Steak on the Lake...or What We Did on Our Summer Vacation

This is a public service announcement...Vegetarians and vegans - turn away! I'm gonna be talking (mostly) about beef; in this particular instance - steak.

On Labor Day weekend, Significant Eater and I were lucky enough to spend time at our friends' home, on a beautiful lake, somewhere in the Adirondacks. And when he (a cook) and I (a cook) were discussing some of what we might indulge ourselves (and the wives) with over the weekend, steak popped to the top of our list.  As an aside, I'm always looking for a great steak, to be cooked at home or a friends' home; one of the reasons for that is that if you go out in NYC for a great steak, you can expect to spend a small fortune. Peter Luger's, a place many people think of when they think steak, fails to show prices on their online menu. Spark's Steak House, perhaps as well-know for its steaks as for its murders...

Paul C. problem outside Sparks - NY Daily News 

No prices. The Palm? No go. Suffice to say that if you plan on indulging in a beautiful steak, at one of the well-known steakhouses, plan on at least $50 per diner, just for your meat. But let's look at another way to enjoy a great steak.

First, procure your beef. Make sure it's at least of "choice" quality, though prime and various aged cuts are easy enough to find these days. Make sure it's good and thick (maybe 2"?) and nicely marbled.  It can be a rib steak, a rib eye, a T-bone, a Porterhouse, a strip, whatever you like the most - after all, you're cooking the damn thing. Then...

Fire.

Build yourself a freakin' hot fire on one side of your grill (ok, I realize many of you don't have grills. I don't. Use your imagination and pretend you do). Let the grill heat up once that flame dies down and you've spread the coals out. Scrupulously clean the grill. Be careful - it's hot! Place giant steaks over the fire for a minute or two. Turn them and cook for another minute or two. Turn them again - once they get a nice char, move them to the other side of the grill (yeah, I know - it's called indirect grilling). Cover that sucker and cook the steaks till they're done. (I don't know how you like your steaks cooked. I do know a good meat thermometer will help  - cook them until they're about 7° - 10°F less than what you want to finish with, as they'll continue cooking while they rest.) They may look like this...

Steaks - Done! Negroni in background.

Now, enjoy your Negroni (or Martini, or Manhattan) while those steaks rest. A good 15 minutes for these Porterhouses was how long we let them rest. Then...

Porterhouses sliced up real nice.

Slice them up. Everyone gets some strip and some filet. The bones are pretty great to gnaw on also. Leftovers?  That's simple...

Steak salad.

Steak salads for lunch the next day are a nice treat, no?

But don't think all we did was cook steaks. No - one evening we were enlisted to do a clam "boil" for about 2 dozen folks. Bushes of clams, corn, potatoes, kielbasa, and shrimp - all simply boiled in salty lake water. And then dumped onto tables covered with newspaper...

Clam boil.

That was fun. And my buddy's smoker got a workout too...

Smoker in action.

Ribs and duck in smoker.

There was plenty of time to relax. Sunset cocktails on the lake. Star gazing at night without any city lights nearby is pretty great. There's this view of their house as you approach via boat - the only access...

Lake house.

Everyone has dogs, and they like the boat rides too...

Pepper and Otis.

And at the end of the day...

Not a bad way to spend a long, summer weekend, right? Thanks, J & J!

Sacre Blue, Smoke

It'd been a while since we'd been to Blue Smoke, and even longer since we'd been to the original, flagship, first, whatever, Blue Smoke, on 27th Street, in the Flatiron neighborhood.  I think our last visit was to the Blue Smoke located in Battery Park City, and that was some time ago. But this past weekend, we attended a birthday party for one of Significant Eater's cousins, which was thrown at Blue Smoke #1; a nice, small party, 30-40 people, in the middle of a busy Saturday afternoon.

If you don't know Blue Smoke, suffice to say it was among the first of the big barbecue restaurants in NYC (and yeah, Virgil's, in Times Square, predated it). There were smaller operators back in the day - I recall a great place out in Long Island  City, called Pearson's Texas BBQ, but bbq had always been but a blip on the NYC restaurant radar.  Enter Danny Meyer, Union Square Hospitality Group, and The Big Apple BBQ Block Party, which brings BBQ specialists from all over the country to Madison Square Park and its environs every June - this year will be the 13th year for the block party - it started the same year that Blue Smoke opened.

