Today is the day I venture into unfamiliar BBQ territory – Memphis, Tennessee. Unfamiliar everything territory, really. I know that there’s a storied musician named Elvis Presley and he has a house here called Graceland. Beyond that, Memphis is a mystery. What are the people like? Do they eat a lot of BBQ? What’s the Memphis BBQ style?
The pinnacle of Memphis style BBQ may be found elsewhere, but I wasn’t quite ready to try my luck in the Mississippi delta. So! One of the places with a good reputation in Memphis is Payne’s BBQ. It is from this place that I would take my imprint of what the elements of Memphis style were.
Reviews warn of the location seeming “sketchy” or (ugh) “ghetto.” Coming from a Hawaii resident perspective, it looks a little like an L&L BBQ. Usually these are made out of cinder blocks, have a linoleum floor, and serve you several pounds of meat in a styrofoam box. Very similiar, actually. From a Seattle perspective it looks like a distressed retro store facade. So hip. Except that in Seattle the place would be a bar or club which does not serve BBQ, despite the name.
Inside, it does have a sort of highway-rest-stop atmosphere. It does not distract from the food at all.
The foods we got here were: the chopped pork sandwich, a rack of ribs, sides of beans and slaw. All of these items were chosen for their fundamental importance to the menu, and for the wildly positive reviews.
I’m pretty sure that the way you are meant to eat this type of meal is with your hands, not touching anything that needs to be clean until you’re done, and then hosing your hands down with a faucet or using half a box of wet wipes to neaten up afterward. With the amount of sauce on the sandwich, let alone the ribs, it would not have made any difference to my cleanliness if I had eaten the beans with my bare hands.
So. Memphis: saucy and tangy! The sauce on both the sandwich and saturating the ribs is a sweet and sour type tangy sauce, with a little vinegar or pickly element in it. The beans have some meat in them too – rib meat I think – and have a tang to them. The bright yellow coleslaw is unusually – and I’m aware that I’m wearing this word out – tangy to boot. Tangy tangy tangy.
The chopped pork sandwich is unlike a pulled pork sandwich in that the meat has smaller and more heterogenuous chunks of pork, ranging from tender to crispy, this gives it variations in texture which are really satisfying. It has a generous pile of the yellow slaw on it. A moat of sauce quickly forms around its perimeter, if left on the plate for any amount of time. The bottom bun really doesn’t stand a chance, and it fell to pieces when I tried to pick up the sandwich.
Covered in sauce from fingertip to wrist. Might as well try the ribs! The rib experience is one of pure meat and sauce. They are thick with meat, unlike many ribs I’ve had. This is good, because it diffuses the, uh, tanginess of the thickly applied sauce. The ratio of sauce to meat is very important, I find. Too much of this sauce and your mouth will get more and more sour. Too much meat and the flavor will fade.
I’m sure this assessment misses all sorts of important points of quality in this kind of BBQ. It’s practically the first time I’ve tried it, conscious of the difference in styles. Someone who’s seen a lot of Memphis style BBQ might notice a lot more than: that the ribs were really saucy and tangy. I don’t expect that out of myself, and I’m not going to overthink ribs any further. They’re yummy.
I ziplocked the half rack which Marianne and I combined could not finish. Unlike Texas style, I don’t know of any place near where I live to get this sort of thing, so I’m going to keep some with me on the road to nibble on – next to a roll of paper towels and moistened towelettes.