BBQ Joints
A New Kind of Barbecue Food Truck
Many of you dream of turning your passion for barbecue into a business. Mark Van Blaricum from Kansas City did it. His Pita for Good food truck has become a mecca for KC grilled food lovers, and I’m personally gratified to have played my small part. Do you have a foodie success story? Share it on the Barbecue Board. –Steven It happened fast. I got Steven’s Planet Barbecue as a gift; found a lamb purveyor at my local farmer’s market; and tried the Moroccan...
Read more →Tips for Planked Salmon
Excerpted from Steven Raichlen's Beer-Can Chicken. Chances are, if you’ve visited the Pacific Northwest you’ve enjoyed one of the most distinctive American ways to grill fish: on a cedar or alder plank. The process satisfies and gratifies on quite a few levels. First, the wood imparts a unique flavor all its own—a spicy, wine-like flavor in the case of cedar; a woodier, smokier flavor in the case of alder. It also tends to absorb...
Read more →Raichlen’s (Mostly New) Best Barbecue and Grilling Restaurants of 2016
It’s tough work, as the cliche goes, but someone has to do it. Part of my job—one of the best parts—is keeping tabs on the best new barbecue and grill restaurants. 2016 has been a banner year for live-fire cooking. The Grillworks wood burner has become the new stove in restaurants from New York to California. Elsewhere, chefs have taken a giant step backwards, installing wood-burning hearths that would have been at home in colonial kitchens. Here are a dozen of my favorite new restaurants for 2016. Boston/Cambridge: The Smoke Shop It’s about time. Boston chef Andy Husbands has had a...
Read more →Raichlen’s Top 10 Smoke and Fire Restaurants of 2014
Smoked steak at Miller's Guild in Seattle Ah, the good old days. When legendary masters like Arthur Bryant and Sonny Bryan manned the barbecue pits. A lot of people complain that barbecue just isn’t what it used to be, and they’re right. It’s better. It’s better in traditional barbecue hotspots, like Kansas City and Dallas. It’s better in places where you’d never expect to find killer ’que, from Brooklyn to Minneapolis to L.A. A new generation of pit masters and grill masters has applied time-honored smoking and grilling techniques to the kind of meat most of us want to eat today: humanely and locally raised animals...
Read more →Raichlen’s Top 10 Meat Cities in the U.S.
Ribs at Q39 in Kansas City, Missouri What are the best cities in North America in which to eat meat? A reporter from a major American newspaper asked me this in an interview recently, and it got me to thinking. Where should the unrepentant carnivore go to eat his/her fill of red meat? Herewith, Raichlen’s Top 10 Meat Cities in the U.S.: Austin, Texas: Where else do people start lining up at 8 a.m. at Franklin, La Barbecue, Micklethwait Craft Meats and other great barbecue joints that won't open until 11 a.m.? Doesn't...
Read more →Five Essential Barbecue Tips from John Stage of New York’s Legendary Dinosaur Bar-B-Que
Photo by Brent Herrig Photography John Stage never set out to launch a barbecue empire. Thirty years ago, the biker turned pit master took a makeshift smoker/grill—made from a halved 55-gallon drum—on the road to motorcycle fairs and festivals, because he believed that bikers deserved a great plate of barbecue, too. You’ll still find Harleys lined up outside Dinosaur Bar-B-Que’s original location in Syracuse, NY, but, travel to any of the other seven restaurants in the Northeast—including the...
Read more →6 Questions for Hugh Mangum, Chef-Owner of Mighty Quinn’s Barbeque
To hear Hugh Mangum tell it, he never set out to become a Brooklyn brisket mogul, nor did he aspire to serve the biggest, baddest beef rib in Manhattan. No, the musician was happy in a career that most guys would kill for: earning a living as a drummer touring with Jacob Dylan and the Wallflowers. The owner of Mighty Quinn’s Barbeque in the East Village comes by his passion naturally. Although he grew up in Santa Monica, his Houston-born father always kept an assortment of Texas-style barbecue pits fired up...
Read more →Planet Barbecue
Raichlen’s 10 Best BBQ and Grill Restaurants of 2013
Barbecue’s golden age? That would be when such barbecue legends as Charlie Vergos grilled ribs in Memphis, Arthur Bryant smoked burnt edges in Kansas City, and Big Bob Gibson slathered chicken with white barbecue sauce in Decatur, Alabama. But if you’re waiting for me to complain that barbecue just isn’t what it used to be, guess again. It’s better. A new generation of pit masters, like Tim Rattray in San Antonio or Hugh Mangum in Manhattan, has taken over. Only now, they’re cooking with heritage pork, grass-fed beef, and organic or natural chicken. They respect tradition to a point (consider Aaron Franklin’s textbook brisket). But they’re also broadening our notion...
Read more →Planet Barbecue
Masters of Smoke—Hometown
Steven with Billy Durney in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where he serves brisket that would make a Texan envious and beef ribs that tip the scales at 1-1/4 pounds each! Billy Durney remembers the exact moment he embraced barbecue as the true religion. "I walked into Louie Mueller’s in Taylor, Texas. One bite of brisket and I knew this is who I want to be and this is what to do with my life." So the security expert (and former bodyguard for Oscar-nominated actresses and Grammy-award-winning...
Read more →Planet Barbecue
A Live-Fire Romance with OX Restaurant in Portland
As Greg Denton tells it, “we fell in love over the grill. The year was 1999; the place Terra restaurant in Napa Valley. The Vermont-born, Culinary Institute of America-trained chef took one look at one of his co-workers—a statuesque Ecuadorian-American named Gabrielle Quinonez—and vowed to make her his wife. (They're pictured, above.) A decade later, the couple honeymooned in Spain’s Basque country, making the obligatory visits to the touted temples of molecular cuisine. (“Left us...
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