One cannot eat barbecue every day, at every meal. No matter how much one wants to, one has to space out the pork ribs and pulled pork and smoked ham and half-chickens--and even the occasional foray into brisket and hot links--with fruits, vegetables, grains not in the form of grocery-store white bread, and protein that doesn't come out of a Southern Pride smoke box. One's doctor has told one so. Repeatedly.
Peter Mumford
Barbecue and booze? At long last, summer.
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Stan's Bar-B-Q 58 Front St., Issaquah, 425-392-4551, stansbarbq.com. 11 a.m.–9 p.m. Mon.–Thurs.; 11 a.m.–11 p.m. Fri.; 11 a.m.–10 p.m. Sat.; 11 a.m.–8 p.m. Sun.
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There are as many different kinds of barbecue in the United States as there are pit men smoking it. It is a highly personalized kind of cooking, and the influences that form the final product run deep and speak of histories older than all of us.
There is Deep South barbecue, which is different from Florida barbecue. There is Carolina barbecue with its pork-heavy roots and dependence on mustard, and then there's Eastern Carolina tidewater barbecue, which is pork exclusively and heavy on the vinegar—a style developed to cover the rank flavors of pork that was less-than-fresh back in the days when the Carolina shore was awash in pigs and slaughtering yards.
There is the St. Louis rib, of course. There is the country rib, which is much bigger and served, generally, as a single bone. In the Southwest there are Mexican costillas which are like country ribs, but sometimes fried hard like chicharones. Texas has beef barbecue—brisket, mostly—which speaks to Texas' history of cattle ranching and cowboys, and also drives some barbecue aficionados crazy because, really, beef barbecue ought to be its own separate category. Brisket doesn't respond to the low, slow heat of the smoker as pig does. It doesn't take to smoke like a rib or a shoulder of God's most delicious animal will when loved up and tended to by an old master.
Some pit men swear by pecan wood, some by peach logs. Hickory is probably the most popular, but in the West it's all about mesquite. (I've even eaten barbecue smoked over scrap lumber, and was happy to have it.) Rubs and mops are family secrets guarded more fiercely than rumors of incest or weird Nazi uncles. I once asked a pit man to explain to me how he cut his ribs, because they were different from any other ribs I'd ever had, and he had me assume the position with my hands up against the tin walls of a cooler while he described the cuts on my back with the point of his butchering knife. Pros are strange about those kinds of things.
Barbecue, in an unusual way, is a kind of fusion cuisine. It's rare to find someone running a shack, a stand, or a full-blown restaurant who doesn't have some wild hair of an influence dirtying up their otherwise pure Carolina, Panhandle, or Midwestern soul. But one place exists as the central clearinghouse of all barbecue knowledge, a wonderland of colliding influences and notions about heat, meat, smoke, and spice which also has a deep-running barbecue tradition all its own. That place is Kansas City, famous for its ribs and its sweet/hot barbecue sauce as thick as syrup and dark as polished mahogany. Kansas City is the barbecue Promised Land.
And Kansas City is where Stan Phillips hails from.
This is plain from the minute you step inside Stan's Bar-B-Q. The room is like a temple to three things: meat, and the men who cut it; Stan's dad, Bill, who taught Stan to smoke in a backyard setup that would be the envy of most professional pit men and passed on the family recipes; and the Kansas City Chiefs. Sure, there's a big Seahawks helmet tucked away in the corner by the hot boxes, but the bar is fairly garlanded with photos of quarterbacks and linemen, decorated with red football helmets, arrowheads, and sculptures of pigs.
Just as an embassy in a foreign land acts as a tiny piece of American soil laid over more traditional geopolitical boundaries, Phillips has transplanted a small slice of KC to the middle of Issaquah, and made it up so that no one inside has any illusions about where they are. It might just as well be the Warehouse District or Gladstone, with all the air pumped straight in from Overland Park, already flavored by the smoke of a thousand barbecue pits. Kansas City is where Phillips learned the art and secrets of Kansas City barbecue. And after years of bouncing around various barbecue capitals as a sales director for a golf company (doing time in Texas, Kansas, and Greenville, S.C.), Front Street in Issaquah just happens to be where he ended up.
It was the smell of Stan's that first hooked me—some freak whiff of smoke and effort and talent and history carried up and onto a swirling breeze, reaching me on a patch of grass a hundred yards away, almost lifting me off my feet like a cartoon dog smelling a ham. The menu is blessedly simple: just barbecue and things that go with barbecue. There are no salads, no burgers, no fish—nothing to distract from the low glory of meat, properly smoked.
