Lemme Adam
The meat falls so gently off the bone at ADAM’S BAR-B-Q PLUS, you’d swear they were using a short-cut. You’d be wrong.
By Sara Roahen
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Adam Shellmire and his mother, Geraldine, make sure that ADAM’SBAR-B-Q PLUS
is kitchen-cooked without cheating with liquid smoke. (Photo by Cheryl Gerber.)
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WHAT: Adam’s Bar-B-Q Plus
CUISINE: Barbecue
WHEN: Lunch and dinner Tuesday through Sunday
WHERE: 1246 Franklin Ave., 942-1100
CASH ONLY
NO RESERVATIONS
You’ve heard about students bound for the Ivy League who spend entire trust funds making movie shorts for their college applications, or about job resumes written in ancient Greek or hieroglyphics or JavaScript in attempt to impress higher-ups for the most competitive positions.
I received something similar from Adam’s Bar-B-Q Plus recently, only they didn’t have to invest as much or try quite as hard. I don’t even know if they realized what they sent. It was a response for an upcoming restaurant guide, in a plain business-sized envelope, hastily addressed and wood fired. The form was splotched with barbecue sauce, and the white paper had yellowed from exposure to smoke. It practically billowed when I unfolded it.
Adam’s bright yellow-and-green, squatty take-out joint sits on Franklin Avenue between St. Claude and North Claiborne avenues, just two blocks from a McRib. You’d think the smells of smoldering fire and slow-dripping fat that pump from the smokehouse in back would drive the neighbors to salivating lunacy. Several customers who step up to Magic Snowballs next door do forgo the buffalo wings there for meatier options at Adam’s, but in general word of mouth (and now, possibly, word of smoked paper) accounts for most of their business.
On a Friday night, behind a thick pane of transparent plastic, a woman worked the kitchen in a fancy pink jogging suit and white tennis shoes. She used long tongs, a ladle and painstaking deliberation to fish tender ribs and baked beans from fire-scorched pots and a few metal pans tented with aluminum foil. The one tool she lacked — something I consider essential for anyone working with barbecue in pink — was an apron. After a good 10 minutes of moving between stovetop and styrofoam, she filled my plastic bags with enough potato salad, baked beans, macaroni, sliced white bread (the only sides available) and barbecue to feed six. Her outfit and her kitchen still showed no spots of sauce, an amazing victory over one of the messiest forms of cooking. When I asked how she did it, the woman humbly referred to a stack of dirty dishes hiding someplace in the back.
I snatched the bags from a revolving door in the plastic window and headed home with an entourage of other barbecue fanatics for the free-for-all dining experience afforded only by take-out. We tried to use plates. A thin coating of Adam’s substantial but slippery barbecue sauce was just a tease. Around the table, we dipped whole spareribs of beef and pork into pools of sauce that remained in the containers. The tender meat pulled from the rib bones with gentle tugs. One impassioned guest continued to trace his finger from the remaining dribbles of honeyed and vinegary sauce to his lips long after the rest of us pushed away our plates.
That’s when the discussion about liquid smoke began. While Adam’s ribs were tender and the mostly skinless chicken meat loosened from the bone in succulent chunks, I was struck most by the robust flavor of campfire and the rosy pink ring just underneath the top layer of all the meats. This bright ring is the mark of masterful smoking and seems particularly difficult to come by in these parts. I already was envisioning my next trek to Adam’s when someone at the table reported a recent barbecue experience that rivaled Adam’s. The ribs she had eaten — and praised — had been “barbecued” by liquid smoke, a substance bought in a bottle that’s produced by distilling or concentrating real smoke. Our informant casually speculated that the intense smokiness of Adam’s ribs was a result of a similar liquid-smoke short cut.
And then the group’s discussion drifted to other topics. I participated politely but couldn’t shrug off this accusation so easily. Everything from Adam’s did taste a little smokier than usual: the bread folded into individual baggies, the soupy baked beans and the viscous barbecue sauce with those tiny black specks. The more I obsessed, even my memories of the smooth potato salad that once smacked of mayonnaise and the strangely soft macaroni that at first tasted like nothing began to take on a smoldering perfume. Then again, so did my clothing and my hair just from standing in Adam’s dugout waiting area.
I had to ask Adam.
Adam Shellmire, his wife, Geraldine, and his son Adam own and run Adam’s Bar-B-Q Plus. I spoke with the junior Adam, who takes credit for the business idea but not the barbecue. It was his father who started the family’s barbecue tradition in a backyard barbecue pit. He developed such a knack for it that friends started buying meat for the shoring laborer to smoke for them. He’s been using the same slow-smoking technique with spareribs, turkey legs and chicken on Franklin Avenue for three years now. Not quite such a perfectionist about the sauce, he adds a few of his own ingredients to a pre-made barbecue base.
And liquid smoke? When Adam Jr. spits out the phrase “kitchen barbecue,” I know I don’t have to ask twice.
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