Kinder’s BBQ…
Whenever clear blue skies start to peek between tiers of the fluffy cumulus floating by, I start to think of the warmer months to come. And when I think of the warmer months to come, I think of barbeque being consumed straight off the grills. Cold beers. Happy faces. Creative side dishes. As a lucky lifetime resident of the Golden State, I’ve been fortunate to have what seems like endless natural resources, technicolour produce, and vast ethnic diversity. With those elements combined, I’ve witnessed and consumed the amazing edible ideologies produced as an end result to those factors. But, I ain’t tasted no mind blowin’ barbeque.
Amazingly enough, it seems beyond the bounds of possibility to find good barbeque. The kind that leaves sticky mahogany flecks of meat on your fingertips. The kind that pardons all sense of etiquette and conjures your inner-primal caveman when you’re gnawing at that St. Louis style rib bone. Sure, there are an array of barbeque restaurant options within San Francisco, but none have seemed to live up to their hype.
Kinder’s BBQ. I suppose it is what it promised it would be. It was food truck. It was BBQ.
I ordered the $8 “famous” ball tip sandwich. I would have liked to have tried the barbeque sandwich, but once they said they added cheese and a slew of other ingredients, my mind ran a blank. I would have liked to try the ribs, but I don’t want to eat Tequila Lime flavored ribs, which is all they had. My $8 ball tip sandwich came with tomatoes and lettuce….toss that out of the window, please. The loin meat was incredibly tender. It gave enough tooth to remind you of its presence, but enough disintegrating quality to not give you lock jaw. And it was on the softest sandwich roll I ever put into my gob.
However, barbeque? Smoke ring non-existent. And anytime there’s an option to add “Onion Garlic” mix to your sandwich, it makes me suspicious. I don’t want anything interfering with the relationship between meat and sauce. Speaking of sauce, Kinder’s also has a self-proclaimed famous barbeque sauce. The barbeque sauce was on the bottom of the sandwich. I would have much preferred a little tossing of meat into sauce, maybe? It was good on the sandwich. But, by itself I found it to be famously disappointing. It was sweet. And sweet. And still more…sweet. There was a mild trace of smokiness, that I missed from the actual meat itself, but there was no heft. The sauce just seemed…soulless.
My craving for soul shaking and addiction creating barbeque still hasn’t been subsided. Perhaps I never had great barbeque. Maybe the idea of good barbeque that I have in my mind is that of the atmosphere in which most grillin’ and barbequein’ is consumed in. The happy faces. The cold beers. The feverish consumption of charred bits straight off the grill coated in an equal balance of politically incorrect charcoal smoke and sticky, salty, sweet, spicy barbeque sauce that’s from no barbeque-centric region…just the golden state in my backyard.
(510) 984-2333
