1. An open pit—The original and historic barbecue technique that cooks food buried in the ground and over a spit, or in a free-standing structure in the open air.
2. The classic barbecue pit—This is usually made out of bricks, and cooks the meat with wood using a live fire and no electrical devices. These are sometimes (misleadingly; they are not literally open as in #1) called open pits. And to a lesser extent, sometimes I like:
3. The mechanized barbecue pit—Slabs of meat are tucked into a mechanized device, which slow cooks them in a mechanically controlled fashion. A mechanized pit may use wood, gas, or other sources of heat. Hybrid mechanized pits—increasingly common—will use gas to heat the wood, which then cooks the food.
All those forms differ from backyard or porch barbecue—more appropriately called grilling—which cooks meat quickly at high temperatures. One estimate suggests that Americans grill over flame an impressive 2.9 billion times a year, but fast, mean grilling generally doesn’t produce food as good as good old slow barbecue. Arthur Bryant’s Barbecue in Kansas City cooks its baby back ribs for ten hours, its briskets for twelve hours, and its pork shoulders for sixteen hours. One restaurant from Memphis is known for cooking its pork shoulders for thirty-six hours. The central elements of classic barbecue are smoke, slow cooking, and low temperatures.
I walked into Lonnie Ray’s BBQ, in Harrisburg, Missouri, after about half an hour drive from Columbia. The place had all the marks of excellent barbecue: It was in a small town, it enjoyed strong word-of-mouth (a local, in fact—a textbook sales representative with whom I was working had driven me there), the restaurant itself was small, and the other customers gave off a distinct air of the vernacular.
The barbecue, which was a mix of regional styles, was excellent. I was, however, impressed by the proprietor of Lonnie Ray’s: Mike Whitely (he named his restaurant after his father). Mike came over to talk to me once I asked a few questions about the nature of the place where I was eating. The chatty but focused Mike was not shy and he launched immediately into scientific discourse. He asked me what I liked about the barbecue, what I didn’t like, and where else I had eaten barbecue. Such talk can sound like fishing for praise, or a chance to boast, but he really wanted to learn more about the craft of barbecue and improve his product. And so we quickly launched into a lengthy discussion of different styles, different restaurants, and how barbecue is done around the world. Most of all, he was interested in hearing about barbecue in central Mexico. Mike had an attitude of inquiry and self-criticism that should be the envy of virtually any scientist.
You might expect Mike to be an uneducated yokel, but he has a psychology degree from the University of Missouri, and has worked as a youth counselor. He cooks food in his spare time for his own enjoyment, and does some catering for extra cash. He became intrigued by the potential of teamwork as a teenager when he saw how it worked in a friend’s family-run Chinese restaurant. He saw the family taking pride in the food, in their food traditions, and he learned how they worked together to pluck chickens. Might it not be possible to apply such cooperative techniques to other cuisines as well?
Barbecue is a market segment obsessed with quality, teamwork, and continual improvement. At its peaks, it is arguably America’s best—and cheapest—restaurant food. If there’s any American food that approaches the status of a religion with its partisans, it’s this method of slowly cooking meats, with saintly sides. Aficionados will travel hours for better barbecue and then passionately debate which pit master and which style is the most heavenly. Few food areas come closer to this idea of the holy quest. There’s something real behind all this devotion. It is one key component of the kind of food revolution we need.
How does the best of American barbecue end up being so good? Furthermore, if barbecue can be so tasty, why isn’t there good barbecue everywhere? The sad truth is that my home area of northern Virginia has only slim pickings and so my research has taken me around this country and across the border into Mexico.
