Audio By Carbonatix
The sandwich board standing beside Brighton Boulevard, in one of the more, um, interesting parts of town, carried an irresistible message: The hand-lettered words “Billy Bob’s Big Ass Burgers” and an arrow pointing to the right.
We turned, of course, swerving the minivan behind a Conoco station and pulling into a parking lot beside the Platte River that contained one toilet, one double-bed headboard, one legless desk, one box-spring mattress, two bicycle wheels, four unidentifiable hunks of rusted metal, four cars — and a small, shadowy building that proclaimed itself Billy Bob’s Riverside Saloon. I decided to park the minivan, which isn’t paid for yet, where we could see it from the door.
“Hi, there!” a booming voice called out as we entered the dark establishment, the kind of dark that can only signify one of two things: Someone hasn’t paid the electric bill, or we’d just stumbled into an authentic dive. Not an Authentic Dive — one of those cheesy LoDo spots into which a chain has poured big bucks to make the bar look like it’s been there for a hundred years, and where people from Highlands Ranch go for an Authentic Experience — but the real deal. And Billy Bob’s qualified: Moosehead was the fanciest beer on tap, the dark competed with smoke for breathing room, and the walls were covered with so many bumper stickers and posters that even once our eyes adjusted, it was almost impossible to focus on any single item. But that booming voice came through loud and clear, and it wasn’t hard to see that it emanated from a really big guy with a really long ponytail. “Can we sit outside?” I asked. “Sure, that’s the patio,” the really big guy said, leaning down and grinning. “Watch out, though, there’s air out there.”
According to Webster’s, a patio is “a recreation area that adjoins a dwelling, is often paved and is adapted especially to outdoor dining.” At Billy Bob’s, the patio did indeed adjoin a dwelling, and there was no question that the area had been paved with asphalt. But the only diners it seemed adapted for were the birds hopping hopefully beneath the filthy plastic tables and chairs, looking for the odd French fry or bun crumb. It’s unlikely, though, that a crumb or anything else could have been dislodged from the tables, which were surprisingly, and kind of appallingly, sticky — even considering that the previous day’s hailstorm had been forceful enough to knock down the fence around the patio. While we sat and contemplated the unusual ambience, a woman came out and hawked a loogie. Thank heavens there was air out there.
“Was that guy who said ‘Hi’ Billy Bob?” I eventually asked our server, who’d told us she’d be out in a minute but then sort of forgot about us for fifteen minutes. “No, that’s Big John,” she explained. “He’s a genius. He has such a vision for this place. Someday this is going to be a big riverfront area, and he got in while it was still cheap. It’s going to be like LoDo. John’s going to have live music and a stage for bands and pool tables, and people are going to come from all over to check it out, and the best thing is there are no noise ordinances out here.” She took a breath, which she could do out on the patio, since there was air out there. There was also a vague scent of sewage. “We own all the way to over there,” she added, pointing to some sheds about twenty feet away. “John’s going to make this huge.”
John “Just call me John” O’Brien is huge himself. His last name explains the many vaguely Irish references scattered around the bar, including an open letter from “Billy Bob” hanging from the ceiling that ends with the hopeful note that the ankles of the bar’s enemies will be turned “so we’ll know them by the way they walk.” (There is no Billy Bob; John says he just liked the sound of the name.) And John’s size explains why that enemy factor isn’t particularly worrisome in the first place; it also came in handy during his decades in law enforcement in Southern California. Soon after he retired, John took his first vacation to Colorado and “fell in love with the mountains and the bike trails,” he says. In fact, he and a friend were riding their bikes along the South Platte one day last year when they came across this bar and decided to stop in for a beer. “The owner and the manager were fighting,” John recalls. “The owner yelled, ‘I wish I could just get rid of this thing,’ and as I was walking out, I said, ‘Do you really want to sell the place?’ He said, ‘Are you drunk?’ and I said, ‘No, but to prove it to you, I’ll come back tomorrow and talk to you about it.’ And I did. The price was right, and — yikes — here I am.”
First, though, he had to spend over a week cleaning the saloon before the health department would let him even think about serving food there. “It was most recently the Blue Chip Bar & Grill,” John says. “Before that, I don’t know. The last plot map I could find was from December of 1950. I do know that this was a very different establishment before, a very rough place.” So after he cleaned up the kitchen, John set about cleaning up the neighborhood, which wasn’t too hard for a retired peace officer. “I needed customers to understand that this isn’t a place to come if you’re looking for trouble,” he adds.
It’s now the kind of place you come to for a Big Ass Burger. “I saw a furniture ad one day, something about a ‘Big Ass Furniture Sale,’ and I thought that would be the perfect name for a burger,” John explains. Not only is the name perfect, but the burger was, too — if you like classic, old-fashioned, big-ass diner-style burgers. Billy Bob’s version started with a half pound of freshly ground sirloin (John swears he gets it ground every morning at the nearby Tianguis Market), 90 percent lean, hand shaped into craggy, uneven patties, sprinkled with garlic salt and then grilled until the rough edges sported a sweet char that held in the juices — until your first bite. A thin slice of cheese — which must be Velveeta, because nothing else melts or tastes like that — had been placed on top of the patty, but became one with the meat during the grilling process; the puffy bun, just one browned crust away from being white bread, disintegrated about three bites away from the burger’s delicious end.
The Big Ass Burger came with a slice of tomato, a slice of onion, lettuce and a pickle; those who wanted to get fancier could find napkins, hot sauce, ketchup and mustard in the old Corona six-pack holder whose new contents were advertised all over the cardboard. Another buck bought us a pile of salty, beautifully greasy Swamp Styx, Billy Bob’s version of French fries; they’re made from hand-cut russets (“Trust me,” John says, “that is a chore”) with the skin left on.
Billy Bob’s also grills a Little Ass Burger — about half the size and a buck less than the Big Ass — or an even bigger burger, the Animal, three-quarters of a pound of meat served with a pound and a half of potatoes. “That’s an ungodly amount of food,” John needlessly points out. The only other items on the menu are Big Ass and Little Ass salads and a Big Ass Polish dog — unless it’s Tuesday, when tacos are 50 cents each (you have to focus on one of the signs hanging in the bar to discover this). The tacos are a bargain, because they wrap just-fried flour tortillas around the same ground beef used in the burgers and come with a side of freshly made salsa. Still, you go to Billy Bob’s for the Big Ass Burgers — just as the sandwich board suggests. During one visit, a cook holding a cigarette stepped into the doorway between the bar and the patio and asked if we liked the burgers. “Yes,” we said. “Good,” he answered, taking a big draw on the ciggy. “I’m glad.”
And we were glad to have found Billy Bob’s in the formative stages.
John is beside himself with excitement over the huge plans he has for the place. “I’m telling you, this is going to be something,” he says. “Yesterday, I bought the official Billy Bob’s Big Ass bus. I’m going to put in a full-size volleyball court and surround the place with an eight-foot-high fence, and I’m getting a cabaret license to have an outside band stage. I’ve hired a graphics artist to paint the fence, too, and this patio’s really going to be amazing, about 12,700 square feet, with separate cabanas and fire rings, and wired for sound. We’re hoping to get it done by the fall.”
So quick, get your ass (big, little or in between) over there, before everyone from Highlands Ranch discovers what an authentic experience really is.
