I watched his right-hand man, Derrick McClinton, tame a flame with a garden hose. Kennebrew’s aquarium smoker is 8 feet wide and 4 feet deep, enclosed on four sides with tempered glass and stainless steel, with a roof that slopes to a metal chimney that punches 42 feet up, through the ceiling and extending well above the building. It is intoxicating in small doses, overpowering within minutes, and after a while you don’t even smell it anymore. Once inside, the smoke that envelops you is thick, hot, and meaty. Fifty feet from the front entrance, woodsmoke tinged with some unknowable savory seasoning takes hold in the back of your nose. It’s wedged into a strip mall in Homewood, Illinois, a suburb just beyond Chicago’s city limits in the shadow of one of the country’s largest rock quarries.īefore you see the interior of Uncle John’s Bar-B-Que, you smell it. On a Friday last fall, hours before his restaurant began its weekend rush, I returned to Kennebrew’s restaurant, Uncle John’s Bar-B-Que-a place I’ve frequented for the last five years. People around here know it as a “tip-link combo,” and like the best barbecue, it finds a dozen ways to stay with you, physically and psychically, leaving evidence to discover hours and days later: dots of red sauce splattered on your T-shirt, a sliver of pork stuck between teeth, woodsmoke emanating from your pores despite a thorough scrubbing. It is a singular, specific combination of textures and flavors, proteins and carbs. Chopped into matchbox-size pieces, these tips are paired with bulbous foot-long lengths of hot link sausages, nestled over a bed of French fries, drenched with a viscous tomato-based sauce, and topped with two slices of Wonder Bread. Pork rib tips, the knobby end of the spare rib, are the favored meat.
When cooked right, South Side style is downright wondrous. But no one asks about barbecue, and it’s my favorite of our city’s culinary contributions. I spent a decade as a food writer at the Chicago Tribune, and not a week goes by I don’t receive an email asking for the best deep-dish pizza or Italian beef in town. I’d argue that South Side barbecue is integral to the Chicago experience, yet it seems half of the city’s residents have never sampled, much less heard of, this kind of barbecue. Garry Kennebrew tends to slabs of pork ribs in his aquarium smoker.
They cook it indoors in smoke-choked kitchens. The restaurants in Chicago still cooking in this manner use a cut many butchers throw away. Few barbecue cognoscenti outside Illinois would consider it top-tier. But the style of Chicago’s South Side remains a curious footnote in the American barbecue canon. Beef brisket is the state-sanctioned protein of Texas pork shoulder reigns in the Carolinas baby back ribs get smoked and sauced from Kansas City to Memphis. The primary method of controlling the heat produced by the fire is spraying with a garden hose.Įvery region lucky to have its own barbecue style operates with its own conventions and peculiarities. These smokers, which can cost more than $10,000, employ no dials, knobs, or even an onboard thermometer they’re simple boxes that house a live fire and capture the smoke it produces. They’re called that because they look like giant fish tanks with meat swimming around inside. Winters are harsh here and outdoor space is hard to come by, so ribs and sausages are smoked indoors, in custom-made glass-walled contraptions called aquarium smokers. As the owner and pitmaster of Uncle John’s Bar-B-Que, 30 minutes outside downtown Chicago, he’s one of the foremost practitioners of a peculiar form of barbecue found only on the South Side of this city. Frying chicken is tricky enough with a controlled gas flame, and she had it mastered on the intense and inconsistent heat of a woodburning stove.Ī half century later, Kennebrew is still taming fire. But it was his grandmother’s skill in the kitchen that stayed with him. It kept the embers underneath hot through the night, and the next morning, a quick shake and some kindling brought the fire back up.
When he was 6 years old, his mother taught him how to bank the fire that warmed the house in the winter-to take charcoal ash and lay it atop the flames. He grew up in Gadsden, Alabama, crammed alongside six siblings in a home with no electricity or running water. Garry Kennebrew had fire in his eyes and smoke in his veins since he was very young.