Some foods seem to be able to migrate, to cross mountains and oceans, and some do not. Take any classic French recipe, of the kind you might find served in a very nice country inn, in France. It can involve twenty or thirty critical ingredients, including local herbs and spices. The meats should be free range or otherwise custom grown. The sauces often require quality wines. The relevant cooking techniques are, by global standards, hard to teach to would-be chefs. The breads, butters, cheeses, and pâtés require specialized skills to produce. Within France, cuisine tends to be regional rather than national. Yet it is possible to replicate that classic French recipe all over the world. You have probably had great coq au vin, if you are interested, wherever you are. It’s common for Germany to have very good French restaurants, cheaper than those in Paris and often quite good. My most memorable meal in Rio de Janeiro involved nine courses of French food. For all of the French hesitancy to embrace cultural globalization, French chefs have produced a globalized cuisine, albeit with country-specific variants. It sells for a high enough price that restaurants will incur considerable expense to re-create some version of French finery.
But quality barbecue is available in only a limited number of regions and countries: in the United States, namely, Texas, parts of the American South, parts of Missouri and Illinois, and Hawaii, which has a public barbecue tradition usually done with roast pig; in other countries, central Mexico, most of Jamaica, which has great barbecue, and I’ve been told in northern Africa, in the desert regions, where the barbecued lamb or goat is spectacular if you hit upon the right tribe and festival.
Maori barbecue—hangi—is done for weddings and feasts and is buried in the ground for a long time until it has a very smoky flavor. Every now and then you’ll find a New Zealand restaurant that serves it or maybe a Maori place that offers hangi takeout, but it’s hardly an established restaurant tradition. The two times I tried hangi there I wasn’t impressed. Maybe, like a lot of things, it is better at a family picnic or wedding.
Overall, barbecue restaurants outside of a few core places usually disappoint. We may be reminded in a nostalgic way of real barbecue, but it isn’t the real thing. Barbecue is a passageway to an earlier food era, a time when production was personal, artisanal, and depended on being in the right time at the right place. When Texas Monthly magazine proclaimed Snow’s BBQ in Lexington, Texas, to be the best barbecue in America, no one complained that the place is open Saturday mornings only. Instead, that was a sign of culinary status. When you walk into Smitty’s Market in Lockhart, Texas, it is a point of pride that the barbecue fires spill out onto the floor, right next to where you order your meal. “Don’t trip,” I told my wife before we entered the place. In one possibly apocryphal account, they offer free barbecue to keep the fire chief and the insurance inspector in support of their enterprise.
That said, barbecue is also a highly commercialized development, dependent on modern American consumer society and on big business—most of all, the meat trade. It does not fit the classic European story of basing the best foods on the finest raw ingredients. The meats are not always of the highest quality—that’s one reason why they need to be cooked for so long—and often the cooking technique matters more than the vintage. Many of the best barbecue sauces are composed from mass-produced ingredients commonly available in the modern American supermarket. The use of long but efficient food supply chains helps make barbecue so affordable. Barbecue markets itself as artisanal, but it is equally adept at blending in the influences of mass commercial society.
Barbecue also offers the promise of a more or less pure American food art, untainted by fancy dining or urban snobbery. The scrawled menu, the shack, and the discarded cookers strewn around the backyard no longer represent the modern barbecue reality, but they don’t feel so far away. Texans in their macho way disdain sauce altogether. It’s all about the quality of the meat and the rub.
Here are some basic observations about good old slow barbecue:
1. The best barbecue places open early in the morning.
2. Eat barbecue in towns of less than 50,000 people.
3. Good ribs, unlike good brisket, are available in many locales.
Understanding what underlies these three observations is an in-sight into where just about all idiosyncratic culinary creativity comes from.
Early Traditions and Rule-making Amateurs
The word “barbecue” comes from the Spanish barbacoa, which dates back to a 1526 Spanish book on the Indians of the New World. The term referred to a Caribbean technique of cooking food by skewering meat on sticks and roasting it slowly over a dug pit. The Taino word babracot referred to the framework of sticks that make up the barbecue grill. Jamaican jerk pit barbecue has a direct link to this early tradition, but indigenous Mexicans claim they also were cooking barbacoa before the Spanish conquest. Probably we’ll never know which group had the idea first.
