Barbecue stands strong as the enduring, finger-lickin' legacy of American roots cooking. Long before Memphis ever pulled its pork, the Arawak were pit-smoking meats in the West Indian islands. Generations before Texans teamed mesquite-smoked brisket with tequila cocktails and white bread, privileged MesoAmericans were pounding pulque and sotol, smoking chilies, and slow-cooking a menagerie of animals that may have included iguana, turkey, and tapir in their subterranean earth ovens. When it comes to our own great city, the great migration of Southern-born African Americans to Los Angeles over the turn of the 20th century leaves our landscape still dotted with sturdy barbecue spots mostly in the Texan tradition, represented today by dedicated, smoker-strapped pitmasters like Neal Strawder of Bigmista's Barbecue, Kevin Bludso of Bludso's BBQ in Compton, and The Spot, which until recently showed up with killer smoked turkey necks and slabs of pork ribs at West Compton's Prayer Assembly Church every other weekend.
This summer, prominent pitmaster Robbie Richter will open Roadhouse L.A. at The Hollywood Improv with backing from Umami Burger entrepreneur, Adam Fleischman. Richter is a Queens native making the move to Los Angeles for his first solo venture. But before a rousing course of California cue-junkies can start crying, "This stuff's made in New York City!" keep in mind that Richter made his bones on the intensely cutthroat competitive barbecue circuit, contests judged in the strictest seriousness by the Kansas City Barbecue Society that offer champions five-figure purses. Through his work at Manhattan's Hill Country and Brooklyn's Fatty Cue, this East Coast pitmaster is among a tiny handful of names responsible for making "New York Barbecue" a term we now think twice about snickering at. Of course, pit-cooking is believed by some scholars to have originally spread to the South from the East Coast (think underground clam bakes in New England), no matter that native Americans had their own form of pit-cooking in the American South West.
At Roadhouse L.A., Richter plans to smoke meats in a more global approach to barbecue, taking the meat-steaming, roasting, and smoking traditions of the entire world into consideration for a fresh take on the genre. Richter debuted a few of the items he's been working on this past week at This Is Not a Pop-Up, the culinary incubator that allows chefs to test restaurant concepts during evenings at Hollywood's Tiago Cafe. Celebrating Memorial Day with an appropriate feast of smoked meats and hoppy beer, we nuzzled up to the bar here on Saturday night to indulge in the imported pit-master's menu.
