The Dangers Of 'Award-Winning' Food

It seems you can't walk into a restaurant these days without seeing a display of awards of various types won by the establishment. With newspapers, weekly shoppers, bloggers, foodie groups and a panoply of other "authorities" handing out honors left and right, it's the rare restaurant that doesn't have at least one or two claims to fame.

This is not to say that these awards are invalid. The ones I find the most reassuring are those bestowed by local weeklies like Creative Loafing and others. In Houston, the Houston Press restaurant guide has long been the authority on where to find good eats in town, although the suburbs are somewhat lightly covered.

Perhaps no type of restaurant is more award-obsessed than barbecue. With big meets like Memphis In May, the Big Pig Jig and the American Royal handing out trophies that can make a good 'cue chef a millionaire plus thousands of other, smaller contests covering every application of smoke to meat known to humanity, it's easy for a meat master to fill a trophy case in short order.

However, no cook in his right mind is going to lay out entry fees that can run into the hundreds of dollars, along with incurring all the expenses of owning and maintaining a traveling cooking setup, and then give less than a full-on artistic performance when the coals get hot. They'll use their very best rubs, their tangiest marinades and their most carefully selected array of aromatic hardwoods to impart ultimate flavor to the meat.

Moreover, no piece of competition 'cue will be hurried. Good beef brisket usually takes more than 12 hours to cook to tender perfection, and even the far more forgiving pork shoulder must be cooked "low and slow" to ensure pulled-pork goodness.

The problem is that it's devilishly hard to translate the kind of witch doctor-level science that goes into competition barbecue to the daily grind of restaurant cookery. Except in extremely rare cases, the demands of time, food cost and salary prohibit restaurateurs from devoting Memphis in May-level attention to each and every chunk of meat.

There are places where quality is king. They are almost always small, independent restaurants where the dining room is crowded with locals on most days, and the signs frequently advise you to order early because "when we're out, we're out." In other words, the owner and chef would rather lose business than hurry or cut corners on their product.

Last weekend, I had the unfortunate experience of falling prey to the "award-winning" hype when some friends of mine, taking pity on the fact that I was a lonely bachelor for the weekend, insisted that I go out to eat with them. We trekked down the freeway a dozen miles to the town of Kings Mountain, to a place whose billboard on the interstate touted its awards for all manner of meats.

The waiter was hawking the steaks, but I wanted to see what this place, which I'll call Big Al's, could do with meat cooked more slowly. I ordered a combo plate of brisket and spareribs and asked for small samples of the pulled pork, chicken and turkey.

A note on terminology: My fellow Texans would no doubt see "spare ribs" on the menu and assume they were beef. In the Carolinas, you'll be getting pork ribs. I was caught flat-footed by that one.

Remember how I said it takes a long time to cook a brisket? If you hurry it, you'll end up with something between beef jerky and overcooked pot roast which will wear out your jaw muscles and displease your taste buds. The Big Al's brisket was not just hurried, I suspect it may have been microwaved.

The turkey was tasty, but anyone who's ever smoked poultry will tell you it's pretty hard to screw up smoked turkey unless you forget it in the smoker for 16 hours like I once did.

The chicken was dry in the way that only seriously overcooked white meat can be, with an almost powdery aftertaste and no real trace of seasoning at all.

But the most puzzling of all the offerings was the pulled pork. North Carolina is one of the world's epicenters of pork cookery, and it is beyond me how a 'cue house could manage to put forth pulled pork (the highest form of smoked butt or shoulder) without a trace of smoke flavor. The meat was nicely tender, but devoid of any hint of hardwood goodness. It was as if you'd described pulled pork to an alien race and they'd duplicated it, but been unable to fathom what "wood smoke" meant.

Oh, and those spareribs? They were the only thing on the plate worth coming back for. Quite good.

What I plunked down nearly $20 for was a plate of food that had obviously been rushed, abused and cheated into existence. Yes, there are a good number of trophies on display in the establishment, but there is no way on Earth I would have guessed it from the quality of the food provided.

I'd like to say that's the only time I've ever met that fate, but it's not even in the first two dozen.

Again, I'm not trying to say that all food awards are irrelevant, or that an award-winning 'cue house can't put out great chow, but you've got to be careful. Don't make your dinner choice based solely on propaganda. Do a little research online. Talk to some locals. Heck, drive by there at 6 a.m. and sniff for woodsmoke!

One final note: The "award-winning" moniker is far more reliable when applied to sauces and rubs. Word of mouth is a big driver in those sales, and if word gets around that Mr. X's sauce differs greatly between the grocery store and the competition plate, it won't be pretty.

Got a question? Comment? Topic you'd like to see covered? Box of food? Drop me a line, anytime!