I was upstairs in front of the computer. "No."
"What about the Japanese restaurant?"
"No."
"Seriously?"
"Yeah, no. Not this time."
Quiet for a moment.
"I don't want Italian."
"Neither do I."
"Chinese?"
"No."
We were trying to figure out dinner, but I'd already made up my mind. There is an art to this in my house, to getting my way -- a game of careful serves and volleys. I would wait until all other reasonable options were exhausted, then make my smash play. In the meantime, I looked at the website, read the menu. I almost wanted to reach out and touch the screen, stroke my fingers across the phosphenes and static charge and lick them.
"No Indian, though?"
"No. No Indian."
I love Indian food, but I wasn't in the mood for Indian food. I knew what I wanted.
"Okay, what about burgers? Sandwiches?"
I made no response.
"Don't you need to get to that place in Highland?"
"We said no Italian."
"Yeah..."
It was the first seriously hot day of the year, maybe the second. Outside, the whole world smelled like cherry blossoms and living earth. I had the speakers on the computer turned down low and Tom Waits was singing "You Can Never Hold Back Spring." It was that kind of day, his voice like glue and sand, singing ugly about pretty things, but I barely heard the husk of his words. I had my own lyrics running: picnickin' and politickin', a pig in the potato patch. Funny names for serious business, all talking about barbecue.
"Come on, Jay! I'm hungry. Make a decision here."
I smiled to myself, maybe a little evilly. We've been married almost six years, Laura and I. I'm just now starting to figure some shit out.
"Barbecue," I yelled down the stairs. "We're gonna go get some barbecue."
Jim 'N Nick's Bar-B-Q opened last fall in the Southlands development on the outskirts of Aurora. In the restaurant's office, the managers still count the days -- two hundred and ninety-some. They still look at it like just getting by, one day at a time.
One really busy day at a time. Laura was cursing when we pulled in. Not into the parking lot, because that was full. We couldn't even park along one of the twisting access roads, because those were full, too. We ended up darting into a special holding area for people waiting on takeout or catering orders, rolling the car up against a cement parking block that sported a sign with a picture of a cowboy riding a bucking pig.
"That would make an excellent tattoo," I said, pointing at the sign.
"That would not make an excellent tattoo."
"I could get it on my shoulder. Totally badass."
"Run inside and see if there's a wait," she replied.
There was a wait. An hour, hour and a half. People were stacked up in the lobby, in the bar, along the sidewalk out front. The noise level was extraordinary. The smell of the place -- the scents of hungry, overheated diners, hickory smoke and char, laboring air conditioners and hundreds of pigs being made into barbecue on the premises -- followed me back to the car.
"There's a wait," I told Laura.
"Of course there is. What do we do now?"
Jim 'N Nick's is a chain. Sorta. Down south, in Alabama, Tennessee, parts of Georgia, it's known as a family business that just happens to have a lot of addresses. Jim and Nick are real guys: Jim and Nick Pihakis, father and son, who ran the business together until Jim died not long ago. Nick is now in charge, and he's been overseeing the expansion into other barbecue-loving parts of America. A Jim 'N Nick's opened on Hilton Head recently. We got ours at the insistence of one of the company's investors who has a house in Colorado and wanted some barbecue very, very badly. The local owner is Todd Koone, who came to Colorado by way of Birmingham. The local GM is Lisa Quinn, who had no idea what barbecue was before the company took her on a tour of the South -- and she discovered sweet tea and fried green tomatoes and real, honest, long-smoked barbecue along the way.
"I thought fried green tomatoes were a movie," Quinn told me one day. "I had no idea. And then I tasted one, and I was like, 'Why have you been hiding this from us?'"
An instant convert, which is the way these things usually happen.
In the car, I pointed to the side of the building. "Pull over there," I told Laura.
"Where?"
"Over there, behind that truck."
"Why?"
I grinned. "Drive-thru."
Barbecue is meant to be eaten on the screen porch, in the back yard, among friends and family. Jim 'N Nick's makes that easy with a double-line kitchen and a drive-thru for carryout business. Finding a barbecue restaurant with a drive-thru is like finding an actual four-leaf clover or a hooker with an actual heart of gold.
Laura did a nice, low-speed hook around a high curb and slid the car into place.
"Do you know what you want?" she asked.
"Everything."
"Come on, Jay."
"Worry about yourself. I know what I want."
I'd been to Jim 'N Nick's before, on slower days, more placid evenings. Inside, it's like any other small chain restaurant aiming for a certain look and achieving a kind of cultural-theme-park feel instead. The plank walls are reminiscent of backwoods barbecue joints, the black-and-white photographs and simple decor an homage to the family cook shacks and rattletrap house restaurants where Southern cuisine developed.
Not too long ago, I met a cook -- a lifer, like I'd once been. We got to talking about food and kitchens (of course) and, before long, the conversation came around to barbecue. He'd been in Kansas City and said that there, the locals all knew to go to one place for pulled pork, another for cornbread, another for ribs. No one who knew anything went to the same place for everything. "Great barbecue?" he said. "No. It's great something here, something else from somewhere else."
I nodded, understanding perfectly.
"Great barbecue is where you get it. It's a big black woman being mean to you," he said. Not exactly how I would have put it, but I got his point: Barbecue is an experience, not a menu item.
