Barbecue has a history and a long association with blues music and jazz music and roof-shakin', foot-stompin', Southern-tinted rock-and-roll music. It has a sweet Sunday side — all gospel hymns and stately women in enormous hats — as well as a dark-and-dirty Saturday-night side. At church picnics and in shotgun shacks that stank of cigarettes, stale beer, ripe sweat and original sin, barbecue was forked up and devoured by equal numbers of God-fearing Charlie Churchmice and white-lightning rummies, sucking bones and licking their fingers. And in both settings, there was music: growling guitar masterpieces about fun, fighting and fucking late on Saturday night, and Sunday hymns in praise of Jesus. Good barbecue — serious, secret, hoo-wee and slap-your-mama good — and good blues, jazz and Jesus music came up together in beautiful American harmony and synchronicity. For the one, all you needed was a pit, some sticks and a Zippo. For the other, a pawnshop guitar and something to howl about. And both the music and the meat were made for the same reason: to feel good for a little while after feeling bad all week long.
Barbecue has a history and a long association with immigration and multiculturalism. It is that most American of cuisines. It's what we've got — as homegrown as anything in our young and dwarfish republic. Stolen, sure (just like everything else is stolen), but ours because we have shouted loudest and longest that it is ours. But barbecue is also (of course) international, because barbecue is everywhere that there are men and meat and fire all together. An interesting sociology thesis paper could be written about the migration of barbecue to the States and from the States, about the barbecue that was carried here on the backs of a million Chinese and Thai and Filipino and Mexican and Argentine and Spanish and African and Indian immigrants, and then the American barbecue — all smoke and sex and longing — that was carried back across the borders and over the oceans.
For a lot of people in this country, the first Korean food they ever had was Korean barbecue (which isn't really barbecue at all), and that first sweet hit was like a gateway drug leading to the hard stuff later on — the kimchi and bulgogi and bi bim bop. Then it's on to Vietnamese barbecue and Mexican barbecued costillas off some gravel parking-lot grill, and the Chinese barbecued pork ribs that I always order every time I eat Chinese, sucking 'em down until my fingers are stained and I've got that candy-red sauce all gummed up in my hair like I was just on the receiving end of an all-clown gangbang.
The Q Worldly Barbeque understands all of this. It gets the vital intersection between proper 'cue and blues and jazz, and even though it's in the heart of Cherry Creek — just about the least sexy, passionate, sinful or dangerous neighborhood in this entire town — it does what it can: bringing the heat and noise, and sticking all manner of combos up on the little stage at the back of the bar five nights a week. And it gets that barbecue is an international thing, that there are other ways to enjoy your smoky pig bits than just naked, fresh out of the smoker and eaten while contemplating the weekend's evil and Sunday's sweet salvation. That's why it's called Worldly Barbeque.
But while I love the melting-pot history of barbecue, and even accept the PC urges of certain open-minded pit men and pig aficionados who want to give equal time to every barbecue tradition under the sun, I am a pork purist and a goddamn chest-out, finger-shaking snob when it comes to barbecue. Carolina smoked pig is the best there is, hands-down and argument over. More specifically, North Carolina pig. Even more specifically, pig in North Carolina tidewater sauce — all bittersweet vinegar and spice, thin as water, pungent as a face full of tear gas. It is the simplest of the historic sauces, the most bare, heavily regional and highly specific, coming up out of a dozen or two towns in eastern North Carolina. Tidewater sauce is not found in many places outside of that charmed stretch of coastline. But I found it at the Q.
At first glance, the Q doesn't look like much. David Pellegrin and Rebekah Donovan, who own Soleil Mediterranean Grill next door, opened it last year in a half-invisible subterranean location. Stairs lead down past the small deck and across the short cement patio into a dark space, smaller than it looks from the outside, with a dining room to the left and the stage, lounge and bar to the right. Even after a year in business, the sparsely decorated space seems new and unfinished, modern and (to a certain extent) soulless — like a starter house bought by a couple who blew their entire wad on the down payment and had nothing left for fixtures.
