The Atlanta barbecue scene is badly underestimated, it appears, even by bloggers who blog in this city. From this perspective, it’s merely a boring repetitious set of chain eateries, whose products are predictable and monotonous, and whose only differentiating factor are the sides or perhaps the sauce.
I have news for ya’ll: this also is Atlanta barbecue.
See that dumpling? It comes from Canton House, the famous dim-sum place on Buford, and yes, it’s full of barbecue.
In this city, perhaps you didn’t know, but the Koreans have barbecue, the Chinese have barbecue, and the Vietnamese add barbecued meat to their banh mi.
Since the work barbecue itself comes in part from the Taino people of the Caribbean, it also appears that the Southern style of cooking meat is also a direct descendent of the Caribbean barbacoa.
That suggests strongly that jerk chicken, from Jamiaca and smoked, is also a style of barbecue.
Is it or isn’t it? I’m not claiming barbecue expertise. I’m merely a student in this genre.
What about pastrami? It’s a smoked meat, isn’t it? How closely related is pastrami to barbecue?
Even restricting the point of view to “Southern barbecue”, I’ll note that there are two common ways to prepare meats in this “style”, and that is to smoke the meat indirectly (leads to a smoke ring and great smoke flavor), or to broil the meat and then finish it on the grill (grill lines, and fall off the bone tender). The latter is indeed favored by chain restaurants. It’s easier, and you’re in no danger of running out of product around 3 pm in the afternoon. They’re easily distinguised, by the presence or absence of smoke rings on the meat.
Getting back to Texas style barbecue: using Robb Walsh’s book as a reference, I counted 6 kinds of Texas barbecue. Using the same source, the Wikipedia counts four. Looking over various Wikipedia entries (like this one on US barbecue, and this one on Texas barbecue), the Wikipedia missed the Caddo Indian style (not common anymore), and I counted the Southern Texas style perhaps twice. So, four styles are extant currently. To note, as Robb Walsh says:
When visitors from Carolina and Tennessee come to Texas, they are generally astonished to find that we eat a lot of pork here as well as beef brisket. That’s the problem with the beef generalization. Yes, we barbecue beef – but we’re fond of other meats.
I know this to be true, for when visiting relatives in Granbury, Texas, I had some good pork ribs over in Glen Rose.
If you talk to bloggers who actually smoke meats in their spare time, they’ll note a merrily promiscuous character to Atlanta barbecue. The city doesn’t appear to care what is good, it just adopts any style that tastes good. So I’ll reiterate the question that comes to me after all this: just how many different kinds of barbecue can you count in this city?
March 31, 2011 at 11:36 am
Great photos, am bookmarking this for our next trip to Atlanta.
March 31, 2011 at 12:01 pm
Thanks for the compliment! If you’re wanting more ‘cue, click on the tags and categories on the right (not on the articles) and drill down. Plenty of discussion there.
FnS.
April 2, 2011 at 10:18 pm
[…] Just how diverse is the Atlanta barbecue scene? « Food Near Snellville […]
June 2, 2011 at 1:09 pm
Well, most people that cook barbecue will argue that it’s only barbecue if you smoke the meat over low temperatures (below 250F) for a long period of time (allows collagens/connective tissues to breakdown, etc.). Anything else is definitely NOT barbecue.
Kalbi and bulgogi are not “barbecue”, even though we refer to them as “Korean barbecue”.
A grill is not a “barbecue” and grilling is not “barbecuing”. Likewise, putting barbecue sauce on something does not make it barbecue either.
Ultimately, it’s semantics. If I roast a cured pork butt in the oven for bo saam and someone calls it barbecue, I’m not going to argue…