This Jim 'N Nick's has a bunch of Aurora teenagers being really nice to you. And while that's an experience, too, it's not the same sort of experience. It smacks of suburban illegitimacy, of a history just seven months deep. Whenever you try to take a food away from where it was born, you lose levels of authenticity with every mile, and Aurora is a long way from Alabama. But the first time I went to Jim 'N Nick's, I drove up just as the house was taking a delivery of hickory wood for the smokers. Over the months that I've been coming back, I've watched the lip of the red-brick chimney that stretches up above the roof grow blacker and blacker from soot and greasy pig smoke. Those smoke stains, those stacked cords of dried hickory -- they give me some comfort. Even if not everything looks right or feels right, it's being done right.
And what's more, it tastes right. The mayonnaise in the coleslaw isn't Hellman's. It's not some sickly thin generic from one of the big supply companies that has to come in a bottle labeled FOOD just to differentiate it from the jug of HAND SOAP. Jim 'N Nick's goes out of its way to get Duke's mayonnaise -- well known to Southerners, virtually unknown anywhere else.
There are no freezers in the building. Nothing comes out of a can or a box, and everything is made fresh, even at the bar. The sweet tea is created by hand: an eye-dropper full of tea squirted over a five-pound bag of sugar. Some of the recipes used in the kitchen -- for the pies, the collard greens -- go back to the early 1900s. The meats get no fewer than nine hours in the smoker, and you can smell it when one of them is cracked and unloaded -- an aroma as timeless as hunger, sweet as spring, heavy as hell.
At the drive-thru, Laura and I put in our order. For me, a two-meat platter -- pulled pork and brisket -- with baked apples and mashed potatoes; a half-rack of spare ribs; one baked potato with butter, sour cream, cheese and bacon, another with butter, sour cream, cheese, bacon and a quarter-pound of end-cut barbecued pork shoulder piled on top; some corn muffins baked with cheese inside; a slice of pecan pie; a small Coke.
Laura got a chicken sandwich.
"No one should be spending seventy dollars on barbecue, Jay," she said. "Not from a drive-thru."
"No one who's serious about barbecue should be spending less than seventy dollars," I insisted. "Look, I'm going to eat some barbecue. When I'm full, I'll stop and put the leftovers in the fridge. And then, when I wake up in the middle of the night, you know what I'm going to have? A whole bunch of leftover barbecue in the fridge. Do you have any idea what a comforting feeling that is?"
She looked at me crossly. "No."
At the pickup window, the guy working the register looked like he was about to cry. Laura asked him how his night was going. He laughed forlornly. "It's so busy..." he said.
"But that's good, right?"
He handed our bags of takeout through the window. "Not always."
Nick Pihakis comes to the restaurant a lot. His job is to show a bunch of Mountain West employees what Southern hospitality really means. So he shakes a lot of hands. He looks people in the eye when they speak. "Every person he talks to is the most important person in the world," Quinn explained to me when I called her. "It's all about people."
At home, we pulled out our barbecue and paper plates and plastic silverware. It was still warm, and we would have eaten outside, on the porch, but the cops outside the bar across the street were frog-marching drunks out to waiting cruisers, and the lights and sirens were distracting.
Laura's chicken was so good that we threw out the bread and ate with our fingers -- picking big pieces of smoked and mopped white meat off the plate and dipping them into a side of Jim 'N Nick's distinctly Southern sweet-hot sauce. The mashed potatoes were too salty, but the bakers were massive and exactly as tasty as you'd imagine huge potatoes heaped with pig products would be. The cheesy corn muffins were addictive, and I ate them all before Laura could get one. The baked apples (cubed and suspended in syrup like the guts of a perfect apple pie with no crust) made me want to find whoever's mama was responsible for the recipe and kiss her on the cheek.
Normally, Jim 'N Nick's pulled pork is excellent. On this night, it was awful -- poorly cut, fatty, taken too quickly from out of the smokers -- but at least it reassured me that human beings were doing the cooking rather than sealed, zero-emission smokers with their temperature and air flow controlled by computers, the cooking times charted on a line graph by weight. The danger of working from scratch is that sometimes, someone is going to make a mistake. But I don't want consistent robot barbecue. I want the real thing. I've been to Jim 'N Nick's about a half-dozen times since it opened, have eaten in and taken out. This was the first time the pork wasn't great -- wasn't deeply redolent of smoke, soft but studded with crisp little burnt edges. And I can forgive that. Once.
When we'd eaten enough, we packed up the leftovers and stuck them in the fridge. Hours later, I woke to darkness in a quiet house still exhaling spring's first heat. As softly as I could, I slid out of bed, padded down the stairs and retrieved the last of the apples, the untouched box of ribs (done perfectly, with a deep, purplish-pink smoke line running just a quarter-inch above the bone), and crumbled cold brisket over barely warmed mashed potatoes. I took my second feast out to the living room where I could watch The Osterman Weekend and eat alone -- a private celebration of seasons and sleeplessness, the comfort of cold ribs from the icebox on a hot night.
If Laura knew, she'd be pissed. Who eats a second dinner at four in the morning? she'd say. And what is it with you and Rutger Hauer movies? But we've been together a while now, like I said, and I kept the volume turned low. I'm finally starting to learn some things.
