Why I Started This Site

I like barbecue. I eat a lot of barbecue.

Because I’m obsessed with barbecue, I’m not satisfied just going to the same few places over and over again. Sure, I have a “rotation” of my favorites that I wouldn’t think of letting a few weeks go by without visiting. But I have this idealistic notion that the world’s best barbecue just might exist somewhere that I haven’t discovered yet, so I keep searching. Combine this idealism with my sick need to go to every BBQ joint (good or bad) I hear about strictly for completeness, and you have someone who scours every newspaper, every food-related website, every search engine, just to find new places to try. I figure, why not share both my list of places and my thoughts on the places I’ve visited.

Barbecue in the Northeast has never been more popular than it is now, so there are new joints popping up all the time. But you know what? It’s not that easy finding new places. The restaurant review TV shows in my area stick to the “usual suspects” whenever their once-a-year barbecue shows air. The popular Zagat guide seems to treat all barbecue joints the same way, focusing on generic phrases like “messy meat mavens moan…” instead of really telling you anything useful about the place.

Then there’s the web. The fact that you can spell it so many ways (barbecue, barbeque, Bar-B-Que, Bar-B-Q and a few others) makes doing web searches tough. Plus, Google and Yahoo are often out of date, missing places that I know exist and including places that have long since bitten the dust or that have nothing to do with barbecue.

So I rely on repeated and varied searches, local newspapers and leads from friends. They literally are leads, often as cryptic as “I saw a new BBQ place is going to open up across from BJ’s. I forget what town, but it was somewhere near Brockton.” And so I go, ferreting the place out.

Why Me?

Why should you trust my opinion? I like barbecue. I eat a lot of barbecue. I used to be on a competition team that placed well in KCBS-sanctioned contests run by the New England Barbecue Society. I’m a certified KCBS barbecue judge. I make my own rubs and smoke ribs and butts on my own smoker.

But seriously, don’t trust me. Take my opinion under advisement, look at the photos, combine the information from this site with other sources and decide for yourself whether a place is worth trying.

Goals of This Site

A lot of the BBQ postings I’ve found on bulletin boards seem to simply advocate one joint over another without stating why. This site will only present one opinion (mine) on each BBQ joint, but I’ll tell you why I like or don’t like a place. I’ll tell you what type of service (counter versus table service) each place offers. What kind of meats they have. What style of barbecue they do. Whether they offer beer and wine. Whether the menu is friendly for someone who isn’t as into barbecue as you are.

The whole idea is that you get not just my opinion, but also enough objective description and photos to form your own opinion of whether you’ll like a place. Walking past a pizza parlor, I can tell just by looking through the window at the slices on someone’s plate whether I’ll like that pizza. Hopefully, this site will do that for you.

My hope is that this site will soon be a resource for not only BBQ restaurant reviews, but also restaurant news and interviews.

One more thing. I know my web development skills suck right now. So this is as much an excuse to learn HTML as it is to eat and describe barbecue.

My Preferences

I like meat without sauce. I don’t mind sauce, but it shouldn’t be used as a crutch to rescue dry, reheated meat. I want to taste the meat. And if the meat is good, sauce can make it better, but I’d rather decide that for myself. There are some places that make several wonderful sauces, so why get every piece of meat covered with just one? That said, I still review what’s given to me. If a place serves up a slab of sauced ribs and they do a great job within that style, I give them credit. The idea is to describe how they do it and how well they do it, so you can decide whether to want to go there yourself.

I like ribs first, pulled pork second, brisket third. For a while, I wasn’t that into brisket, primarily because so few places did it well. Ribs are the easiest to master, brisket the hardest, so it makes sense to start with the meat that everyone should be able to do right every time.

Scope of the Site

The area this site covers is roughly all of New England, plus New York City, Long Island and the Hudson Valley. Realistically, I probably won’t often get to the northernmost points in Maine, the easternmost points on Long Island, and some of the most rural parts of Vermont. But if it’s in a city the size of Fairfield, CT or larger, I have every expectation to give any place a try.

Living and working in eastern Massachusetts, I’m obviously going to have more chances to hear about and visit places within I-495. But my travels take me to New York frequently enough that I have good opportunity to mine the best (and worst) barbecue along US-1 and I-95. Long the laughingstock of serious barbecue fans, New York City has seen a BBQ boom in recent years, with Blue Smoke, RUB, Daisy May’s and others receiving deserved national attention. While I’m not going to pretend to be as intimately familiar with the New York restaurant scene as a native New Yorker, I’ve eaten at enough of their BBQ joints to know the good from the bad.

Feedback

Barbecue is one of those topics that breed disagreement. If you disagree with something I wrote, let me know.

More importantly, if there’s a really good joint that you think I overlooked, let me know. I try to hit anything that I think might be good.

BBQ Restaurant Owners

If you are a restaurant owner and you have a new menu item, or a new event, or a month’s worth of band listings that you’d like to promote for free on this site, please feel free to contact me.