The first (non-Indian) American barbecue appears to date from the 1660s in North Carolina; slaves may have brought the technique from the Caribbean. It seems that barbecue was popular because its core ingredients fit into the colonial lifestyle. Pigs were plentiful. Vinegar, which is still part of North Carolina barbecue sauces, served as a natural bactericide. Peppers contributed vitamin C to protect against scurvy and other diseases. Slow cooking at low temperatures made it less likely that the wooden barbecue rack would go up in flames. It has been speculated that fine chopping of the meat was introduced to help individuals with bad teeth. Note that tomato was not eaten much at the time and it did not find its way into the early sauces.
In Texas, barbecue spread in the nineteenth century as a traditional means of feeding large groups of people. A sheep, goat, pig, or steer would be cooked in an open pit for up to twenty-four hours. Civic events held barbecues. A Sam Houston political rally from 1860 was called Great American Barbecue. Sometimes the word “barbecue” was used to refer to political rallies, rather than to the food itself.
Barbecue crossed over from churches and political rallies into small stands, barbecue shacks, and restaurants in the very early 1900s. The growth of disposable incomes, dining out, and the consumer revolution of the 1920s—all economic forces—encouraged commercial barbecue to expand. The advent of cars made it possible to open rural restaurants of many kinds, including barbecue, because now more customers could get to them. Unlike in a Chinatown, most of the customers are not walking to their meal or taking public transportation. Often in the 1920s the phrase “barbecue stand” was used as a general reference to roadside eateries. The consumer revolution of American society made the side dishes easier as well: ingredients for sauces could be found in supermarkets and the new availability of manufactured bread made it easier to serve barbecue sandwiches. Basically the blossoming of barbecue into public restaurants was part of the broader consumer revolution in early twentieth-century America.
But barbecue never really became fast food or junk food. The Pig Stand company expanded barbecue to over a hundred outlets in the 1930s, but the number of restaurants shrank to almost nothing during the 1940s. Luther’s reached sixty-three stores in the mid-1980s, but by the 1990s had retrenched to twenty stores. A Cincinnati radio preacher named Reverend Deuteronomy Skaggs once proclaimed, “If God had meant for Cincinnati to have barbecue, He’d a give it to us a long time ago.” Barry Farber, the New York radio star, in 1977 believed that barbecue would take over the food world. He opened a barbecue restaurant in Times Square, believing that barbecue would be “the next pizza.” Both the restaurant and Farber’s broader plans failed. The closest thing to quality, mass market barbecue are some of the meats at Chipotle, and they are cooked by sous vide, which I’ll discuss at the end of this chapter.
Barbecue developed regional artful traditions. In most of the southeast, barbecue means pork, often a whole hog or pork shoulder roast. Pulled pork is common in the South and parts of the Midwest, but it is otherwise difficult to find in authentic form. Pork ribs are a staple in Chicago. Texas barbecue emphasizes brisket, sausage, pork ribs, and sometimes beef ribs, especially in West Texas. Other regional traditions involve goat (southern Texas), mutton (western Kentucky) and barbecued snouts (East St. Louis).
Eastern North Carolina barbecue differs from that found further west in the state. The East is more likely to barbecue the whole pig, the West will do the shoulder. More recently, the East has switched more rapidly to gas and electricity in modern commercial cookers. The traditional eastern sauce contains no tomatoes but uses vinegar, pepper, cayenne, and salt. The western sauce will add ketchup and Worcestershire. The eastern barbecue tends to be drier, some argue because the pork is chopped more finely by machine. The East also uses Brunswick stew, originally made with squirrel but now usually with chicken, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, corn, and lima beans, among other ingredients. Barbecued potatoes are popular in the east as well. Coleslaw in western North Carolina is usually red and is crunchier as well. While Highway 1
often served as a rough dividing line for differing barbecue styles, these distinctions are blurring with time.