In its earliest days, Blue Smoke was uneven. They had to learn how to use the smokers, compounded with the scrubbers, which were a necessary evil due to NYC's, well, smoke and fire laws. This isn't exactly bbqing on a Weber in your backyard - something I love to do, even though I lack both a Weber and a backyard. But every once in a while at Blue Smoke, you'd get a great rib, or a hunk of wonderful smoked pork, and all would be good with the world.

Of course, once a place is successful in NYC, many places open offering similar stuff. Bbq became a "trend," and places popped up everywhere. Some are quite good; some, not so much. Pitmasters come and go - you know the story. As a matter of fact, a while ago Blue Smoke's original pitmaster, partner and co-founder of the BBQ Block Party, Kenny Callaghan, left the organization.

So where would they head? Well, from the food we ate at the birthday party, it appears they're headed in a fine direction.  The new Executive Chef is Jean-Paul Bourgeois, and that's a great name, no? The menu has been condensed a bit - there used to be a bunch of different rib styles...they're no longer there, and that's just fine with me. Because most everything we got to taste made us think we have to come back more often.

Roasted oysters were delicious, not too much topping, allowing the flavor of the oyster to shine through, touched by smoke. On the half shell, these same oysters were well-shucked, fresh and briny. I've always had a soft-spot for the chipotle chicken wings at Blue Smoke (well, wings anywhere) - these are still great. I tasted the kale salad, but don't know why. On the other hand, the gem lettuce and citrus salad was fine, as were the cornbread, deviled eggs and assorted sides like brussels sprouts slaw and butter beans with bacon.

Of course, the star of the show is 'cue, and based on the 'cue Sig Eater and I tried on our recent trip to Nashville, I'll take Blue Smoke's any day. I'm not a huge fan of bbq chicken - I've never had one that was transcendent. And maybe the brisket here could use a touch more smoke, but I'll leave that to the Texas 'cue experts. All I know is that the rack of ribs that was placed on our end of the table was just great. Smoky, tender and just chewy enough from the right amount of time spent hanging out with smoke and heat, these ribs could hold their own with the best I've eaten. And for this alone, we 'll be heading back to Blue Smoke soon...or at least as soon as we need our next bbq fix.

Right On 'Cue

First, lemme get this out of the way: I hate crowds. I know, I know...it seems kind of silly that Significant Eater and I live in NYC if I hate crowds so much. Maybe I'm just cranky and think that I hate crowds; or maybe I'm just much more tolerant than I think I am and I really like crowds? Yeah, right.

So, what's with all this stuff about crowds? Well, this past weekend brought us the 10th anniversary of the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party (hereinafter known as the BABBQBP, because that's so much easier to type). This barbecue festival, which brings together close to 20 BBQ pitmasters from around the country, helps to raise funds for the Madison Square Park Conservancy, which is, imo, a great cause.

It also brings, you guessed it, the crowds. Remember - 10 years ago the BABBQBP was a quiet little festival...you could literally wait 5 minutes and you'd be sampling some fine 'cue. And then, like everything that's happened to anything food-ish over the past 10 years, the sucker exploded like Guy Fieri's ego. It's money, if you get my drift.

I think we've attended every BABBQBP since its inception and it gets crazier and crowded-er every year. Of course, the marketing geniuses figured out that they could sell a "Fast Pass," which allows the holder to bypass the lines and theoretically get served more quickly. But they sell so many of the damn "fast passes" that the lines for fast pass holders end up being just as long as the lines for the plebes...and basically it's a sucker's game.

OK - now that I've gotten most of my gripes out of the way, I do have to say we tasted some mighty fine 'cue this year. One of our new favorites was the whole hog bar-b-que from Scott's Bar-B-Que in Henderson, South Carolina; the smoky pig served up with a side of crispy skin and some tasty sauce. As this picture proves, BBQ ain't easy...

