If you like this idea, we are offering Pit BBQ night once a week:
BBQ Pit Night
A BBQ Rib-Off, that is…. Baby back puerco, spare and not-so-baby back boeuf. Ribs rule. BBQ rules. And a Rib-Off is not complete, at least here in Vallarta, without BBQ links (of the best local chorizo).
I came to Mexico via Oakland, California, and I love the way ribs are served there. Kind of St. Louis style but with a much more desperate soul. Flint’s and Everett and Jones were my sources. Flint’s was closed down by the local yuppies who did not like to smell ribs cooking. Everett and Jones is now corporate.
The ribs will be the standard meat falling off of bones, etc, but the secret will be in the sauces. We have experimented with BBQ sauce, out of necessity because everyone in Vallarta serves only one kind of sauce, kind of a gooey, sticky, sweet, clinging concoction that belongs more in a McDonald’s than it does in a rib pit.
We will, in true Mexican taco stand tradition (and Oakland pit rib tradition), offer multiple choices of sauces. Not just mild, medium and hot but mild, medium and hot in varieties. Let’s be clear: BBQ ribs are a Black American tradition, part of the cuisine of the slaves who were given only the rib bones to gnaw on while their “masters” ate the fat bellies…
On the theory that we are all slaves, we offer only the finest of slave cuisine this evening.
To accompany the ribs we will throw in homemade potato salad, baked beans and sweet potato pie. And possibly other fine slave fair as it comes to us. These tastings are experimental and menus sometimes change with availability and whim.
This tasting is 70 pesos and, as always, BYOB and bring a hunger that is not easily satisfied.
Thursday, August 9, from 7 to 9 pm.
UPDATE:
Looks like I’ll have maybe 5-6 kinds of homemade BBQ sauce for this event. Been working over a hot stove for days. I think I’ve perfected the super hot BBQ sauce that I remember in Oakland. Sarah thinks it’s a bit selfish of me to work on the one I love first. It’s so hot that it kicks you on your ass, but only after it makes it past the front of your tongue where it kind of sweet talks you. Kind of a tricky sauce. The other ones are more civilized.
I used to get the hot on a 3 way (ribs, links and brisket) at Everett and Jones after a night of drinking at a biker bar/down-and-outer bar called the W & S Club. A little hole in the wall in Oakland. Drank there with Dayla, my ex, her brother, Steve, and a guy called “wild Bill” because he was a paraplegic and he would still raise hell at the slightest provocation. Steve and I would have to carry Bill into the bano to piss. He always called us fagots cause we used to argue over who would get to hold him from behind instead of holding his penis at the urinal. He was one of those Vietnam vets, so common in those days, that didn’t come back from the war quite whole mentally or physically.
It’s hard for me to taste this BBQ sauce without remembering those days. I think I have nailed it.
“So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.” — Genesis 2,21-22 from the Christian and Judea Bible
“I was always shocked when I went to the doctor’s office and they did my X-ray and didn’t find that I had eight more ribs than I should have or that my blood was the color green.” — Nicolas Cage
“It is a curious and painful fact that almost all the completely futile treatments that have been believed in during the long history of medical folly have been such as caused acute suffering to the patient. When anesthetics were discovered, pious people considered them an attempt to evade the will of God. It was pointed out, however, that when God extracted Adam’s rib He put him into a deep sleep. This proved that anesthetics are all right for men; women, however, ought to suffer, because of the curse of Eve.” — Bertrand Russel
Inside Everett & Jomes in the old days.