But why does this matter? Barbecue is about local creativity.
Even after commercialization, barbecue resisted turning into junk food, and has retained strong ties to its amateur roots. In a given year, over six million Americans attend more than five hundred barbecue contests. The Memphis competition, usually the nation’s largest, might bring up to three hundred teams and about eighty thousand spectators. This intense interest often takes over people’s leisure time or even their entire lives.
In earlier times, the barbecue masters often were the amateurs who have succeeded and worked their way up through the ranks. Still, for all the achievements in this field, wherever you have great barbecue, you also have mediocre barbecue. Trial and error is going to mean a lot of error. Often barbecue masters got started by cooking for their church, for a political rally, or for their friends. The popularity of the food induces some of the better cooks to start restaurants and perfect their products through experimentation on a larger audience of customers. The best establishments rise to the top and, in the process, train staff who often go on to open their own barbecue restaurants.
Nelson Head, perhaps the best barbecue master in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, grew up in Birmingham and ate barbecue from his early childhood days. He started in real estate but later decided to enter the restaurant business. He learned barbecue from a well-known pit master before starting his own restaurant. He experimented with restaurants in Washington, D.C., before moving to his current location in Woodbridge, Virginia, right off the interstate and with easy access to truckers and tourists. And like so many other barbecue proprietors, he has that calm, reasoned air of a man used to thinking and talking in terms of rigorous applied science.
As we might expect from non-chained, amateur products, barbecue restaurants often have idiosyncratic names. Like Bubba’s. Other well-known barbecue outlets have been called Fat Willy’s Hawg House (Rockville, South Carolina), Dr. Hogly Wogly’s (Tyler, Texas), or Bubbalou’s Bodacious Bar-B-Que (Orlando, Florida). These names represent deliberate decisions to personalize the product, to identify it with an artisan, and to accept standards of quality outside of formal dining canons. Even the spelling of barbecue is not the same across many of these restaurants, the ultimate rebellion against homogenizing cultural trends.
A Big Fire Before Breakfast
This is why barbecue is what it is. In rural Texas a classic barbecue pit is no longer strictly open, as defined above, but rather the term refers to long (10- to 20-foot) brick compartments that cook meats using wood. Metal gratings hold the meats up, a chimney disposes of the smoke, and a large woodpile is nearby. Often the fires are concentrated at the ends of the compartments, so that the meat is cooked by indirect heat—but, still, imagine a wood pile as big as a car, on fire. Typically such pits were made by hand, decades ago, rather than purchased in ready-made form. Classic barbecue pits in the American South are more likely built into walls and aboveground, but they rely on essentially the same cooking process.
Classic pits work best when someone watches for all or much of the night. This person ideally sleeps near that big fire, awakening periodically to stir it or to make sure nothing has caught fire that wasn’t supposed to. Not all pits are monitored so closely, but then the owners incur greater risk or they must shut down some or all of the pits at night, thereby limiting the long cooking times and thus the quality of the product.
Using a draw and flue, the pit master gets the air entering the pit and the smoke leaving it. Just lighting the fire properly is an acquired skill.
Then the meat must be turned, the temperature must be sampled, the fire must be lit, maintained, or restoked, as conditions dictate. The wood doesn’t always burn the same way each time. The pit master must regulate the temperature by making ongoing adjustments in the pit conditions, such as adding more wood or poking around in the pit. An open pit is difficult to run and takes years of practice and training. This is a style of cooking that involves high labor costs and is not conducive to assembly line methods of production, as one might find in a McDonald’s or Applebee’s.
Doughnut shops, which are usually nationally chained (Tim Hortons is the classic Canadian suburban landmark), are based on the opposite principles. The equipment is standardized and not very expensive or difficult to learn. The typical restaurant is fairly small, franchising is easy, and a huge fire is not required in the adjacent room to serve a doughnut. Doughnut shops often rely on a national brand to provide image for the shop, like Dunkin’ Donuts, whereas barbecue revels in its local, regional, or idiosyncratic image. Doughnuts are about mass production and distribution. They are about snacks that are available in uniform quality around the clock. A powerful fire doesn’t fit that kind of food.
