Setting The Table

Episode 8

Barbeque Legacies in Los Angeles

Mona Holmes:

My name is Mona Holmes. I'm a reporter for Eater Los Angeles, and I live in Los Angeles. We grew up in Altadena, which is about 20 minutes outside of downtown Los Angeles. Whenever my family would have a party, my mother would send my father to go and pick up meat from South Central. This was an hours-long expedition, and this is before direction apps. This is before... the only way that we would be able to check traffic was through the radio. And if we got caught in it, you got caught in it, and that was that. But it was a great time to spend with my father because we got to pick up turkey and pork sausages from Southern food makers that have been doing it for decades. Those were the tastiest, most delicious sausages you've ever had, rather hot links, if I might correct myself.

Mona Holmes:

Some of them made them in house, some of them exported from Louisiana and right into our bellies. Those were the things that we always got whenever we'd have a gathering. But whenever I was with my father, we would make little pit stops all over Los Angeles, just picking up a little something to eat. We were gone for like two, three, four hours, so we couldn't wait until we got home. Of course, I wanted to go to McDonald's, but my dad said, "No, we're stopping at Woody's," "We're stopping at Phillips." So all of these places that have been around for a long time when I was this high, I've been trying for a long time and lucky enough to retry them as an adult, and they're still spectacular. I'm feeling really grateful that they're still around, number one, that they haven't been victims of gentrification yet, but they're still feeding people by the dozens.

Deb Freeman:

Welcome to Setting the Table, a podcast about Black cuisine and foodways. I'm Deb Freeman. I'm a writer that focuses on African American foodways and the impact those foodways have on how we cook and eat today.

Deb Freeman:

Los Angeles is a fascinating city. It's a sprawling metropolis, a sea of enclaves, one of the most multicultural cities in the world, but few of us will ever actually know Los Angeles unless we're from there. The second great migration brought around 700,000 African Americans to Los Angeles from the American South between the 1940s and the 1970s. You might recall from our first episode that the great migration was instrumental in spreading Black people and foodways throughout the country, and that includes barbecue.

Deb Freeman:

When I think of LA, I think of the diversity, the great weather, and of course the food. Every time I've gone, I've been able to sample cuisines in a way that I can't quite do in Virginia; from tacos to dumplings to sushi. Not to say that I can't eat that way here, but the sheer variety, and in some instances, the quality, just isn't the same. And the same can be said about barbecue. For this episode, I wanted to follow Black foodways to the West Coast and take a look at the legacy of Black barbecue culture in Los Angeles, which in recent years, has seen a resurgence. To learn more about barbecue in LA, I enlisted the help of Mona Holmes, an Angelino and food writer for Eater LA.

Mona Holmes:

I actually find the evolution of Los Angeles barbecue in its present form incredible. It's a hard place to be in to describe to anyone who doesn't live of here because Los Angeles, unfortunately, I feel like more than most other cities, has outsiders, people not born and raised from here, placing their expectations of LA food and barbecue with very specific and a very regional lens. But for those of us who live here, we don't do that. We don't get in the way of what's happening around us with a population that is 47% Latino, almost 10% Black, and 11% Asian. There's just a huge conflation of things coming in from everywhere, natives that have been here for centuries. We've also got Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Filipino, Cambodian, Brazilian, Mexican, Salvadorian, Guatemalan, and it's just a small segment of the type of cuisines that Los Angeles excels at.

Mona Holmes:

And all of the things that I mentioned do barbecue. It's pretty incredible to think about what we have because all of these flavors keep evolving and transported between communities and among communities and they continue to evolve. When most people talk about Los Angeles barbecue, I think that they are thinking of it from a Southern or Midwestern lens, and they overlook something that to me is very special. It's a big mashup of a lot of things in a city where we have maybe 30 days of rain a year, so we get to grill every day of the year if we wanted to. And when you're open to that, you're going to experience some things that are not New Orleans style southern barbecue or Texas barbecue or North Carolina or St. Louis. We're Los Angeles. We might have some people who are from those places doing those things, but if you're looking at the people who've lived here for generations and generations, or have family members that have lived here for a while, that you'll get some great grilled, smoked meat in just about every pocket of the city.

