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How would you like to pack your bags and spend the next half-year doing nothing but traveling around the U.S., stopping at every barbecue restaurant from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine? At each 'cue shack, the owner would skip forth from the kitchen bearing a platter of the house specialties for your delectation. As the months pass, the numbers grow. Before long, you will have eaten at several hundred barbecue restaurants. You can taste the individual ingredients in the sauce. Your tongue can actually tell how many hours a rib has been in the smoker. If the potato salad isn't perfect, you lean to the left and surrender it to a silver spittoon engraved “Boss.”
This is the (somewhat exaggerated) reality for Johnny Fugitt, a St. Louisan who sold his house and began the next phase of his life as a barbecue nomad.
Fugitt is in the process of researching a book to be called “The Best Barbecue Restaurants in America.” He began in his hometown, contacting guys like Mike Emerson at Pappy's and Matt Stiffelman at Vernon's. Fugitt showed up at these joints and about 10 more in the area with his camera, notebook, and mouth. They fed him. They educated him on the finer points of the smoker. And quietly, he judged.
This week, he's doing the same thing in Kansas City at Jon Russell’s Kansas City Barbeque (their burnt end, according to Fugitt "maybe the best I've ever had," is depicted above), Fiorella's Jack Stack Barbecue, et alia. By the time May of 2014 rolls around, he says, he hopes to have hit the Carolinas, Texas, Memphis, California, New York and the entire lower 48, and to have the book published (either by himself or by an established publisher).
His blog offers brief recaps of his visits, with photos (side dishes and ribs at Vernon's are shown below) and opinion, for vicarious fans of his smoky odyssey.
So how did he get the gumption to make this pleasure tour for barbecue lovers a reality?
“I'm a barbecue fan, and I've noticed a lot of articles that list the best barbecue, but no comprehensive list for the whole country,” said Fugitt. “There are road-trip books, but not specifically barbecue or not ranked. I think people like rankings. I think there's a hole in the market, so I'm traveling America for the next six to seven months, meeting with restaurant owners. I've met a lot of great people and heard a lot of great stories about what makes their barbecue unique.”
“I'm in the Navy Reserve, and I need to be in St. Louis once a month,” he added. “So I'm looping around the country and keeping St. Louis as my home base. But I've jumped in with both feet. I sold my house and I'm basically homeless. When I'm back in St. Louis I stay with friends.”
Fugitt's foodie background includes working at a Famous Dave’s BBQ franchise in Branson, where he grew up, he said, as well as time spent toiling in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant in London, under the tutelage of a Sicilian who was serious about food. He's lived in BBQ mecca Kansas City, and after moving to St. Louis five years ago, he started a dinner club so he and his buds could try new restaurants together regularly.
For the purposes of his book, the budding author has sampled:
- PM BBQ (he liked the flash-fried crispy ribs, above left)
- Capitalist Pig (he loved the warm potato salad in a dill, caper and tarragon sauce with red onion)
- Pappy's Smokehouse (he recommends the ribs and fried corn on the cob, above right)
- Vernon’s BBQ (he dug the horseradish potato salad and huge wings, below left)
- Randy’s House of Bar-B-Que in Troy, Ill. (he heard a great story about rifling through the Pappy’s dumpster to find out who supplies their meaty ribs)
- Hendricks BBQ (he advises we try the burgers and whiskey) That's Fugitt, above right
- Hicks Bar-B-Que in Belleville (they have a drive-thru window, which amused him)
- Sawmill BBQ in Cahokia (Fugitt dug the BBQ nachos)
- Bandana’s (he inhaled the fried green beans and the BBQ tacos, below)
Which of these will make Fugitt's final cut is very much up in the air for now. But the pride of place for this town in the national bbq scene is not in doubt, he said.
“Carolina, Texas, Memphis and Kansas City get mentioned when people talk about barbecue, but St. Louis gets left out of that conversation a fair amount. The quality is improving here and it'll have a strong place in the rankings,” he said.
On his blog, Fugitt quotes Southern writer John Shelton Reed: “Southern barbecue is the closest thing we have in the US to Europe’s wines or cheeses; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes.”
Fugitt is quite literally driving those miles and tasting those changes. It sounds like the gustatory adventure of a lifetime.
In parental mode, I asked him if he was occasionally eating some vegetables too, as a concession to nutrition.
“Ya know,” he said, “I have a juicer in my car, and it really helps.”
Follow his journey at http://barbecuerankings.com/
