Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Does Percy Street Barbecue's shipped-from-Texas concept translate to Philly?

by Trey Popp

Neal Santos FAT OF THE LAND: Red oak smoke-imbued beef brisket, best with various sides, is the house specialty at Percy Street Barbecue.

[ review ]

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Texas has no suitor more earnest than Percy Street Barbecue. South Street's latest high-profile restaurant wants its wood smoke to stick to your shirt just like it does down at Smitty's Market in Lockhart, where an open fire pit hisses a few feet from a counter where brisket sells for $8.90 per pound. It wants you to drop dollars in the jukebox and order beer in gallon jugs. It wants you to know that there's nothing on the meat beyond "salt, pepper and smoke," the holy trinity of the Lone Star State.

"We're not trying to reinvent anything,"  says co-owner Steven Cook. "We're trying to do a fairly faithful take on Texas-style barbecue."

"Faithful" is both an understatement and a PR tactic for Cook and his partners, chefs Michael Solomonov (Zahav) and Erin O'Shea. Before opening Percy Street, they took a copiously publicized scouting trip to Texas. Solomonov sees this kind of travel as "the basis for our quality control." It's also becoming part of the standard publicity repertoire for Philly restaurateurs. They did the same thing for Zahav two years ago, netting a City Paper cover story. Rick Nichols recently chronicled Stephen Starr's East Coast pizza quest for the Inquirer. For this venture, the Percy Street crew took along a Philly Mag editor and a documentary filmmaker. It's only a matter of time before someone brings in James Cameron to do the thing in 3-D.

Texas barbecue is three-dimensional, but in the most austere of ways. Salt, pepper and smoke really are the sum of it. Some joints eschew sauce of any kind. Maybe that explains why the mere rumor of a perfect brisket drives some Hill Country meat fanatics two hours down the highway in its pursuit: When you don't have so much as a vinegar mop to lean on, perfection is not easy to achieve.

Or to imitate, as O'Shea is well aware. "Barbecue is something people feel strongly about," she told me on the phone. "Everybody's familiar with it, in some shape or another. So it's a little bit of a battle, because they're expecting to get that rib they had two years ago."

O'Shea's ribs were thick and meaty, and like everything else, suffused with red oak smoke. Smoky brisket, smoky pig belly, smoky chicken, smoky sausages. The main variation, aside from the natural differences between the meats, was moisture. The chicken was shiny with it. The sausages were as dry as, well, the smoke that permeated every cubic inch of ground brisket, fat back and pork butt inside the casings.

Neal Santos (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Basically, you better like smoke.

Sides are the staples of Southern banquet tables everywhere — stewed collards, black-eyed peas, mac and cheese and so on. Here they're solid but commonplace. I liked the green-been salad laced with thin fried-onion crisps, but the only thing that really made an impression was O'Shea's root beer chili. Root beer aroma rose from the murky, meaty swirl with such startling clarity that I wondered if she'd dosed the bowl with ROOT liqueur. (Nope: just a scrumptious simmer of root beer, which Yards brews especially for Percy Street, along with Brooklyn Brown Ale and chicken stock.)

Desserts stick to the same territory — think banana pudding and pecan pie. Both renditions I tasted verged on sickly sweet, which may be authentic in its own way, but disappointed me, especially since the pecans in particular were quite good. An apple crisp was crispy in the wrong spots, with undercooked apples and no crisp at all from the crust. But Percy Street's root beer float, whose puff of carbonation had frozen into a delicate lace of vanilla-scented ice, is probably the best in town.

The aim here is comfort food, and O'Shea hopes people will shed their preconceived notions of what that should entail — be it a different style of barbecue or their grandmother’s apple crisp. That was hard for me to do. For one thing, the memory of O'Shea's cooking at Marigold Kitchen, where she spun Southern simplicity and sophistication into meals as distinctive as they were down-home, far outshines the offerings at Percy Street. O'Shea says she finds her new assignment just as challenging, yet it's hard to escape the thought that her talents for invention are being squandered on something more akin to imitation.

And what is the point of reproducing a Texas smokehouse a thousand and some miles from its sustaining environment? That's a question you might ponder when you look up from your metal cafeteria tray and roll of paper towels and catch a glimpse of Whole Foods across the street. It's hard to insert a culinary idiom that flourishes best out back of ramshackle variety stores and gas stations into a full-service setting where every detail bears the mark of a set designer. There's a pre-distressed wooden hutch that looks like someone attacked it with a pressure sprayer. Mismatched lightbulbs bristling from the ceiling bespeak not thrift but affectation. And brisket that sells for nine bucks a pound in small-town Texas carries different expectations than brisket that commands $19 here. (They've recently introduced a family-style option, for four or more, that provides samplings of the entire menu for $24 a head. I liked the convenience of that route, even if it's only a token discount compared to a coordinated order of combination plates.)

That premium may be worth it for barbecue junkies. Smoke lovers will undoubtedly get their fix. And some customers will look up from their plates and see nothing more than the happy promise of a well-stocked jukebox and a bar boasting top-shelf liquor. But Percy Street's paean to the Lone Star State had me struggling to shake Samuel Johnson's warning about the hazard of mimicry. "Almost all absurdity of conduct," he remarked, "arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble."

(t_popp@citypaper.net)

Percy Street Barbecue | 900 South St., 215-625-8510, percystreet.com. Open for dinner Sun.-Thu., 5-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 5-11 p.m. (bar till 2 a.m.); open for lunch Sat.-Sun., 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Brisket, ribs, sausage, chicken, pork belly, $9-$21; sides, $4-$7; desserts, $6. Wheelchair accessible.