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NEW YORK CITY
Grill
King Rising
Local boy does good, breaks into the BBQ racket.
On a residential street in Rego Park, Queens, a barbecue rig is parallel-parked among the neighbors’ sedans and SUVs. Beside it, Robbie Richter waits for his prizewinning ribs to cook as the occasional passing automobile slows down, observes and speeds up again.
Richter is a competitive barbecuer and founder of the catering business, Big Island Barbecue. He is also the first New Yorker ever to have qualified for the Jack Daniels World Championship Invitational Barbecue contest, which takes place on Sat., Oct. 25 in Lynchburg, TN.
The converted propane tank pipes out sweet-smelling smoke that bathes his baby back ribs and chicken thighs. They’ve been cooking indirectly in the traditional "low and slow" method for the last few hours.
There has been much hoopla in the food world over the recent ascent of barbecue in New York City restaurants, and this achievement has been paralleled by Richter on the competitive circuit. But for a city of "bests," it’s unusual to come across moments of "firsts"–particularly with a form of American cooking that has been in practice since colonial times.
There are reasons why barbecue rigs aren’t parked up and down all of the streets of New York City. Some are pragmatic, some are cultural, many are tied to the law. Fire codes meant to protect New Yorkers from industrial smells and the scarcity of time and space are challenges to cooks who want to spark up a pit and spend sixteen hours nursing a pork shoulder, but can’t.
"Barbecue is an outdoor style, and outdoor cooking in New York is discouraged for all the obvious reasons and has been for a very long time," says New York City-based culinary historian Betty Fussell. "You need space for these great, beautiful barbecue smokers, and anything that takes up real estate is eight times as costly here as any other place, so who’s going to do that commercially?"
Plus, barbecue simply is not a part of the city’s culinary culture.
"New York looks to other parts of the world for its food trends," says Cheryl Alters Jamison, who along with her husband, Bill, wrote the definitive barbecue cookbooks Smoke & Spice and Sublime Smoke. "I don’t think it tends to look inward to other parts of the United States."
Or, as stated in plainer terms by Arthur Schwartz, the host of WOR 710 AM’s Food Talk, "Tourists don’t come to New York to eat barbecue."
What, then, has led to barbecue becoming the city’s flavor of the moment? Reasons vary from the cynical to the gustatory to the economic. Fussell is fairly certain that barbecue was bound to have its moment, by default. "This is because barbecue has not fully been exploited in this city, and we’re a city that likes to exploit," says Fussell.
"Everything in New York is becoming more informal and less expensive because restaurants are dropping like flies," observes Schwartz. "People don’t want to go out and get dressed up and eat a mediocre expensive meal."
Restaurateur Danny Meyer, whose barbecue restaurant Blue Smoke quite possibly jump-started the current trend, says, "Of all the different flavors that have been appearing on plates, a lot of them have had to do with spices in the last several years–Indian spices, Latin spices, Thai spices, Chinese, South Western. It was only a matter of time that barbecue, from a flavor profile, had to hit New York."
Although the barbecue phenomenon has been confirmed in publications like the New York Times, New York City is far from being a barbecue town.
Kansas City native Calvin Trillin has authored several books on food and has been known to preach the supremacy of Kansas City barbecue. He notes, dryly, "It’s not as though there’s a barbecue at every corner. It’s sort of like Southern soul food restaurants in New York that serve perfectly good food, but it’s not the same as it is in Alabama.
"I think it’s the same with barbecue in New York–it’s slightly out of place, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be perfectly good food."
A similar ethos ruled the competition circuit when Richard Westhaver of Norwell, MA, started out. Westhaver says his team, Dirty Dick and the Legless Wonders, was among the first Yankees to compete in Kansas City Barbecue Society-sanctioned competitions. (KCBS is one of the main ruling bodies in barbecue.) Westhaver, who was New England’s first barbecue champion in 1991 and the first New Englander to be invited to the Jack Daniels, says it wasn’t easy for Northerners early on.
"I used to go to Tryon, North Carolina, one of the biggest contests down South, and they couldn’t believe us," recalls Westhaver. "For the first few years not many people talked to us, but as we started winning and doing well, people started to warm up to us."
These days, the competitive landscape has changed considerably, due largely to increasing participation of serious pitmasters from regions where barbecue is not a tradition. Ed Roith, who founded the Certified Barbecue Judging program of the KCBS and will be judging at this year’s Jack Daniels, says that these days, Northerners are getting respect.
"Five years ago I went up and cooked the New Hampshire State championships that had all the Massachusetts cookers and New York cookers and it was tough barbecue and fantastic barbecue," reports Roith. "So I’m going to say that there are some cooks up there as good as any cooks down here."
"The whole barbecue competition is a phenomenon that’s grown," says Tana Shupe, the chief organizer for the Jack Daniels competition. "When we started the Jack Daniels 15 years ago, there were maybe 100 or so barbecue competitions in the U.S.; there are probably five-fold now."
Robbie Richter’s rise in barbecue is likely a symptom of the movement of the circuit, which is inching its way toward New York City from the south (New Jersey) and the north (New England), providing more access to New Yorkers. As of now, there is no governing body for barbecue in New York City, and there is no championship for New York State. Richter gets by as an honarary member of the New England Barbecue Society.
"It’s coming on," says Roith, in anticipation of New York City competitions. "Your young man is making a name for himself and a lot of people are going to wonder why they can’t do the same thing. They’ll think: ‘Jeez, if he can do it, I can do it!’ And that is the way the majority of them get going."
