and by the time I arrived around noon on a flawless Saturday in May, there was one lone rack remaining. At first bite, the smoke is overpowering. Once you've adjusted, though, it's hard to rationalize lathering barbecue sauce onto loin backs that have endured nine hours on the smoker.

Do it anyway. Brian DeVaux's half-dozen barbecue sauces (which he developed himself but which are manufactured off-premises) include peach habanero, sweet plum, and cherry chipotle, along with more traditional offerings.

A foray deep into Northern Virginia isn't the only way to escape the gas-powered smoker. When John Snedden opened Rocklands in upper Georgetown in 1990, he knew a brick pit wouldn't pass fire code. So he custom-designed a fully enclosed stainless steel smoker. It's prompted only three visits from the fire department so far.

Rocklands takes its name from a 235-acre Virginia farm that Snedden lived on while attending Washington and Lee University in the mid-'70s. He'd built a pair of smokers in high school shop class from sawed-in-half oil drums, and he hauled one to the farm to barbecue the turkey, dove and squirrel that he and his roommates shot on the farm, sometimes from their back porch.

Rockands' current sauce is more or less the same recipe Snedden developed at school 25 years ago, "a cross between Florida and Carolina, tomato-based but distinguished by vinegar." The restaurant produces only one sauce, but its menu is virtually unrivaled barbecue-wise, with smoked beef ribs (a rarity in the area), lamb, tuna and vegetables. Many items, like smoked turkey and Vietnamese hot sauce, were inspired by Snedden's frequent fact-finding missions through barbecueland.

"We're not trying to re-create the authentic Memphis experience here," Snedden says. "When people ask what kind of barbecue we serve, we say D.C. barbecue."

Snedden's most recent expedition, a road trip through Virginia and North Carolina that he charted using tips from friends and assorted newspaper clippings, took him to nearly two dozen barbecue joints in three days this spring and confirmed many of Friedman's points on the perils of old-style, backcountry barbecue. "Virtually every place we went that was using wood had at one point or another burned down," Snedden says. "One place had burned down their pit three times."

Some restaurants he came across barbecued whole pigs, which Snedden does for catered events. But the Carolinians didn't bother separating the ribs from shoulders. "They'd strip all the meat and chop it all together, the hams, the shoulder, the loins," he says. "Everything went into one big mash."

Pig mash, in fact, was pretty much the only dish available along the trip. "We went to 22 places, and only one place served ribs," Snedden says. "And there was no beef whatsoever."

Almost makes you glad to live outside of "real" barbecue country.

BACK TO WHAT'S SMOKIN'

IN OTHER NEWS