Johnny Fugitt

Linkdown: 12/24/14

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– Robert Moss goes deep on chicken mull, “the rarest stew in barbecue”

– To sauce or not to sauce: well that just depends on whatcha like

– Mission BBQ in Virginia Beach is the most patriotic bbq joint in America (h/t reader Robert Evans)

– Crown Town Living checks out The Improper Pig

– “Denver’s barbecue is atrocious” (via)

– Grant from Marie, Let’s Eat! finished up his NC/SC circumnavigation reviews last week, but checked out Praise the Lard BBQ in Buford, GA recently

– Johnny Fugitt of Barbecue Rankings is interviewed by the salad restaurant Chop’t after his 365 joints in 365 days sojourn ended

– ICYMI, here’s our holiday 2015 gift guide we posted last week for your (extremely) last minute gift ideas

Linkdown: 10/1/14

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– NC barbecue guru Bob Garner has a new book out that *gasp* isn’t completely about barbecue

The 187-page book does mention the state’s signature varieties of smoked meat and sauce, but it also explores other North Carolina food traditions, including fish stew, Ocracoke fig cake, banana pudding, collards and even Moravian chicken pie. The book is part cookbook, part essay collection, part dining guide.

– TMBBQ interview with friend of the blog Barbecue Rankings

– So there’s this:

– BBQ Jew with a short write up on The Great NC BBQ Map

– Q 4 Fun interviews a board member of the NC BBQ Association

What makes you different than the other associations, societies and networks?
We train our judges to recognize and appreciate NC-style BBQ. Teams will be judged on their ability to produce traditional NC-style BBQ. I don’t think other sanctioning bodies concentrate on regional BBQ styles. Furthermore, we not only sanction competitions, but hold cooking classing and are beginning to work on projects that will promote NC BBQ to the general public. We don’t see the other bodies as competitors. We see them as partners and can hopefully jointly sanction some events as with this year’s comp in Washington with the NC Pork Council.

– Arrogant Swine failed their construction inspection, but trudges on anyways; the blog post does have this great photo

– The Whole Hog Barbecue Championship is this weekend

– Diva Q visited Barbecue Bros fave Ed Mitchell’s Que (our 5 hog review) earlier this week

Linkdown: 7/30/14

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– John T. Edge and Joe Kwon (cellist for The Avett Brothers and also raised in High Point like the Barbecue Bros), take in 15 of the Korean and Korean-inspired restaurants in northern Atlanta, including Heirloom Market Bar-B-Que (who we reviewed earlier this week)

– Texas BBQ Posse: More evidence that Lockhart has lost its barbecue magic

– The Elements of Barbecue Sauce has this little tidbit from Chip Stamey, which is similar to my feelings on the matter:

“Everyone makes a big deal about ketchup,” he says “But it’s really a mild thing. [Our sauce has] black pepper, red pepper, a little bit of sugar, and that’s it.”

– Ugh, not another one of these lists again, compiled according to some random set of arbitrary criteria. In this case it is:

To determine which states are the most barbecue crazed in America we used five sets of data…

  1. Barbecue restaurants per capita (source: Yellow Pages)
  2. Facebook interest in barbecue (source: Facebook)
  3. Percentage of restaurants that are barbecue (source: Yellow Pages)
  4. Google searches for “barbecue” (source: Google Trends)
  5. Barbecue accessory stores and charcoal producers (Yellow Pages)

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– Johnny Fugitt (aka barbecuerankings) gets interviewed by Philly.com

Nationally, “there are also a number of famous or historic places that I wasn’t impressed with, so they’ll be left off the list. I’m going to make plenty of people mad!’ he said.

– Well this was a nice surprise:

– Did you know? Via The Great NC BBQ Map, who had their launch party this past Sunday. We’ll have some photos from the event on Friday

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– Speaking of which, a sneak peek of the map which has begun shipping to Kickstarter backers

Barbecue Rankings

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How would you like to pack your bags and spend the next half-year doing nothing but traveling around the U.S., stopping at every barbecue restaurant from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine? At each ‘cue shack, the owner would skip forth from the kitchen bearing a platter of the house specialties for your delectation. As the months pass, the numbers grow. Before long, you will have eaten at several hundred barbecue restaurants. You can taste the individual ingredients in the sauce. Your tongue can actually tell how many hours a rib has been in the smoker. If the potato salad isn’t perfect, you lean to the left and surrender it to a silver spittoon engraved “Boss.”

This is the (somewhat exaggerated) reality for Johnny Fugitt, a St. Louisan who sold his house and began the next phase of his life as a barbecue nomad.

Since last October, Johnny Fugitt has definitely had my dream job: travel across America, try all of the barbecue, and rank the restaurants.

(h/t)

Barbecue Rankings