It does have a menu, though. A big one, done up permanently on a chalkboard hung by the counter, with room for daily specials. The board is fairly straightforward: sandwiches in six different varieties, from Deep South catfish to Memphis-style slaw and pulled pork; two salads; a couple of desserts; the standard church-picnic sides (baked beans, potato salad and coleslaw, then corn on the cob, house-made mesquite barbecue chips, house-made fries and house-made buttermilk onion rings); and the meat.
Lots of meat.
Something like 800 pounds of meat a day, all run through the big ol' Southern Pride rotisserie smoker chugging along in the back. And this is where the Q goes a little weird.
In this kitchen, they dry-rub everything. And they lay that rub on thick, until it creates a sweet and greasy shell, heavy on the spice, that lacquers the ribs and the half-chickens and gives every order of pulled pork both the weird textural crunch of eating Kansas City burnt ends and the hot-doggy smell and first, strongest savor of a country rib.
It's not bad, by any means — just different. Addictive, in its way, as evidenced by the bare-naked bones I left behind from the order of ribs that I took with me to go — driving them over to Alamo Placita park so that I could eat my lunch in the sun, sitting in the grass among the sleeping winos and righteous bums, tuning up my plain root beer with a hit of cheap hobo bourbon from a paper bag and stripping the short, fat and well-cut ribs clean with my teeth. I wasn't crazy for the potato salad (jacked up with celery and bits of bell pepper and so much spice it tasted almost Cajun) and was disappointed in the dinner roll (straight out of a bag and not nearly as satisfying as even a slab of bad cornbread). But the ribs were so good that I was back at the Q for dinner.
The "Worldly" part plays out mostly by way of the sauces proudly laid out in a cold table by the front door. About twenty of them, all in squeeze bottles, starting with the simple ones (a local ketchup, a plain "Birdland" K.C. sauce all sweet and cloying but missing the blunt tang of smoke) and then going to international extremes with mango-habanero sauce with a Caribbean bite; Asian sake (too watery); an Irish Guinness mop that actually tasted like stout (but also of sour onions); and a Thai chile/mint/lime that tasted exactly like its constituent parts, but with an aftertaste of sugar and pineapple that hangs on the tongue like feet and soupy sweat when mixed with the dry rub.
What got me going, though, was that tidewater sauce — a pure and lovely pinkish-orange wash of vinegar and chile meant for sopping down a big old plate of pulled pork. The Q is one of only two places in town where I've found this sauce — and it's the only one that serves it properly. Meaning left out for me to add in either judicious or ridiculous amounts. And not only did the Q have a North Carolina sauce on hand, it had a very good South Carolina version as well — heavy on the mustard and vinegar, with a strong line of honey sweetness running through the core.
It was bliss in a single bite — like the culmination of a quest, the end of a long and bitter road. I gorged myself on both Carolina styles, doctoring up a half-pound of naked pork shoulder (which I found slightly inadequate simply because it didn't have the heavy reek of hardwood smoke I expected, though it was smoked hard and cooked long and served dry and almost chewy — which I prefer to wet and fatty most of the time) and a mess of grilled shrimp already dusted with mesquite flavor like a bag of barbecue potato chips, then tearing into half a chicken just off the rotisserie and run through puddles of dusty-yellow mustard sauce. Sure, there were plenty of other things I could have been eating. A little pork with chile-lime sauce, maybe some smoked wings sauced with bright Mexican chipotle sauce, or that chicken rib meat with Japanese sake, like a freaky yakitori. Hell, the Q even offers smoked, sliced brisket and a Texas vinegar-and-pepper mop for those of you who make the mistake of considering Texas barbecue actual barbecue.
I won't be ordering it anytime soon, but as with everything else — the jazz and the blues, the chipotles and the mangos and the stouts — it's there for those who want it. I think everyone finds what they want to, maybe what they need to, at the Q. I know I did. And even if I ignore 90 percent of the menu every time I visit, it'll still have the one thing I've been looking for longer than anything: that bittersweet tang of Carolina vinegar on smoky pork. That bright burst of spice on a sunny summer afternoon.
To view more of the Q, go to westword.com/slideshow. Contact the author at [email protected].