From the beginning, many of the very best barbecue places have opened early in the morning. Classic pit barbecue starts cooking the food the night before and the next day the proprietors try to sell this food as rapidly as possible. A very high quality barbecue restaurant therefore tends to open early—even in the 7 to 9 A.M. range—and hopes to sell much of its product by the middle of lunchtime. The food is ready from its overnight processing and it will only lose freshness as the day progresses.
Given that the food must be sold in large batches, lunchtime is the obvious market target. In rural America, lunchtime is very often a much bigger food audience than dinnertime anyway. People are out at their jobs, in their cars, looking for a big meal, and they haven’t yet settled into the house routine with the kids. So the proprietor synchronizes a batch of meats to be ready early in the day. Given the risk of uncertain daily demand, the restaurant is willing to sell before lunchtime, to make sure it takes in as much business as possible. The restaurant is less willing to extend these same sales through late in the evening. High-quality barbecue restaurants are committed to making every meal meet a certain level of quality. They do not wish to sell inferior food much later in the day, so it’s not unusual for a quality barbecue restaurant to close by two thirty or three.
Along with bunched selling, the best barbecue restaurants often run out of their best meats at some point in the day. It is common to show up—perhaps no later than one o’clock P.M.—and be told that ribs or shoulder or brisket are no longer available. This encourages the crowd to come early. A popular barbecue restaurant is often full by noon or earlier, whereas many other restaurants hit their peak time around one or a little after.
Another factor favors early opening hours, namely that the proprietor must tend to the meats early in the morning. So why not open up as well? The top barbecue spots in Lockhart, Texas, open between seven and ten in the morning. Many locals or tourists will stop in for breakfast, often ordering the sausage, which is the first dish ready in the morning. In the case of Kreuz Market or Smitty’s, the butcher running the pits simply chops off some meat for you; early opening does not require an extensive staff of waitresses or a lot of preparation. You take your meat to the table and you pick it up with your fingers; the napkins are already there.
The slow cooking times limit the ability of a barbecue pit to meet surges in demand. Suburbanites often seek immediacy, as evidenced by the popularity of fast food. If Applebee’s does not have enough chicken sandwiches ready, it does not take them long to make more. Similarly, most ethnic restaurants in the United States are open all day long and offer ready-to-serve food, usually in less than ten minutes time. But the best barbecue restaurants tend to run out of their best dishes as the day runs on. Rather than periodically frustrate its best customers, a barbecue restaurant is more likely to close, and open, early. At the very least they will simply be out of some of the best dishes.
Memphis barbecue does not tend to open early or close early. Barbecue restaurants there commonly open at 11:30 or 12 noon, which is the norm for the town. But Memphis barbecue centers around pork ribs, which brings us to another critical distinction. It is possible to cook ribs for a dozen hours or more, and end up with a delicious product, but decent-quality ribs can be produced in as little as ninety minutes. Good beef brisket, in contrast, requires eight to twelve hours or more. Barbecued ribs are much easier to handle than a whole hog and they are easier to cook by machine rather than using a classic pit. They take less time, less space, and less fuel. The major Memphis barbecue restaurants also use mechanical rather than classic pits. In other words, simply be out of some of the best dishes.