Deb Freeman:

Mona has spent her career thinking and writing about LA's dining scene, and she's proud of the multicultural breadth and nuance found in cuisines throughout the city. And as you heard in the intro to this episode, she grew up around LA's Black barbecue scene, making her the perfect person to guide us through the foodways that make up LA barbecue.

Mona Holmes:

Barbecue in Los Angeles has a couple of foodways. There is the long-standing element of vaquero culture, the horseman from Spain and Mexico, who in the 1700s, on horseback, roamed all of these lands long before white cowboys were even a part of the culture, weren't barely even a mention. They were already with the cattle, so barbecue became a part of their lives. They prepared cow quarters over a fire, they prepared tri-tip for when they were on horseback, roaming. And you can even trace the origins of California, Santa Maria-style of barbecue back to this, where it's seasoned meat over coals of red oak wood, and you can find it at places still throughout Southern California. And it's wonderful and delicious with a very unique way of barbecue pit. And then there's the few migrations that have put millions of Black families here in Southern California and just west. The second migration from 1940 to 1970, doubled the Black population in Los Angeles in less than a decade.

Mona Holmes:

These traditions that were happening in Texas and Louisiana were brought with them, and they're still here. They're still here with spots like Woody's Bar-B-Q, which has three locations throughout South LA. Then there's a newcomer named Bootsy's, who makes some of the best traditional barbecue you've ever had out of his backyard, along with smoked salmon, and even mixes it up a little bit by putting his incredible tri-tip on top of tortilla chips on Tuesday nights. He has managed to evolve it into something that is truly Southern California because he can't dismiss the fact that almost half of the people who live here are Latino. When you combine all of that, that's when you do find a uniqueness about Southern California.

Deb Freeman:

While driving around our recent trip to LA, one of the things I noticed were these barbecue smokers. They were in parking lots, on street corners, and being there, I started realizing there's a barbecue culture here, even if it doesn't look like what we're doing here in the South. I asked Mona to highlight some of the staples of Black barbecue places in LA, as well as some of the newer standout places.

Mona Holmes:

So let's start with Woody's. Woody Phillips started Woody's Bar-B-Q in the early 1970s. He was one of the folks that came from the South who came to work, like many Black folks, for the government, and saw that there was an open space, and missed his hometown barbecue, and opened up a space that became an iconic corner of Los Angeles on Slauson, deep in, back then, South-Central LA. And there he does the traditions. He actually has a wood-burning fire that he drips his hose on it... well used to, unfortunately, before he passed in 2020, early 2020, actually, and has been making this tradition continue for the last 50 years, and has passed it down to his family. You can find it all over the place.

Mona Holmes:

His cousin also operates another one called Phillips Barbecue on Crenshaw. And all you have to do is look for this pillow of white smoke coming from the top to be able to find him. I do believe that you can see it from about a mile away, where he is making, once again, very traditional Texas-style barbecue with the traditional sides, from beans to everything that you could possibly want. Then there's Shalamar Lane, who operates My Father's Barbeque, and she's the daughter of pitmasters from Texas and Alabama. And while she's young, she's carrying on this tradition that she got from her father and her uncles, and also making it interesting because barbecuing is typically seen as a guy thing. I call her a pitmistress because that's what she is. The men can be pitmasters, she is a pitmistress, and she's doing it incredibly well.

Mona Holmes:

So you can find all kinds of traditional barbecue throughout Southern California. Then you can also find something a little bit unique, like Smoke Queen BBQ, who operates out of Orange County. She makes her version of our regional barbecue. She draws from her Chinese American background to make it, and everyone loves it. She's only been in business for less than two years. But if you go to her, she's got this very slightly sweet, very smoky meat that she produces and everyone has taken to it. It's just some of the juiciest, most delicious meat. You can tell that there's a slight difference in it. Sure there's a slight traditionalness to it, but she tweaks it so that it winds up being a really wonderful introduction to her style of food.

Deb Freeman:

One LA barbecue spot that's part of the resurgence of Black barbecue is RibTown BBQ, located in the parking lot pawn shop in LA's Jefferson Park neighborhood. I spoke to RibTown's pitmaster.

Lonnie Edwards:

Lonnie Edwards, RibTown BBQ, Los Angeles, California.

Deb Freeman:

Lonnie and his family started RibTown BBQ with the goal of providing Los Angeles with delicious pit-smoked barbecue, and Lonnie has been barbecuing since he was 10 years old. I asked him who he learned barbecue from.

