June 16-22, 2005
food
There's the Rib
FOUR INTO ONE: Fourplay, a wine from Sicily blending four grape varieties, came in at the top of our survey of Southern Italian reds.
I watched the 1985 film Better Off Dead repeatedly in my formative years, and as a result, I tend to avoid restaurants that personify dinner. So "Conshy," the cartoon pig clasping his suspenders on the Conshohocken Rib House sign was, at first, a little off-putting. A door down from the Conshohocken Bakery (where the tomato pie probably deserves its own column), the Rib House is a corner taproom retrofitted with dining capability. If you've come to eat, you have to cross into the back room through a narrow aisle. It's here, amidst the drop ceiling, wood-paneled walls and plastic posters with handwritten announcements in marker, that the magic happens.
The bar crowd is steady, and the domestic beers on tap are cheap, but the menu's fried snacks are nothing but distractions. After all, Conshy is not a grinning grilled cheese. You come here for pig roasts, chicken, ribs or any combination thereof, served in a no-frills fashion. Our meals, when they arrived, threatened to warp and spill over the Styrofoam plates. They came with only a flimsy stack of napkins for sauce-residue management.
All the better for diving in face-first. Both the baby backs and spare ribs are smoked over oak and hickory, and the long, slow exposure to wood lends them deep-down flavor. The spare rib meat is tender but holds to the bone, suggesting that there have been no shortcuts through vats of boiling water. Lacquered with sauce, the ribs' outer edges are flaky, caramelized and perfect for gnawing. Barbecue chicken breasts and legs are juicy, their meat silky beneath crisped skin. A choice of ketchup-based house sauces includes mild, hot or hot honey. You can't go wrong here, but the latter, thrumming with spice, was the favorite at our table. Conshy clearly knows something we don't.
Platters come with a choice of sides and a layer of Texas toast to mop up everything if and when you reach the bottom. I was happy to discover that the homemade sides are in no way an afterthought. The cross-regional list includes classics like corn on the cob (in season). We sampled the freshly made coleslaw and macaroni salad, baked beans doused in a rich mahogany sauce with an aroma of smoky pork, and velvety stuffing with spicy nuggets of sausage.
Our Rib House meals were amazingly cheap, given the enormous mound of food that we left with. (On Mondays, crab legs are all-you-can-eat with sides for $19.95.) After our Rib House visit, I'm starting to understand why a pig might need to wear adjustable overalls.
Conshohocken Rib House 600 E. Hector St., Conshohocken, 610-834-9400 www.ribhouse.net
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