Memphis barbecue does not tend to open early or close early. Barbecue restaurants there commonly open at 11:30 or 12 noon, which is the norm for the town. But Memphis barbecue centers around pork ribs, which brings us to another critical distinction. It is possible to cook ribs for a dozen hours or more, and end up with a delicious product, but decent-quality ribs can be produced in as little as ninety minutes. Good beef brisket, in contrast, requires eight to twelve hours or more. Barbecued ribs are much easier to handle than a whole hog and they are easier to cook by machine rather than using a classic pit. They take less time, less space, and less fuel. The major Memphis barbecue restaurants also use mechanical rather than classic pits. In other words, they’ve been liberated from some of the traditional constraints, albeit at the risk of losing some of the artisanal qualities of the finest barbecue. The result has been that barbecued ribs have spread across America in a way that other barbecue forms have not. The restaurant Tony Roma’s—to provide one example of many—offers quality ribs in the form of an expensive but polished chain restaurant.
In North Carolina, the barbecue has found a disturbing solution to the problem of barbecue freshness. Most barbecue restaurants in North Carolina open early, but now more out of tradition than economics. The food is cooked in advance and then either frozen or placed in a heater. Sometimes the food sits for as long as a week; Lexington Barbecue #1 proudly tells the customer that the food never sits longer than overnight, and yet neither I nor my traveling companion were impressed to hear that. Sometimes today’s mix and last night’s are thrown together and served for lunch. These restaurants never run out of their best product, but their best product is less impressive in the first place. The economics for this decision are obvious, and they illustrate just how uneconomical true barbecue art can be. North Carolina barbecue restaurants do not close early, do not run out of food, and can serve their customers extremely quickly. So if you’re asking me to weigh in on this classic dispute—North Carolina vs. Texas barbecue—I have to rule against North Carolina, precisely for these reasons.
Barbecue Paradise
Sad to say, the best barbecue region in the world is probably not the United States. You can understand a lot about the economics of classic barbecue pits if you go south of the border.
In rural Mexico still some of the oldest barbecue traditions are alive and well. Commonly a family will have a goat or pig barbecued for a special occasion such as a wedding or birthday. For the underground barbecue, rural Mexicans dig a hole in the ground and build a fire in a stone-lined pit. The meat is then wrapped, often in maguey leaves, and placed on the fire. The hole is covered with damp earth and the food is allowed to cook.
The well-known Mexican dish cochinita pibil, which you can find in some of the better Mexican restaurants in the United States, refers to barbecued pig in a pit. Pib is the Mayan word for pit barbecue, although our Mexican restaurants serve bastardized versions of the dish with the pork wrapped in banana leaves and cooked in ovens.
In San Agustin Oapan, the small Mexican village where I have done fieldwork (for other projects), the villagers cook the meat by burning hard sugarcane, the kind with “hearts” inside. It is claimed that wood would break apart during the cooking process and this may reflect the limited wood choices available to the villagers. Some rural Mexicans use charcoal for cooking, but throw onion, garlic, chilies, or oregano on the coals for seasoning.
The best-known barbecue master in San Agustin Oapan is Angel Dominguez, who is also a noted maker of pottery from the clay by the village riverbank. If you walk over to Angel’s house to visit, either you will find him sitting in a hammock, simply smiling, working at his sewing machine, or you will be told that he is out tending his watermelons by the riverbank. He is known as a village eccentric, in part because otherwise both the pottery and the sewing are the exclusive province of the village women. He always responds with a slow lisp, but his fierce burning eyes betray his dedication to his creative arts. When he feels like it and needs a few extra pesos, Angel does brilliant work shaping his pottery and then cooking it underground, using pre-Columbian methods and all-natural materials from around the village. If he doesn’t feel like it, offers of money will not spur his efforts. And if you leave him money as an advance on the work, it is simply treated as a gift.
Having learned the skills of using and controlling underground fire, he naturally stepped into a position as village barbecue master. He cooks goat meat and pig meat for village ceremonies, such as fiestas and weddings, simply by burying the wrapped meat with a burning fire and tending it to make sure the fire is neither too strong nor too weak. The animal comes right from the village and it is slaughtered by hand right before it is cooked, for some of the freshest goat flavor I have enjoyed.
If you ask Angel, he has no idea that such a thing as commercial barbecue exists. For him, barbecue, like his traditional pottery, is an ancient way of the village and an art that can be mastered by only a few people.
