Texas Monthly's Top 4

OK. No more teasing. You're not surprised. The best BBQ joint in the world is only four years old. It's @franklinbbq
— TMBBQ (@tmbbq) May 16, 2013

And the rest of the Top 4 (in alphabetical order): Louie Mueller (Taylor), Snow's (Lexington), Pecan Lodge (Dallas). #tmbbq
— TMBBQ (@tmbbq) May 16, 2013

The magazine has spoken. Snow's in Lexington and Pecan Lodge in Dallas? I guess we'll need to take a family road trip soon.

A Defense of the Salt Lick: Sides Matter

We'll announce the best BBQ joint in Texas - & yes, THE WORLD - at noon. Along with the Top Four. Follow @tmbbq if you haven't already.
— Texas Monthly (@TexasMonthly) May 16, 2013

It's here! It's here! This afternoon, Texas Monthly will release the rankings of its very controversial and much-anticipated Barbecue Issue. It has already posted, without rankings, its list of the top 50 barbecue joints in the state. There aren't many surprises: Franklin Barbecue in Austin is on the list, as is Cooper's in Llano, Cousin's in Fort Worth, and Kreuz Market and Black's in Lockhart (Smitty's missed out).

One omission that disappoints me, but doesn't surprise me, is the Salt Lick in Driftwood.

The Salt Lick is one of the most popular restaurants in the state, but its reputation among barbecue snobs goes up and down from year-to-year. I understand why: somehow, for reasons I can't comprehend (since they've got some of the biggest, best tended pits in the world), their brisket is wildly inconsistent. I've had brisket there as good as anything I've had at Cooper's or Black's; I've also had brisket that was just ok. That's how it was on my last visit--I remember looking down at my plate at one point and thinking, This meat's nothing special.

That said, I also remember that visit as one of many in an unbroken line of magical barbecue meals that I've had at the Salt Lick, dating back a decade and a half to my undergrad days. How to reconcile that magic with the (sometimes) underwhelming meat? The answer will appall purists, but here it is: it's not all about the brisket.

Or to put it another way, sides matter.

(NOTE: in Texas barbecue, everything but the brisket is a side--bread, slaw, potato salad, yes, but also ribs and sausage and sauce... I'm even counting dessert as a side here)

Texas Monthly writes that their final score "considers intangibles like setting, service, and history, but mainly it is based on the meat. The brisket score counts the most." They say they take sides into account. But obviously sides don't count enough. Or, more likely, they haven't developed a scale that fully registers the total superiority of the Salt Lick's sides. This makes sense, to an extent. After all, sides don't matter at most barbecue restaurants. At most barbecue restaurants, you get a bag of white bread and a bargain-sized jar of jalapeños on your table. At most barbecue restaurants, the beans and potato salad are warmed-over afterthoughts, not much better than what you'd get in the prepared-food section of your local HEB.

But the Salt Lick gives you fresh baked bread, and they pickle their own jalapeños and cucumbers. Their potato salad and slaw are unorthodox but great (the latter is dressed in sesame oil, giving it a nice, nutty flavor). Their spicy sauce is my favorite barbecue sauce by far, their ribs are and sausage are excellent, and their blackberry cobbler is one of the state's dearest treasures.*

Let me try to put this into a crude numeric form, using a scale of 1-10: if the meat at Black's or Cooper's is consistently at 9 or above, then the meat at the Salt Lick averages around a 7--sometimes it's a 5, sometimes it's a 9. On the other hand, all of the Salt Lick's sides are 9s, while the sides at most barbecue restaurants hover around 3 or 4 (or lower).

The result is that the Salt Lick is an eating experience unlike any other barbecue restaurant. When I go to one of the state's big barbecue names, I look forward to it like I look forward to a meal at any world-renowned restaurant. But I look forward to the Salt Lick like I look forward to Thanksgiving dinner**. It's a more complete experience--different, but certainly not inferior. So the Salt Lick deserves mention on any list of the best barbecue joints in the state. And any scoring system that leaves it off is a busted instrument.

*My one complaint with their cobbler is that they don't serve it with Bluebell Ice Cream.

**An especially appropriate comparison, since the Salt Lick, like Thanksgiving dinner, makes me feel like I'm done eating for the week.

Bourbon, Bad and Good

Walker Percy was a fascinating dude. The author of (in my opinion) the best New Orleans novel, 1961's The Moviegoer, and a key champion of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Percy was both an existentialist and a self-proclaimed bad Catholic. On top of all that, he was a drinking man, and his short essay "Bourbon, Neat" has become a  sort of touchtone text for religious people trying to make sense of their own drinking.

Maybe because of that, "Bourbon, Neat" is one of the most misread essays in the American canon. I guess because he called himself a Catholic, people figure that "Bourbon, Neat" is Percy's attempt to find virtue in bourbon, to show how drinking can be safe, healthy, and ordered.

