When you’re as obsessive about food as I am, it’s tempting to eat your way to clarity. Pizza crusts exist in constellations, hamburgers form concluding paragraphs, and frozen yogurt opens a window into economic impulses. Overwriting ensues.

BBQ is far from exempt when it comes to the feedback loop between thought and appetite. After reaching a certain threshold of barbecue consumption, my understanding of America’s greatest food began to crystallize around technique and regional style. Academic notions of authenticity still haunt my neurotic taste buds whenever I hear about a barbecue joint for the first time, point-for-point comparison permeating my first meal at any smokehouse – especially those in New York. The enjoyment of pulled pork takes a back seat to memories of Lexington. Brisket never tastes as good as it does Luling. I can find pages of Chowhound threads testifying to the need for a barbecue rubric, debates that smolder under a shared desire for a good fight over what puts the quality in Q.

I try to keep in mind that most of this feedback is after the fact. The variables of authenticity – wood, smoke, pit, sauce and everything else that goes into the formal equations of good BBQ – were unknowns when I was a hungry college student looking to try the next tasty pork rib. This isn’t to say I was without prejudice, but the first bite of a rib or barbecue sandwich and how it made me feel about life that day was enough to inform my judgment. It still should, and every once in a while it still does.

Case in point: the barbecue at Calvin’s Royal Rib House, an thirty-year-old institution of higher burning in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Fuck a flavor rubric; if BBQ were judged solely on sentiment, I wouldn’t even have to eat the food here to know it’s the genuine artifact. Royal Ribs opens its door at 11:30 a.m. every Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Lines of rib hungry customers, almost entirely composed of middle aged Bed-Stuy locals, stream out that door until the house is out of food – no closing time, just the limits of supply an earned sense of confidence.

Any BBQ fiend will tell you that a place that opens three days a week deserves your business at least once. If it also happens to be a hole-in-the-wall takeout counter without enough ventilation to dry the sweat on your brow or prevent the sting of smoke in your eyes as you wait to place your order, a place where every other customer is greeted with the surname of “Brother” and women regularly walk out the door with eighty dollars’ worth of styrofoam-bounded sustenance stacked in white shopping bags, then you’d better have a damn good reason for eating pork anywhere else this weekend.

Of course, structure alone isn’t enough to guarantee satisfaction. The Royal Rib House scores highly on all predictive points, but its real worth – as it should be – lies in that first bite of pork ribs: charred, crispy, and tender in all the right ways. One bite is all it takes to cut through the fog of barbecue pedigrees. As spicy-sweet sauce drips from my fingers and bay leaves fall off the rack, I’m too happy to ponder the fact that these ribs aren’t particularly smoky or wonder about the sight of wood/gas hybrid rotisseries in the kitchen. I don’t fixate on the composition of the meat or ask myself questions about seasoning and sauce. I don’t care about anything but eating more ribs.

I don’t care, that is, until I take my first bite of Royal Ribs’ chopped pork. I can’t help but notice that its vinegar-soaked flavor and half-mashed consistency is entirely out of place – it tastes like pork that migrated from North Carolina, not Harlem. I’m much busier noticing, however, just how impossible it is for me to put down my fork so I can get a head start on the next rib. Southern roots be damned: All I know at this point is that I’m hungry, I’m in Brooklyn, and I have found my new go-to joint for New York barbecue.

Royal Ribs serves other forms of soul food, but aside from a wonderfully crusty and sweet cornbread and some solid fried chicken, the rest of the menu is more or less irrelevant. As if making a final testament to the classic signs of a real smokehouse, the side dishes here are run-of-the-mill enough that you’d be better off saving that money (and stomach space) for more ribs – and maybe a loaf of white bread. While you’re at it, forget about placing the Royal Rib House in a greater context of barbecue mythology, too. I certainly have, and BBQ in New York has never been clearer.

Calvin’s Royal Rib House
(Thurs-Sat)
303 Halsey St.
Brooklyn, NY 11216
718.453.9284

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Brooklyn, New York.