04.03.07

Smoky And The Bandit

Posted in BBQ, Brooklyn, Caribbean, On The Open Road at 3:42 pm by Administrator

It was midnight in Austin, Texas. My friend Gary – Brooklynite, sushi eating champion – and I were in the midst of a cross-country road trip. We just spent a lovely evening eating queso and drinking margaritas with some hospitable UT kids. But we had no place to crash because, contrary to my assumption that all of Texas is full of wide open spaces, these grad students were packed in like sardines. We may as well have been back in New York. There wasn’t even any floor space to spare.

(That’s my cousin’s husband’s little sister on the right modeling some queso with her friends. Talk about southern hospitality, we were already approaching a full 6 degrees of separation and she treated us like family.)

But we were in an open road state of mind, and we were happy to take on the driving challenge. “You think we can make it to White Sands, New Mexico by morning?” Gary asked one of our gracious hosts. “Sure, and you’ll pass through the darkest place in America on the way. You’ll see all the stars,” she replied in a slow, southern drawl as we looked at the Road Master together. “You gotta go through a shit ton a Texas first though,” were her only words of caution.

So off we went into the muggy Texas night. Gary drove first because he hadn’t had a margarita in a couple hours. I was used to driving my cab very late at night, so I’d take over in a few hours. I folded my arms and pulled my hat low over my eyes like I was Austin Millbarge and Gary was Emmett Fitz-Hume.

Very soon thereafter I was awoken not because we were surrounded by Mujadhadeen, but because Gary was howling with terror as we whizzed by a deer standing on the shoulder. Gary’s eyes were wild with fear, mostly because he loved his 2003 Hyundai like a son. I begged him to slow down, but even at 50 mph, deer would appear from out of nowhere, and we’d miss them by pure luck. When we saw the mangled carcass of a buck that looked as though it’d been creamed by a tractor trailer, we figured our chances of hitting something had risen to about 50/50.

In the first town we came across, we asked the gas station attendant why there were so many deer out. “This here is Hill Country you boys are in. We got a lotta deer in these parts,” he informed us. Why none of our hosts in Austin had warned us, we didn’t understand. They must not have known what dangers lurked to the west. “Well, how fast can you go?” I asked. “You can go as fast as you want. But I keep it to 40 . . . and that’s still pushing your luck,” he grinned.

Realizing we couldn’t get anywhere in Texas going 40 mph, we found a cheap motel for the rest of the night. We were both deflated. I knew Gary was in a weird place, because he was speaking fondly of the Gowanus Expressway as I fell asleep. I dreamt of queso and margaritas and venison jerky.

We awoke to discover that we were in a town called Llano. But even before we found out where we were, we were overwhelmed with the divine scent of barbeque. As we wandered out into the street like a couple a hobos, we felt as though we’d happened upon some sort of Garden of Eden (we actually weren’t far from Eden, Texas).

(Here I am later in the day in Eden, Texas)

The entire, tiny town was engulfed in smoke from multiple barbeque pits and smoke houses lining the main street. The locals weren’t batting an eyelash. We thought that this must just be the way it is in Texas all the time. We were wrong, but we knew there was nothing like Llano back in New York.

It turns out, we were wrong about that too. Recently, I was driving a plucky family of adventurous eaters through Brooklyn when we got caught in a traffic jam on Nostrand Avenue approaching Flatbush. We were overwhelmed by a familiar smoky scent. The whole street was filled with smoke, and the locals didn’t seem at all concerned.

I spotted the source of the smoke, pulled the cab over in a no parking zone in front of a church, and ran across the street to see what was cooking. “Jerk chicken, Guyana style . . . you know, the place where Jim Jones killed all those people,” the sweaty cook standing over the steel barrel full of chicken and charcoal on the sidewalk told me.

(It struck me as kind of sad that nearly 30 years after the kool-aid, this native son of Guyana still felt he had to invoke Jim Jones’ name to explain where he was from)

(The jerk chicken was to die for)

Before I saw what was on the grill, I hadn’t the audacity to dream I’d found Texas brisket or beef ribs on the streets of Brooklyn. But once I tasted that jerk chicken, it seemed to me that Shaborn Juice Bar must be the Brooklyn equivalent of Llano. That divine scent and that ubiquitous smoke brought me back to the heart of Texas. And the jerk chicken, tangy and spicy and custom drenched in jerk sauce, was as flavorful as any barbeque I had back in the lone star, though in a totally different way. We devoured it all right there amidst the smoke filling the air on Nostrand Avenue. It tasted as though we’d found the Garden of Eden.

(Usually we don’t try anything I haven’t had a million times before on the tour, but that day it was clear that whatever came out of that smoke would be delicious)

Shaborn Juice Bar, Nostrand Ave And Glenwood Rd (near Flatbush Ave), Flatlands Brooklyn

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