Why is Austin’s famed Franklin BBQ always running out of BBQ? Perhaps for a reason related to why I made terrible stir-fry in college.
When I say I made stir-fry, I was giving myself far too much credit. It was awful. Inedible. I had a wok and a stove and a wooden spatula with which to stir onions and bean sprouts and green peppers in scalding oil. I also added beef to the mix. And that was the problem.
It’s not that the beef was off, though it was certainly off-putting. I knew nothing about different cuts of meat. And so with the ignorance of which only a graduate student is capable, I bought the cheapest beef the supermarket had: stew meat. I stir-fried it up and couldn’t comprehend why I might just as well have been chewing saddle-leather.
Thus, I finally learned one of the fundamental facts of the kitchen. A cheap cut of meat is cheap for a reason. The reason usually being it is tough enough to dull your knife.
Cooked properly, tough cuts are delicious. Cheap meat has to be rendered tender somehow and that process often imparts a flavor of its own. One can do it through marination or by cooking it at a low heat for a long time, otherwise known as “low and slow.” It can be a long-simmering pot of stew (the supermarket didn’t label what I was eating as “stew meat” for no reason) or roasting over a flame so low it‘s more smoke than fire.
This latter is the fundamental principle of great barbecue, which is a separate, if related, concept from grilling. Barbecue at its best entails cooking over tepid temperatures (a little over 200 degrees) for as long as a day or more.
Which brings us to Franklin Barbecue in Austin, Texas, and their inability to provide smoked meats for everyone who lines up in hopes of getting some. Franklin is open for lunch Tuesdays through Sundays. They begin serving food at 11 a.m. and close up shop when they‘ve run out, typically between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m.
It’s not quite like the cheese shop in the Monty Python sketch. At least they have meat for most of the lunch hours. But running out is part of the appeal — and not just because of the thrill of getting a scarcity. Running out is an indicator that a barbecue restaurant is making real barbecue the right way, with no shortcuts.
Or maybe not. It’s hard to master the pit, after all, but easy to declare that you’ve run out of brisket. Declaring oneself “out of food” is the simplest way for the wannabes to mimic the joints with hard-to-copy barbecue.
And that can leave some excellent barbecue places a little defensive about running out of food.
Take Cattleack Barbecue in Dallas, Texas, which practices an even more radical scarcity than Franklin. It is only open from 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays and the first Saturday of every month.
With such a narrow window of availability, one would think Cattleack would have no trouble providing tasty smoked meat to those who line up for hours to be among the fortunate who get served. And yet they, too, run out of food.
Cattleack’s official explanation is that proper “barbecue takes 10 to 40 hours” to make, what with “prep, cooking and resting times.” It’s impossible to grab extra and throw it on the grill once the brisket begins to run out.
They claim to do a “pretty darn good job” anticipating how much barbecue they will need on a given Thursday or Friday and insist they don’t run out on purpose: Why “would we want to run out?” Cattleack protests on their website. “It makes no sense.”
They said it, not me.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