We also took a liking to the smoked sausage from Jim 'N Nick's Bar-B-Q, a chain based out of Birmingham, Alabama...their spicy hot link was crisp, juicy and absolutely delicious, served up with a side of everyone's favorite...pimento cheese and Saltines...

On the rib end of things, we bypassed our usual favorite, Memphis Championship Barbecue, and instead tried the St. Louis style (a real sparerib, not a wimpy baby-back) ribs from Checkered Pig, in Danville, Virginia, a worthy endeavor even though I like my ribs sans sauce. 

In addition to the 'cue, there's music, and it just so happened that 2 performers whom I've actually paid money to see were performing for free on the festival's main stage. On Saturday, we got to see and hear Jon Langford...

And on Sunday, Alejandro Escovedo closed out the party...

To prove that I'm not just a grump, Madison Square Park is beautiful and its location offers stupendous views of a few iconic NYC buildings. For example, there's this...

And perhaps my favorite building in this whole city...

So come to think of it (other than the crowds), it's not that bad. I mean, sure - waiting on endless lines can be a drag. And squeezing by sweaty mooks gnawing on ribs isn't that much fun. But hey, it's NYC after all - deal with it...just like I did and will continue to do. See y'all next year at the BABBQBP - I hear it's the 11th anniversary.

Tender at the Rib - Exploring BBQ Around DC

With a year and a half of traveling to DC on a fairly regular basis now under my belt, I still don't really have an opinion on what's the best barbecue anywhere in the area. So much of what I've tried is pretty bad; bad enough where I have no remembrance of the names. There was some place up on 14th St NW that sucked. Badly. It had the appearance that it might be good - big stack of logs in the front window. Inside, just a bullet-proof glass window where you ordered and picked up...like at a bank or a post office. To no avail. There's Hogs on the Hill. Which may have been good on one of my visits, but was really not on my next time back. And a few others. But then there was this, which I stumbled upon one afternoon while taking a drive with a friend to have lunch...

Remember, we were going to lunch, so we didn't stop. We stopped on the way back instead. To greet this guy, who was manning the smokers...

And selling his wares out of this portable unit...

It's The Tender Rib, which is evidently parked right smack dab in the middle of this parking lot, in the middle of nowhere, somewhere out near RFK Stadium, on Thursday and Saturday afternoons. Actually, it's on Benning Road NE, if that helps. They fortunately have a website to go along with their bricks and mortar operation, since we'd just had lunch and didn't order anything. But he ran over to our car and insisted we try at least a taste of his ribs...

So how were they? Simply, the best ribs I've tried in the area. And actually, maybe as good as any others I've tried. Pink ring, nice and smoky, Tender, juicy with just the right amount of chew. A rub that's not overpowering but complimentary to the flavor of the pork. There wasn't any sauce on these samples; they didn't need any. I can't wait to try out all their barbecue and a trip to the restaurant is in our immediate future...

Interestingly enough, there's another guy who operates his smoker in a parking lot and out of an old bus parked off of Rhode Island Avenue. In a Safeway parking lot. It's called Mr. P's Ribs and Fish. Supposed to be good. Last time I stopped there, Mr. P was closed. And I can't forget, of course, about the big news; Hill Country BBQ has opened a huge (300 seats) restaurant in DC, two weeks ago in the Penn Quarter neighborhood. Currently, it has a lot of people confused; about the quality, about the ordering and about the whole ticket shebang, which works sort of like Katz's, so here's a tip...if it works for Katz's, it works. I'm going to let it settle in before Significant Eater and I head over there for what I hope is some damned good brisket.

Finally, on my drive down to DC this past Wednesday, I made a stop at Red, Hot and Blue Barbecue, which is just outside of Annapolis, and an easy hop-off, hop-on from Route 50, from which it's quite visible. I've heard about them for a long time (there are 3 Maryland locations and it's a franchise - who knew?!) and figured I'd bring home a sack full of stuff so SE and I could eat 'cue and watch the finale of Top Chef. I brought home a sampler of ribs, brisket and sausage.

And you know what? The Top Chef finale was so much better than our dinner, it wasn't even close.