Restaurants
Vancouver's Best Barbecue - continued
By Charlene Rooke published Jul 1, 2009
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Southern-style barbecue—one of North America’s mother cuisines—is friendly on the wallet and a delicious counterpoint to the sort of fussy cuisine one critic called “children’s portions prepared by an interior decorator”
VANCOUVER'S BARBECUE RESTAURANTS are not the best I've eaten at, and a couple of them rank among the worst. (I don't mention them in this article.) I take comfort in the fact that we do have the start of a good local barbecue restaurant scene, and we may even have the beginnings of a regional barbecue style all our own. And so I had high expectations when I saw duck on the barbecue menu at Migz (formerly Slimz), a dark, pubby joint at Broadway and MacDonald. The dish has the potential to be Vancouver's entry in the Asian-fusion barbecue canon. We start with hush puppies that are like juiced-up Timbits, with the addictive bite of salt and the tang of buttermilk balancing their crisp cornmeal crust. The pulled pork and succulent beef ribs taste and smell of the cherrywood they use in the smoker. But the duck is oily, stringy, and burnt-tasting, and the pork ribs are desiccated and too crisp, as if they've been reheated in the fryer or left in a too-hot oven. Food that takes half a day to cook can't be made to order, so keeping it hot, fresh, and moist after it comes out of the smoker is the challenge.
It's something they do well at Burgers Etc., a homey, humble place on the stretch of East Hastings that's suddenly Burnaby. No warming ovens, manager Calvin Levesque confides. The terrific pork side ribs are prepared in advance, then brushed with sauce and reheated on a grill. "A lot of people say that's not traditional," he shrugs, "but that's how we do it." The butts are shredded and portioned when they come out of the smoker, then reheated in hot pork stock for every juicy pulled-pork sandwich ordered.
The busts of bluesmen and wall-mounted licence plates from Texas, Kansas, and Washington declare Burgers Etc. as regionally agnostic. "It's all barbecue," says Levesque, which is heresy to many. Also abhorrent to purists is his topping of lettuce, tomato, and onion on the pork sandwich. And indeed, why innovate when his take on the traditional topping-slaw that's zingy, crunchy, and lively with celery seed-is this good? The bun it's served on is not the traditional soft, white, pork-delivery device, either. But who cares when the food is this toothsome and you can get a big platter of it for 40 bucks that'll stuff two people, with leftovers?
"THE MEAT IS THE SUPERHERO," says a friend and fellow barbecue devotee, "and the sauce should be the costume." That comes to mind at my next stop, Dix BBQ and Brewery in Yaletown. They use two overpowering sauces: a Carolina red sauce for pork and chicken, and a brownish Texas whiskey barbecue for beef. The red is overly fruity and, like almost every sauce in town, too sweet without the backbone of vinegar and heat that a Memphis-style ketchup-based sauce needs. The brown has the tamarind tang of a Texas sauce, but also a weird cookie-spice taste. Still, the beef sausage has a slow burn and a nice snap (though it doesn't quite pass the Texas test and spurt juice when I poke it with a fork). And the Original Aficionado sandwich, slices of beef brisket on white bread with mayo and the brown sauce, is a chewy, savoury mouthful. The house microbrews are just hoppy enough to cut through the meat and sweet sauces.
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i love bbq - have to cut down a bit now that I'm doing the brazil butt lift workout
i love the bbq - have to cut down a bit now that I'm doing the insanity workout