Take Michael Barruzini's "Walker Percy, Bourbon, and the Holy Ghost," published at First Things. Now, I don't want to be too hard on this essay, because it's a good piece of writing, and it calls attention to Percy's excellent piece of writing. 

But damn if Barruzini doesn't miss Percy's point.

In Baruzzini’s analysis, bourbon is one way of answering the existential question of how to be in the world. “No, not in the sense of drowning sorrows in alcoholic stupor,” Baruzzini writes, “but in recognizing that it is in concrete things and acts that we are able to be in the world.” Man drinks bourbon, Baruzzini argues, like an eagle flies or like a mole digs, “because that is what you are, what you are good at, what you love.”

And he concludes: “[B]ourbon is for Percy a way to be for a moment in the evening. Why might one take an evening cocktail? Baser reasons are: an addiction to alcohol, or the desire to appear sophisticated. Better reasons, according to Percy, are the aesthetic experience of the drink itself—the appearance, the aroma, the taste, the cheering effect of (moderate) ethanol on the brain. Another reason is that a drink incarnates the evening; it marks the shift from the active workday to a reflective time at home. One simply must choose a way to be at a five o’clock on a Wednesday evening. Instead of surrendering to TV, Percy recommended making a proper southern julep.”

We can put aside the objection that Percy doesn’t recommend mint juleps (the essay is called “Bourbon, Neat,” remember), and we can ignore the fact that Percy advocates the opposite of savoring the “appearance, the aroma, the taste” of bourbon. Those are confusing aspects of Percy’s essay—he does give a recipe for mint juleps, and he does have a beautiful line about the “hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime.”

The bigger problem comes in with Baruzzini’s insertion of the word “moderate” into that last paragraph.

Where does he get the idea that Percy's essay is about moderation? The drinkers in "Bourbon, Neat" are desperate, awkward, and unhappy: they drink illegally, they drink irresponsibly, they drink whatever they can get their hands on, from Coke bottles and hip flasks and home-rigged stills. He writes of a bunch of teenaged boys so scared of girls that they hide in the bathroom during a school dance, swilling whiskey and wincing at its taste. He writes about turning to bourbon when he doesn't know what to say on a date. And he writes of a julep party on Derby Day where “men fall face-down unconscious, women wander in the woods disconsolate and amnesiac, full of thoughts of Kahlil Gibran and the limberlost.”

But to hear Baruzzini tell it, Percy is advocating the stolid, responsible pleasures of a cocktail made with good whiskey, taken from an evening chair, maybe before going out into the backyard to toss the ball around with the kids and, then, once they’re bathed and off to sleep, making stolid, responsible love to the wife.

Percy’s ideal of whiskey drinking is far, far from that. It’s: 

“William Faulkner, having finished Absalom, Absalom!, drained, written out, pissed-off, feeling himself over the edge and out of it, nowhere, but he goes somewhere, his favorite hunting place in the Delta wilderness of the Big Sunflower River and, still feeling bad with his hunting cronies and maybe even a little phony, which he was, what with him trying to pretend that he was one of them, a farmer, hunkered down in the cold and rain after the hunt, after honorable passing up the does and seeing no bucks, shivering and snot-nosed, takes out a flat pint of any Bourbon at all and flatfoots about a third of it. He shivers again but not from the cold.”

So "Bourbon, Neat" isn't about drinking to be yourself--it's about drinking to escape yourself. 

Drinking to escape? Isn't that bad? Isn't escape precisely the wrong reason to drink? 

Yeah, it can be, but Percy hates what he calls the "everydayness" of modern life. And so he celebrates drinking, even bad drinking with all of its risks, because those risks allow bourbon to lift us out of that everydayness. Now, Barruzini is right that there's a religious aspect to all this. But he's wrong to look for it in the concept of vocation (doing what God calls you to do) rather than in the concept of grace. Booze is grace, Percy is telling us. Cheers! 

But what does that mean?

Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, describes grace as “an entry into some different kind of identity.” Specifically, he says that “grace, for the Christian believer, is a transformation that depends, in large part, on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted.” Grace means recognizing yourself as an occasion of joy for God.

Percy’s essay is an elaboration of the famous quote, attributed to Benjamin Franklin, that alcohol is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. But since that joy and love don’t come from our own merits, they can’t be rationally explained.  So grace is inherently wrapped up in mystery; in this respect, it differs from vocation, which involves doing what is self-evidently good for us. Drinking whiskey, then, is man’s (or woman’s) way of getting at the unfathomable, of launching himself into the wilderness of mystery. Even when he does it from his armchair.

In other words: We don’t drink bourbon because it’s good for us. We drink it because it’s not. And somehow that’s good.

That “somehow” is grace.

Can I get an amen?