Lonnie Edwards:

Ah, my Auntie Punkin and my mama, Sarah, and my grandmother. But Punkin was the one that really lit my fire. If you ever see a picture on our website, it's a picture of her in the backyard, cooking on a little raggedy pit, and I was in sitting on the porch. Growing up in LA in the late sixties and early seventies, when you have more folks barbecuing, especially on the holidays. When I was a kid I loved to wake up on the holiday. You would smell all the charcoal pits going people 'cueing. So that was my experience coming up.

Lonnie Edwards:

Then seeing Punkin, she could just flat out just barbecue. I can remember, I was just eight years old just watching her. I wasn't playing, I wasn't with my cousins. I'm watching Punkin. So I became fascinated with it. Then when you were going to the barbecue places, you would see these guys, the Black men in there, sweating like hogs. I'm like, "What the hell is going on in there?" You could see the labor that they put into the meats and how tasted so good. I never put the two together until I got older, but that's what I remember. It was the work. It was the passion.

Deb Freeman:

As its name suggests, RibTown is all about the ribs, and Lonnie's specialty is his rib tips. And rib tips are something that's most associated with Black barbecue in Chicago. So if you don't know what a rib tip is, rib tips are the ends of the spare rib. It's knobby, it's full of cartilage, but man, if it is prepared properly, it is delicious. I'm not sure there's another cut that better exemplifies African American foodways, taking an ingredient that's a little tough to work with and turning it into something beautiful and delicious. But back to Lonnie. I asked him to share a little more about the early days of RibTown BBQ and how he got started.

Lonnie Edwards:

We put three names in a hat and my wife pulled RibTown. I said, "That's that's the name of it then," and that's how we named it. That's how we started. I don't know what name I picked. I don't remember what my son picked, but my wife said RibTown, and it came out the hat, and I said, "That's the name." That was when we started 2005, 2004. But I was coaching for a long time. That's my love, football. But barbecue is special. It's personal. It's who we are.

Lonnie Edwards:

And then I was working at the pawn shop and the boss lady fired me. She said, "You're fired, go run your barbecue place." But now you got to understand, the barbecue set-up is on her lot, so she wanted me to go, go do it. She said, "You won't leave." I knew the product was right, and I didn't know if it was ready for the next level. Then the boss lady said, "It's been ready." That's what she told the Los Angeles Times. She said, "He was ready. That's why I fired him. He didn't know it." So it was there, it was no time period. It was there. The trailer was there, cookers were there. We were ready to go. But it was me. She kicked me into high gear. I've never been so broke in my life.

Deb Freeman:

He's making light of the situation, but running a small business is no joke, especially a barbecue business.

Lonnie Edwards:

It's a struggle because of the economy and the meat and everything else. You get stuck with one supplier, and then your supply chain changes on you, you have to cook different. Because they changed my tips for a while, and I had to cook these tips different than the other tips, because once you learn one product, you know how to pull it, when to pull it. That's the challenge. Barbecue, it's art. It's no science about it. There just ain't no formula, it's going to do the same... No, every day is different.

Deb Freeman:

Even through the struggles, for Lonnie, it's all about the art of barbecue. And he takes his art very seriously in pursuing his vision of Southern barbecue.

Lonnie Edwards:

My roots are Texas. All my people are Texas. My mother, my father, my cousins, all them, they're there. But I don't claim that flag everybody does nowadays, Texas barbecue. And a lot of people was like, "If anyone can claim it, it's you, but you don't do it." No I'm barbecue. I don't cook a state. I barbecue.

Lonnie Edwards:

I had a customer. He called me back the other day and he said he wanted it more smokey. I said, yeah, I know what you want. I said, I purposely don't over-smoke my meat, because I want you to taste the meat. I want you to taste the seasoning. I want you to taste what we put into it. And he looked at me like nobody's ever told him that. I said, "Yeah, you want to taste the smoke." I said, "Nah, I want you to taste everything else."

Lonnie Edwards:

The Southern style, what Southern folks do? They believe in their seasons. They believe in their salts, their peppers. He just don't meat on there, "Oh I cook with oak." That ain't going to make it good, just necessarily. You got to add some flavors. You got to add some levels to it. You know? And I hear people tell me, "Well the Texans don't have a lot of flavors, just salt and pepper." That's what they want to do? Fine. The canvas is bigger than salt and pepper.

