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Sun, 28 May 2006

Barbecue: bad news and good news

You know it's not going to be a good night when you pull up to your long-time favorite barbecue place for Saturday dinner and find it closed and (gulp!) completely roped off with yellow CAUTION tape. (I even drove past in the other direction to make sure it was CAUTION tape and not CRIME SCENE - DO NOT ENTER tape.) There were some curious onlookers trying to peek in the windows, but even after I rolled down my car window and asked, nobody knew anything.

This immediately brought to mind a similar situation from a couple of years ago, when the best barbecue joint in Nebraska similarly closed up with no warning, leaving Maggie and I bereft after a Saturday-night drive across Lincoln in search of ribs and brisket.

Everett & Jones BBQ opened in 1973 in Oakland. I moved to Berkeley in 1974, as a fuzz-faced 17-year-old college freshman, and within a couple of months was urged to come along on a late-night run to the newest location of what everybody in my co-op house called "E&J's". This was probably the first authentic Southern style barbecue I'd ever had, part of the African-American culinary and cultural tradition of pit-smoked meats. Sure, my parents and I had stopped at a few barbecue places over the years, mostly on road trips in the southwest, but I'd never had anything like E&J's. It was a revelation.

Volumes could be (and probably have been) written about Everett & Jones, undoubtedly the most famous barbecue in California. It was founded by Dorothy Everett and her eight daughters, her son, and her son-in-law (the Jones of the name), with financial backing from a friend, "Cora the Angel". The Everett family was from rural Alabama and moved to California in 1952. Their first restaurant opened in 1973 in Oakland, and the Berkeley location opened in 1974. (Since then, there have been several others which have come and gone, including a branch in Pleasanton.) It's an East Bay institution, and each branch is decorated with photos, plaques, and memorabilia of visiting local dignitaries. E&J's most famous fan is probably Coach John Madden, who introduced Everett & Jones to a larger audience, and was a regular diner at the short-lived Pleasanton location. Everett & Jones has earned mention in most books and articles about barbecue, and their sauce (which is a deep-South molasses style) regularly wins awards.

The chain now has six family-owned locations, including one in Oakland's Jack London Square, and bottles and sells its sauce through supermarket and specialty food retailers.

Reviews of the food at E&J's go up and down like the stock market. Barbecue is the opposite of fast food and corporate chains: it is cooked slowly and doesn't always come out the same each time, due to the supplies of meat, wood for smoking, and even the weather. On any given night, the ribs and chicken might be perfect, but the beef links or brisket merely OK; the next night might reverse the outcome. When you eat at a place regularly over a few decades, things like that even themselves out. I'm a lifetime E&J's loyalist, and as long as they keep cooking barbecue, I'll keep eating it.

Which brings us back to last night: the horrible sight of a closed-up Everett & Jones, right there at University and San Pablo, where I first ate real barbecue 32 years ago. What had happened? Surely they were not out of business; word of that would have spread within hours, and probably would not have given rise to the CAUTION tape.

I'd been walking around San Francisco all day, was ravenously hungry, with a serious barbecue jones, and the prospect of going to the newly-reopened Flint's over on Shattuck was not appealing, since they're takeout-only, and I didn't want to schlep the Q back to Pleasanton, or try to find a park bench. Plus, it just seemed wrong to head to Flint's after something terrible had befallen E&J's. (E&J's and Flint's are the Macy's and Gimbel's of East Bay barbecue.)

So I headed for E&J's Fruitvale Avenue location in Oakland, which is not far off I-580, and pretty much on the way home to Pleasanton. I didn't know what to expect, but I found nearby parking and was relieved to see the place full of people. I had a nice plate of ribs and beef with coleslaw and while talking with the staff learned that around 4 PM, the Berkeley E&J's had a fire in the pit which spread to the kitchen, and the staff and customers fled and called the fire department. Nobody was injured. Nobody knows how long it will be closed.

Pit fires are pretty much a given in the barbecue business. The history of E&J's on its web site notes that in 1976, during the party to celebrate the third anniversary of the first restaurant... the pit caught fire and burned the place down. The Hayward location was closed for a while after a fire, and Flint's was closed for several years. I don't know the insurance and finance issues involved with such an occurence, but it does take a while, and a lot of hard work, to get back in action after a fire. I hope E&J's will be able to reopen in Berkeley quickly, and in the meantime, I'd urge everyone to support them by trying one of the other locations.

Posted at 15:36 | permanent link

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