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Vancouver's Best Barbecue

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By Charlene Rooke published Jul 1, 2009

Johann Wall

Additional Images click to enlarge

Some things have soul and other things do not. You know it when you feel it. Lynyrd Skynyrd singing "Sweet Home Alabama" has soul. Kid Rock rapping over it does not. Though Vancouver has a big heart, it has a deficiency of soul. So I'm hungry to taste redemption when I can, even if it's in the humble act of sucking lashings of sauce and pork grease off my fingers.

Double D has soul. He's a wiry white guy with a wispy pale ponytail and 'stache. His T-shirt makes his business as a barbecue pit master perfectly clear: Get the Lard Out. When he plays lap steel guitar and sings the blues at the Princeton Pub or the Yale, it's with an intuition earned by travelling across the American South and eating barbecue along the way. His barbecue is a noun, not a verb; it's made by smoking meat over low and slow heat, using hardwood charcoal and plenty of love.

On this morning, in the kitchen at Memphis Blues on Broadway, Double D's instrument is a quivering, gelatinous pork butt, a cut of fat-mantled, bone-in pork shoulder that has spent 14 hours in the applewood fumes of the restaurant's Ole Hickory smoker. He slaps on thin latex gloves; it seems a bit like donning stockings to walk on hot coals. He plunges his fingers into the caramelized sugar-and-spice crust to pull the pork by hand, by feel. (At a barbecue joint on the side of a highway in South Carolina, a red-faced, plaid-shirted pit master once told me that a properly smoked pork butt "should jiggle like a woman's ass." Nobody every mistook soul for chivalry.) He passes me a piece, tinged with a deep burgundy smoke ring just inside the dark crusty bark. My fingers are covered in grease; my heart is bathed in soul.

For many B.C. gastronomes barbecue is a passion, maybe an obsession. Bill Gaston, a novelist, UVic professor, and otherwise sane man, burned a house down smoking meat in his backyard. Ron Shewchuk, a Vancouver-based speechwriter and head of the champion Rockin' Ronnie and the Butt Shredders barbecue team (click link for their award-winning Beef Burger with Chili Butter Core recipe), burned out the interior of the family car by leaving a smoker in the trunk overnight. Chefs like Brian Fowke (Mon Bella, Metro, Rare) and Neil Wyles (Hamilton Street Grill) have caught the fire for barbecue competitions. Michael Allemeier (departing chef at the Terrace at Mission Hill) has four smokers in his Kelowna backyard. Shewchuk invited him to join the Butt Shredders at the hallowed Jack Daniel's World Championship Invitational Barbeque (the annual holy grail of barbecue competitions, held at the Lynchburg, Tennessee, distillery every summer), where Allemeier poured a bottle of the winery's pricey Five Vineyards Riesling into the smoker's drip pan in place of the usual apple juice-then took a glug from the bottle. Evidently he, too, caught the fire.

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Filed Under

Barbecue, Blues music, Burgers, Pork Ribs, Restaurants, Soul food