Lonnie Edwards:

And you got to think about ancestry. Our people got the worst piece of meat. Threw it out the back of the door and said, "Cook it." So we had to cook it. We had to make it flavorable. So that's where the Southern roots come in. And that's how I do it. We season the rib tips, they sit a day, at least 24 hours, before we put them on the pit. I'll rub them, and then we'll put them back in the cooler and they'll sit 24 hours, and then they get cooked. And that's how we do it.

Lonnie Edwards:

It's always a challenge. My thing is once I cook the meat, I don't even want to sell it. I let my wife and them do that. My fun is actually the prep and the cook. They don't let me do the trailer. They say I don't know what I'm doing in there. I don't. I go in there, just mess up. I don't know what I'm doing there. They say, "Go in the back, the pits." But the process is what I love. The process is me. It's my people. That's what I love.

Deb Freeman:

In the Los Angeles food media, Lonnie is seen as a rising star and the leader in the resurgence of Black, Southern-style barbecue. But none of that seems to matter to Lonnie. He just wants to barbecue.

Lonnie Edwards:

I think nowadays, barbecue is so commercial. And so in history. They try to make it like the Silicon valley. It's not. All these rules. You can't bite the meat unless you're having a bite mark. And I told a guy once, I said, "Where did that come from?" And I broke him down the history. I said, "Do you know why black people like their meat falling off the bone?"

Lonnie Edwards:

"Well, no."

Lonnie Edwards:

I said, "Well, when you got the scraps thrown out the back of the door and it was a piece of crap, and nobody could chew it. Nobody knew how to cook it. And most of them didn't have teeth in their head. They had to cook it that way so they could eat it."

Lonnie Edwards:

"I never knew that. Learned something." So when people say, "Why you don't do contests?" I say, "I don't believe in it. It's too subjective."

Lonnie Edwards:

And look, if you look at barbecue on the internet and all that, they're trying to make it look so perfect. I'm like, "That ain't the barbecue I grew up with." Oh, you come get our ribs sometime. Ain't nothing perfect about them. I don't know how to cut a slab of rib for nothing in the world. My nephew and them cut better ribs than me. I'm strictly about that pit. And I don't call myself a pitmaster. I don't do titles. I'm just... I'm a barbecue guy. I don't like titles. People say, "Oh, you're the pitmaster."

Lonnie Edwards:

"No, no, no, no, no, no."

Lonnie Edwards:

People come, "Oh, you're the chef."

Lonnie Edwards:

"No, no, no, no. I'm just the barbecue guy." I don't do those titles. I keep it very humble about what I do because it's very personal to me, because I watch my aunt and I watch them old timers.

Lonnie Edwards:

I tell people, "You know what a real pit is? You dig it in the ground. You dig it in the ground, you cook that wood down and you put your grate over and you cook it over those wood." I said, "A real pit is in the ground." And I think my Auntie Punkin, when she used to cook barbecue, unbelievable, that lady took maybe a 22-inch diameter, little raggedy pit, and she would cook eight slabs. Eight slabs.

Lonnie Edwards:

That's what stays in my head. All this commercial, perfect rib and this and that is fine for them. But for me, no. It doesn't speak to who I am. And some days I'm hit and miss too. Some days the barbecue, I'm like, "Oh yeah. It's where it needs to be." And some days I'm like, "Eh, it's okay." But I have a very, very high standard for it. When I'm out there cooking, my wife's father used to dig pits to barbecue in Louisiana. I watched Punkin and them cook. I watched my grandmother and them cook. So when I'm cooking, I'm always thinking of us, what we went through, why we did it. I think of why we had to cook a piece of cheap pork. I think of that stuff. And I just try to stick to it.

Deb Freeman:

Through his work at RibTown, Lonnie is a part of a legacy of Black barbecue that can be traced back to the second great migration. And I asked him to reflect on the history of Black barbecue in LA.

