Roadtrip: Barbecue

I love barbecue and our roadtrip gave us an opportunity to sample many different barbecue places. But I worry that a focus on down home authentic food, like that in Jane and Michael Stern's Roadfood, is reducing American cuisine to barbecue, hamburgers and fried chicken.

Most of the barbecue places we went to in fact are not in Roadfood. The book's recommendation for Johnson City, Dixie BBQ, was closed on Sunday (we neglected to call ahead) so we ended up grabbing pork and brisket at another barbecue place for lunch. It was fine, tasty, quick. Barbecue is the ultimate fast food because it's been cooked for hours and is sitting ready for the diner when ordered. This was great on the roadtrip because we could not leave the dog for too long in the car in the hot weather.

That night in Sevierville, we went to Tony Gore's barbecue and it again was all right, though we were beginning to worry that we would be eating too much barbecue. A break then in Nashville, when we ate at non-barbecue places.

The best pulled pork we had was at B.E. Scott's in Lexington, Tennessee, a short detour off I-40 (not in Roadfood) between Nashville and Memphis. I had read about it in Leite's Culinaria blog, where he described spending a couple of days there learning how to smoke whole hogs. The pulled pork was fabulously tender, moist, tasting of pork and only slightly of smoke. It was served without sauce and you could add whatever you liked.

In Memphis, we followed a hotel staffer's advice to go to Central BBQ (again not in Roadfood) and had some excellent Memphis-style ribs. Succulent, falling off the bone tender. I ordered a half slab half and half dry and wet and probably could have eaten a whole slab.

The best barbecue of the trip, though, came in Kansas City at Jack Stack's, my old favorite just south of the city off I-495. I'd often gone there when my mother was at the nursing home just up the street and it was as good as I remembered it. We got burnt ends, pork and beef, and the beef stole the show. On our last roadtrip in 2008, I'd had the wonderful crown rib roast at Jack Stack's in Overland Park. This wasn't available at lunch and would have been too much to handle in any case. Jack Stack's is not in Roadfood, though they list other barbecue places in the immediate area.

Last barbecue stop was in Owensboro, Kentucky, where we went to Old Hickory for the barbecued mutton and burgoo typical of the region. We went here instead of George's, which is listed in Roadfood, on the advice of locals, but perhaps George's was better, because the mutton was dry and not very tasty. The burgoo was fine, but nothing special really.

Fortunately, there are always other possibilities, like the locavore places springing up everywhere, or the nice steak I had in Lexington, Kentucky with my bourbon flight. When all is said and done, Rocklands here in town puts out a perfectly good barbecue, and I'm sure the pit beef we saw in Maryland outside of Baltimore was very tasty, too. It's not rocket science and fairly useless to discuss just who has the absolutely best barbecue.