By Jim Duncan CVFDude@aol.com

El Bait Shop

Barbecue is a holy concept, purified by smoke and sanctified by hard labor. Like so much that is sacred in secular times, it is more frequently blasphemed by impostors than honored by keepers of the faith. But you can't get to smokehouse heaven by baking and then adding "BBQ" sauce, nor by simulating smoke with gas, nor by grilling over charcoal briquettes. The pure Q heart communes only with indirect heat from the embers of hard wood logs. That is why real barbecue is rare on the commercial level - it's utterly labor intensive to do it right. So some BBQ chains now smoke off site and then truck the meat in for reheating.

El Bait Shop (EBS) is a fisher of men who would confess the pure barbecue faith. They smoke the hard way and produce an exquisite product - both their ribs and briskets, served as daily specials, were as good as Q gets. Ribs were tender as they can be without turning to mush that slips the bone. EBS is also, perhaps, the oddest duck within a faith composed mostly of very odd ducks. They do the hard work of producing pure Q and then apply most of their product to a foreign culinary concept - Mexican cuisine. Then again, one doesn't expect standard operating procedures at a place where industrial garage doors serve as windows, fish trophies wear leis, Christmas lights burn all summer and the dining room features a shower stall. Nor from a place that gives guests a choice of more than 100 on-tap and bottled beers.

Using smoked meats in Mexican cuisine isn't an original idea. It's helped make Chicago's Topolobampo one of America's greatest restaurants. But that place sells entrees in the mid-$30 range, and appetizers close to $20. El Bait Shop keeps everything under $8 and restricts its menu to a single page, a delightful respite from bad theme restaurants where only speed-readers can deal with the encyclopedic choices.

Basically, EBS gives two choices - smoked meats or fish. The meats include: carnitas (in the linguistic, not culinary, meaning of the word, these little pieces of pork shoulder and butt are simply smoked and not refried); barbacoa (smoked beef, pulled from the bones and simmered in a sauce of tomatoes, garlic, olives and multiple chiles); verde (pork that is more shredded than chopped and simmered in a tomatillo sauce); chicken, which had the best smoke flavor of all the meats; or ground beef. Yes, even the ground beef was smoked. Grilled fish include grouper and tilapia. For both burritos and tacos, the more fatty grouper worked better with the cabbage-mango salsa. The tilapia was served with more seasoning, which fought the salsa.

Sauces were not standard, either. All were made with fresh vegetables, which came from the restaurant's 20-acre garden in Madison County. That's another Topolobampo feature, incidentally. The green salsa that was served with our carnitas one day was an epiphany. A week later it wasn't available any more. That's the kind of trade-off one accepts in order to indulge fresh and local thinking. Instead of being disappointed, we went with a new salsa that was even better, filled with the flavor of smoked jalapenos and serranos.

All dishes came with Sonoran style rice and a choice of frijoles or black beans. Sides included fried or pickled jalapenos, banana peppers and guacamole. Flour tortillas were so fresh they tasted doughy. Corn tortillas were fresh enough to stand up to warm salsa verde without breaking. While the beer choice is cosmic, not a single non-alcoholic brew was offered.

Food Skinny

El Bait Shop owners say their planned Court Avenue grocery store will feature original smokehouse items, including cold smoked salmon and block cheeses...Wyoming-based Taco John's opened another new store at 100th and Urbandale. CV

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