Most mid- to large-size Mexican cities, at least in central Mexico, have numerous barbecue outlets, often on the outskirts of town rather than in the immediate center. The very best would not meet traditional definitions of a restaurant and I might add that they are also very cheap, serving spectacular meals for often less than five dollars. The food is served outside, or perhaps under a tent covering or awning. The barbecue meat is cooked in a pit, traditional style, usually completely outside the city and in the neighboring countryside. The meats range from mutton to beef to pork, the head and stomach are treated as well, and often the pit is lined with maguey leaves. While the barbacoa is cooking, a metal pan collects its meaty juices, which are served as barbacoa consommé, a kind of side soup accompanying the taco in which the meat is wrapped. Fiery sauces are optional additions to the tacos.
The meat from the countryside is ready early in the morning, at which time it is shipped by truck to the barbecue restaurants. The restaurants open between 9 and 10 A.M., at which point they serve barbecue for breakfast. Cooking the meat in rural or more remote areas makes catastrophic fires and loss of life less likely. Classic Mexican barbecue of this kind is most prominent in the states of Hidalgo, Tlaxcala, and Mexico but you also can find it in Morelos, Guerrero, and possibly in other locales that I have not visited. The Mexican hinterlands where the meat is cooked are not densely inhabited and not much regulated by the government. If there is any problem with the police, a bribe can be paid. Barbecue cooking, in the classic open- or dug-pit manner, proceeds unhindered and the art is alive and well like nowhere else in the world.
If you’d like the name of just one place, try Cucina Económica “Lupita,” about ninety minutes north of Mexico City, near the town of San Juan del Río, in the state of Querétaro.
There isn’t really an address or phone, but rather it is designated at “Carretera [highway] Galindo Amealco, Kilometer 3.” On the back of their business card is a chromolithograph of John Paul II and a quotation about justice, peace, and love. They are only open weekends and the barbecue runs out sometime by the middle of lunch, after which they serve only delicious quesadillas. Get there early. It’s basically a covered shelter on the side of the road, but on the weekend they come along and put out chairs, tables, and the cooking equipment and they are ready to go. It’s run by an elderly Mexican woman, named Lupita, who requires some convincing that an American visitor can handle the spicy sauce for the barbecue. This is how barbecue is meant to be cooked and there are hundreds of places like this, scattered around Central Mexico. If you are into barbecue pilgrimages, these kinds of places should be your first stop.
It’s not just at Lupita’s. In Mexico, once the fresh meat runs out, the restaurants close. This can happen as early as one o’clock in the afternoon. The limited hours are one reason why these eating places do not invest more in costs of décor and presentation. A few barbecue establishments will stay open later in the day. Either they are serving a less fresh or inferior product, or they receive a second shipment of meat during the day. Even these restaurants, however, might close as early as P.M.
Less fresh forms of barbecue can be found in Mexico as well. Barbecue is served in more mainstream Mexican restaurants, but there the meats are often frozen and later thawed. These restaurants do not have delivery problems, but as in most of North Carolina, this efficiency is obtained at the expense of quality.
Mexicans also cook meats—especially pork—al pastor in yet another version of the barbecue arts. A meat is skewered and then roasted slowly on a vertical spit, with the coals to one side. Pork al pastor—a kind of mini-barbecue—might cook all day long. A similar technique is found in Greek and Turkish gyro cooking, and the inspiration comes from Arabic food culture. In Mexico, the gyro method of cooking was first used in the 1930s, when Lebanese immigrants came to the city of Puebla, a longstanding center of Mexican cuisine. It’s now about as Mexican as you can get and it is more closely identified with Mexican food, to most outsiders, than is the more classic tradition of Mexican barbacoa.
By Tyler Cowen in "An Economist Gets Lunch", Dutton (Penguin Group), USA,2012, excerpts chapter 5. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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