Lonnie Edwards:

The history of LA Black barbecue was crazy. They're all gone. It's only Phillips and Woody's, but Phillips used to be Leo's Bar B Que. Mr. Leo's gone too. That's where Phillips is now. There was a couple places on the east side of LA. I wouldn't know the names to this day if you asked me. But I know we would get rib tips there. Then there was another one, Mr. Jim. "You need no teeth to eat my beef." That was his slogan. And he's gone. There's a couple other JBs down in Gardena. They're gone. And I'm on a parking lot of a pawn shop with a trailer and my pits. And everybody's like, "When you going to get your brick and mortar?" I said, "Don't want it. I want to look country just like it is."

Deb Freeman:

And while many of the old places have closed, Lonnie is also part of a group of Black pitmasters bringing Southern barbecue back to LA. And I wanted to know why he thinks this recent resurgence has come about.

Lonnie Edwards:

Social media. I think it's the easiest way we can get our name out there without having a big budget and advertising agency and a big restaurant. Social media drives it now. All the social media stuff I do, I don't do it. The boys do it. They have the accounts. I tell them what we thinking this week and how we're running. And they take off with it. LA right now is driven by social media, and the creativity of all these guys. I love it. I love all these guys. All they got moves, they got heritage. They got all... They got Bootsy's BBQ. They got Ribs in LA. I love the creativity of it all. I don't feel threatened by nobody. It's enough out there for everybody. And it's just a beautiful thing right now. Because social media is just driving it.

Deb Freeman:

Los Angeles is a place that doesn't often come to mind in the conversation of barbecue, but it's just as much a part of those foodways as St. Louis, Chicago, Texas, and Virginia. It's a nexus of many cultures and foodways interacting with each other. And I'm quite confident that I'll never get full handle on everything that city can offer, but that's okay because that means there's always something new to discover. And that gives me yet another reason to visit.

Mona Holmes:

What I hope for people to bring to Los Angeles when they are seeking out barbecue is to be open to things and to not expect this to taste like home anymore, because this isn't the South. This is Los Angeles, and with it comes a whole set of politics and culture and backgrounds that you'll never really, truly be able to find out in a weekend. Because you just might find something incredible that might be comparable to the things that you're used to or that you grew up on. Whether that is Thai barbecue, Bootsy's BBQ, who I mentioned earlier, or something a little bit more traditional, like going to Phillips Barbecue where there's a tiny sit down area. We just don't really roll like that. Now mind you, some of those places are absolutely incredible, and we do have them, but be open and you'll have a good time with good weather. And you can't go wrong.

Mona Holmes:

Now having said all of that, one of my best experiences last year when we were researching this entire project for barbecue in Los Angeles, I went to Bootsy's BBQ and I got a whole platter of everything. Chicken, tri-tips, baby backs. I mean, you name it. And it was outstanding, but the standout was his salmon. It was cooked delicately, perfectly, slowly over his gigantic red smoker. I'm a huge fan of perfectly cooked salmon, and this was. This was something that exceeded dishes that I had tasted in high-end restaurants. So had I been only focused on the traditional stuff, I would've completely missed out on this one thing that is incredibly special that I'll always order or every time I go back to it. And that to me encapsulates what is special about Los Angeles for food, but especially barbecue. Just be open and you'll be wowed.

Deb Freeman:

This has been Setting the Table. I'd like to thank my guests, Mona Holmes and Lonnie Edwards. Follow Mona's work at Eater LA and follow her food adventures on Instagram @monaeats. You can find Lonnie at RibTown BBQ by checking out his website at ribtownbarbecue.com and follow him on Instagram @ribtownbbq.

Deb Freeman:

Setting the Table is part of Whetstone Radio Collective. Thank you to the Setting the Table team, producer Marvin Yueh, audio editor Evan Linsey, researcher Haven Ogbaselase, and intern Kai Stone. I'd also like to thank Whetstone founder, Stephen Satterfield, Whetstone Radio Collective Head of Podcast, Celine Glasier, sound engineer Max Kotelchuck, associate producer Quentin Lebeau, production assistant Amalissa Uytingco, and sound intern Simon Lavender. Cover art created by Whetstone art director Alexandra Bowman. Our theme music is Who's Back in Town by Sammy Miller and the Congregation. You can learn more about this podcast at Whetstoneradio.com, on Instagram and Twitter at @Whetstoneradio, and subscribe to our YouTube channel Whetstone Radio Collective for more podcast video content. You can learn more about all things happening at Whetstone at whetstonemagazine.com. Until next time, I'm Deb Freeman.