Fresh barbecue matters, even when diners don’t get any
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Version 0 of 1. As every barbecue nut knows, you try to time your restaurant visits so the meats are straight from the smoker. That’s easier in places like Austin, Kansas City or Memphis, where barbecue joints have such heavy reputations that customers are willing to wait in long, decidedly insane lines for the chance to bite into fresh barbecue. Some diners may even be turned away at the door when the pitmaster abruptly announces he’s sold out for the day. D.C. barbecue joints can only dream of such devotion. There are probably a half-dozen or more reasons why the District doesn’t have a barbecue scene on par with the cities mentioned above, but one of them is a culture of entitlement that permeates Washington. In a town full of important people, few seem willing to be inconvenienced for lunch or dinner, especially if they have to wait in line. Or told they’ve arrived too late to eat. Their concept of fresh, high-quality barbecue involves its immediate availability, no matter the time of day. “People in those other places definitely understand a [barbecue restaurant] running out of something, while here in D.C. they don’t,” says Josh Saltzman, co-owner of Kangaroo Boxing Club on 11th Street NW. “If we ran out of brisket or pork, they would murder us.” Such consumer demand can place a serious burden on pitmasters, particularly those at smaller joints. A smokehouse kitchen doesn’t function like the back-of-the-house crew at a standard restaurant: Pitmasters can’t open a lowboy refrigerator, take out a half-rack of ribs and smoke it to order. They have to smoke meats hours in advance and have them ready to meet customer demand — even if that customer arrives at 9:15 p.m. on a Wednesday and demands a brisket platter. Keeping the barbecue fresh can prove difficult, if not impossible. Larger barbecue operations such as Hill Country in Penn Quarter or Smokehouse Live in Leesburg can better meet those expectations. They have large-capacity smokers and advanced meat-holding systems. But at neighborhood places like Kangaroo Boxing Club or Small Fry in Park View, the owners have to get creative. At KBC, for example, co-owner and Michigan native Trent Allen has developed an ingenious method for preparing brisket, borrowing from barbecue and French techniques. The smoker-cum-confit process, part of KBC’s Michigan-style barbecue, helps keep the meat moist throughout the day. When I sampled KBC’s brisket for my annual barbecue rankings, I was struck by its succulence. It was silky and fork-tender, the kind of beef associated with wet-cooking methods, not dry-heat smokers. The thick-cut slices stubbornly resisted categorization: They sported little bark and only a hint of wood smoke. They also came with a horseradish-laced sauce, aligning the dish more with steakhouse traditions than barbecue. Still, in my notes, I wrote that the brisket was “tasty.” I also said it had little to do with barbecue — at least my notions of barbecue. [The $20 Diner’s 2016 rankings of Washington’s best barbecue joints.] Over at Small Fry, owner and chef Ali Bagheri takes an equally unorthodox approach to brisket. He starts like any pitmaster would: Bagheri smokes the massive hunk of beef for 10 hours in a Southern Pride unit with apple, oak and hickory woods. Then he rests and refrigerates it. He’ll save the pan drippings from the 10-hour smoke and cook them down with beef stock. The resulting jus, equally warm and smoky, will be used to reheat slices of brisket whenever an order comes in. “We serve it like a French dip,” Bagheri tells me. The thin slices of ashen brisket do nothing for me, but they did much to sink Small Fry’s chances to appear on my list of the best barbecue joints for brisket. Could meat like this be the reason Bagheri calls Small Fry a “nontraditional smokehouse”? [A good pitmaster is difficult to replace] Well, yes and no. It’s true that Bagheri — better known as the owner and sandwich wiz behind Sundevich in Shaw — didn’t want to align his shop with regional barbecue traditions, but he also envisioned Small Fry as a place that would smoke atypical proteins such as bluefish and peel-and-eat shrimp. He, in fact, had both on his menu when Small Fry opened last fall, but they’re gone. They’re gone in part because of customer demand (or lack thereof) and because Bagheri had to focus on two forthcoming projects: a second Sundevich in Georgetown (a collaboration with Grace Street Coffee and South Block Juice Co.) and Union Drinkery, a sister bar to Small Fry (much like A&D is connected at the hip to Sundevich). “I haven’t had a chance to get into the kitchen and do my thing,” Bagheri says. Once Union Drinkery opens later this year, Bagheri has plans to revive his original vision for Small Fry. He hopes the bar crowd will increase demand at his smokehouse, perhaps to the point where he can serve fresher meats. He doesn’t hide the fact that, at present, he serves ribs that are sometimes two or three days old. When I visited Small Fry in June, I placed the kind of order that immediately pegged me as either a) a food critic or b) someone with a serious eating disorder. I was the only customer there at 11:30 in the morning, so I wandered to the back wall, which provides a view of the spacious kitchen. I watched as the cook pulled the St. Louis-style ribs out of a container and tossed them on a grill with a little sauce. It had all the romance of speed dating. Yet the reheated ribs quickly cast a spell on me. The grill had warmed them through, caramelized their saucy exterior and added a layer of char, all black and crusty. The ribs were a little sweet, a little spicy and totally slammable. Later, I sheepishly admitted to former DCity pitmaster Rob Sonderman how much I liked the reconstituted bones. My affection for them, I told Sonderman, felt like a betrayal of the unwritten rule to embrace only fresh barbecue. The pitmaster confessed he likes pre-smoked ribs revitalized on high heat, too. But here’s the thing: No matter how delicious, reheated ribs are never going to contribute to a scene that puts Washington in the national barbecue conversation. To earn any sort of wider recognition, local pitmasters must be willing to offend their customers by running out of meats — and customers must be willing to wait for brisket they may never taste. |