A Southern Barbecue Experience

At age 27, I’m ashamed to admit as a fanatic carnivore, I’ve never had proper barbecue until today. Sure, I’ve been around it, smelled it. sampled it. I was even fortunate enough to attend the Big Apple BBQ festival as a member of the press a couple of years ago. The greatest barbecue chefs from all over the country gathered at Madison Square Park and fed me to my heart’s content, for gratis! But I wouldn’t even count that as a proper barbecue experience.

The big problem is I don’t eat pork, which of course, is the centerpiece to any barbecue. I used to avoid it for religious reasons but now since I’m not used to the taste, I just don’t enjoy it as much as beef or lamb or any other red or white meat. So I’ve always ate around barbecues, loading up on collard greens and macaroni and cheese and nibbling at a couple of riblets at a friend’s barbecue for the sake of being polite.

But lately, I’ve grown more adventurous, experimenting with more and more pork just to see what I may have been missing, especially when it comes to French cuisine which I love. As a result, I got violently ill last weekend from sampling cured pork meat at a friend’s wonderful dinner party. (Or was it the coq au vin cooked in a pork belly sauce?). Needless to say, I could easily go my entire life without eating any more pig, which in a city like New York is really easy to do. But when it comes to events like barbecues, it’s always a sad affair.

This week, I’m driving around the Great American South with my girlfriend, Kelly, just for the pure fuck of it. Our only goal is to end up at her family’s house in Elizabethtown, Indiana sometime around Christmas Eve. We’ve been seeing things, doing this, and oh yes, eating things. The South, as you know, is the Madison Square Garden for huge outdoor cookouts and barbecues and today we found ourselves at the heart of it in Nashville, Tennessee. Kelly’s good friends from Louisville (who we’re staying with tomorrow) recommended a place called Jack’s Bar-B-Que off the District in Downtown as a good place to get some divey, local barbecue into our systems. And that’s what we ate for lunch!

It wasn’t until I took my first bite of the beef brisket dipped in one of Jack’s plethora of barbecue sauces, chewed, paused, and then uttered out loud, “Oh.” As in, “Oh, so that’s what all the fuss is about.” It was a fascinating cut of meat. Normally, when I get tender, stringy meat I expect it to be boiled, bland and taste repetitive. But here I was enjoying every bite. The shell was just the right amount of crispy and each bite was moist, juicy and pleasurable. Adding the sauces made it almost unfair as there was suddenly a kick of thunder, lightning, tornado into each mouthful. Boy, was I happy!

As for the sauces, without a doubt, my favorite was the “XXX 911,”  which tasted more tangy with a little kick than out-of-this-world hot and spicy. It was so good that I even bought a bottle to go.

When Kelly ordered this chicken plate, the server, a no-nonsense, thick Southern-accented (which, I guess is normal-accented in Nashville) man in a sauce-stained apron mumbled, “You’re gonna enjoy this. I chased this little fella down myself just a couple of hours ago.”

He was right. I guess the secret ingredient is “fear.”

As you can see, I still steered clear of any pork-related meats. I guess I’ll never be a real die-hard BBQ lover. But keep serving me beef briskets and grilled chicken like this and I won’t ever complain.