Wrong Burger in Paradise
Posted By bbinns on February 7, 2009

Roadfoodie and the road-dude at Baby Blues
I always order the wrong thing. This has been a vexing constant of my traveling and eating life for decades. Often, I vow to stop doing it, but that sort of resolve carries mind-boggling potential for inverse logic. Venturing down this road, I might end up second-guessing myself to the point where I would never order at all, and that would be a pity.
(When I spent six months in Hong Kong as part of an academic program out of Lewis & Clark College—yes, Monica Lewinski’s alma mater—one of my fellow students, John Prendergrass (sp?), always ordered the right thing. During that six months, I had only to emulate John’s choices. Then came graduation, and an unavoidable need to take responsibility for my own choices. Which have not always proved to be spot-on.)

Perched unassumingly, on a corner of Lincoln near Fart and Sminal.
Cut to Venice Beach, circa last week. Both road-dude James Harper and chef Jill had recommended Baby Blues Bar-B-Q. So I carved out an hour between my annual physical in Santa Monica and the drive out to far Calabasas to spend a few days with my oldest friend Ronda (oops, so sorry, longest friend), and arranged to meet the road-dude at Baby Blues. This place has quite a following, and had we not been so early (right at opening time, 11:30am), two places at the counter could certainly not have been secured. Always on the lookout for a literate, preferably tongue-in-cheek title for my blog posts, I had resolved to have a cheeseburger. Then, I reasoned, I could title this post “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” Idiot Idiot Idiot. Sometimes, one must ignore one’s art.
(You see, when C is not with me, I listen to Jimmy Buffet; I’d recently been bombing down the 405 to one of his best songs, eponymously named for my putative blog post.)

Grill-master Eddie Jimenez offered a shrimp-rib sampler to us misguided types.
It had seemed so right. But, not. For one thing, Baby Blues is a kinda North Carolina BBQ joint, and what you order in such a place is emphatically NOT a burger. Besides, they didn’t even offer a cheeseburger, just a (big, meaty) plain ‘ol burger, which right there should have alerted me to a conceptual break-down. But, no, caught in some sort of artistic imperative, I ordered it. Luckily, Eddie the smiling grill master took pity on my stupidity and offered up a complimentary sampler plate: two tiger shrimp with a haunting, remoulade-ish, mayonnais-y sauce, and two Memphis ribs. This, of course, is what to order at Baby Blues, and the menu item that combines them is helpfully titled “The Deuce.” The tiger shrimp have been violently seared to brown-crisp succulence. And the ribs? Please. That I will drive hundreds of miles out of my way so I can hit Charlie Vergos’ Rendezvous in Memphis, and snarfle down a rack of their ribs should be a clue to how I feel about Memphis-style ribs. These two puppies were a

Eddie's on the right. Kinda short for a grill master....

Tasty enough, but the wrong thing, writ large
But there’s more than just food here. There’s an open and unpretentious camaraderie among diners and dishers-out unlike anything I’ve come across in the sprawling LA basin, especially in an establishment where people are not engaged in serious or talented-amateur drinking. On the initial journey of their discovery, road-dude and Marilyn had befriended a waitress named Kasey. Our waitress, Amanda, it turns out, is Kasey’s roommate and they are both in a band called “Miss Willie Brown” (misswilliebrown.com). Their CD is “Blackouts & Polaroids.” Drop in to the website and take a listen—I spent two minutes there and immediately ordered it. Although I’ll be off like the wind in just a few short days, road-dude and Marilyn will be dropping by an upcoming gig. (A menu item called “Get Down Miss Brown” was clearly influenced by these two boozy, ballsy, bluesy babes.)

Amanda: Pretty girl with a voice even bigger than her smile.
I hear that Baby Blues will be opening in Hollywood, and in SFO’s Mission District, too, so this brand of grease and gladness must be striking a happy chord with a lot of folks. Check out www.babybluesvenice.com. Infectious grubby music on this site, too, and under “Galleries” you can look at “Grub Pix,” if you want to torture yourself like I just did. If you can get there from where you sit right now, just do it. Me, I’ll have to save up my tender, smoky fat-lust for Texas, and, in March, the pork tour from Marfa to New York. Better start my research now so I don’t miss one little morsel.
Some photographs courtesy of James Harper.
Next post (maybe, um, Wednesday): Malibu Brigie’s Excellent L’Aventure
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