Category: Food Reviews

It’s the Sunday Afternoon Gospel Lunch, and a singer is belting out a stirring rendition of “I’ll Fly Away.” The walls are adorned with pictures of B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, and Memphis Minnie. Folks are chomping pork ribs, and owner Bob Hodges is taking it all in with satisfaction.

It’s Beale Street, all right — in Portland, Oregon.

Every major city has a best barbecue contest. And it would seem that in every city, somebody is working the Memphis angle.

There are several barbecue categories considered legitimate around the country: Texas, Kansas City, Carolina, and Memphis. Hodges went with Memphis for his first restaurant, Beale Street NW. It’s an interesting choice, since he’s never been to Memphis. But as a former Memphian now living in Portland, I can assure you it’s a fine taste of home.

“I’ve always liked barbecue, and I’ve always liked the blues,” Hodges says. So, after 15 years in the banking business, and with some restaurant management experience behind them, he and his wife, Margaret, did their Bluff City research and opened the place up for New Year’s Eve 2004. (A delicious irony: Beale Street NW is in a former bank building. The old vault is the musicians’ green room, and the safe-deposit room is the liquor storage.)

Hodges’ restaurant, like others across the country, are variations on a formula: How To Open a Memphis Barbecue Place. You call it Beale Street, or Memphis something or other, and you get pictures of Elvis, Memphis, and a bunch of blues people. If possible, you claim some connection to Memphis, or at least Tennessee or the South. Then you give half the menu some goofy Memphis names, find somebody to say you’re the most authentic ‘cue around, and voila! “Memphis barbecue.”

Beale Street NW, for example, serves “Memphis Fries,” tossed in the dry rub they use on the ribs. Another example, Max’s Memphis Barbecue in Red Hook, New York — voted “Best in the Hudson Valley,” no less — offers “Memphis John’s Barbecued Pulled Pork Plate” and “Ozark Cheese Grits.”

Mike “The Legend” Mills grew up in Illinois, but after becoming the only three-time grand champion of Memphis in May, he moved out to Las Vegas to open Memphis Championship BBQ. There he serves “Memphis Skins” stuffed with barbecue pork topped with cheddar cheese and green onions. He’s got four locations now and serves thousands of people a day.

Denver has all sorts of “local” options. There’s Tennessee Hickory Smoked BBQ (on Mississippi Avenue), which is “in a strip-mall space that looks a little like an Appalachian cabin,” according to a recent review. The same reviewer said the Yazoo BBQ Company serves “artisan flesh” with a “spice-spangled, lacquered mahogany surface.” Then there’s Joe’s West of Memphis BBQ, run by Joe and Carolyn Stuckley, formerly of West Memphis. (So, in the marketing lingo, they’re from “West of Memphis,” since nobody’s heard of West Memphis.)

There’s a place in Virginia Beach that hits all the buttons: Beale Street Memphis Barbecue Boogie and Blues. In Maine, there are three Beale Street Barbecue locations, where they call their Caesar salad a “Beale Street Caesar.” The restaurant Red Hot and Blue, basically a re-creation of Corky’s, now has 34 locations around the country, serving “Memphis Tea” and “Memphis Fries.” I once ate at their store in New Jersey, and my Jersey friends asked if the fried strips of potato on our plate were like the fries in Memphis. I had to allow that, by golly, they were!

Not everyone is impressed. The online magazine Slate sent a guy around the country to eat barbecue, and he wrote, “I left Memphis not at all sure why it counts as a world-class barbecue town. Perhaps it’s Memphis’ deft boosterism. This city has genius marketers. Memphis is very grungy, yet the marketers have managed to enshrine Graceland as a national monument and to convince tourists that Beale Street — a rowdy boozefest — is a major cultural landmark. Perhaps they have done the same with Memphis barbecue, an illusionist’s trick to make it seem more appealing than it is.”

Well, maybe, maybe not. But it appears to be working. You tell people in Oregon or anywhere else you’re serving Memphis-style barbecue, and they raise their eyebrows and nudge each other as if to say, “Let’s go.”

In the 1990s I worked as a waiter, bartender, cook, and occasional dishwasher at La Montagne, a “healthy” vegetarian-friendly eatery on Park, just a block east of Highland. The area was, as it is now, blighted with strip malls, but “The Mountain,” as employees called it with equal parts affection and animosity, was a cozy cottage tangled in grape vines and rimmed with an elegant garden. It was hidden in plain view, out of place, and inviting. Prices were competitive, which made it hard for employees to make much of a living from the bistro-sized, veggie-loving clientele. But for this U of M grad student who only needed rent money, beer money, and all the free beans and rice he could eat, La Montagne was ideal.

In 2003, the famously inconsistent restaurant — which opened in the early 1980s as a progressive vegetarian restaurant supplied by its own garden — finally closed. It reopened, however, in June 2004 with the same name and perfunctory nods to its healthy past. But the new La Montagne is owned by a meat-loving chef who thinks portions should be generous and customers know exactly what they want.

“I decided to keep the name La Montagne for one reason. It’s been around for a long time, and people already know where La Montagne is. They don’t have to go looking for a new restaurant,” says chef/owner John Bragg. “But it’s confused a lot of people who come wandering in looking for a $4 vegetable plate.”

In the old days, La Montagne’s fare consisted of a “spinach fantasy” served over green noodles, assorted seafood, and exotically named bean-based dishes involving shaved coconut, sweet potatoes, eggplant, or an exotic cheese like feta, with the option of adding grilled tofu, chicken, or shrimp. Today, the Mediterranean-inspired menu contains items such as a prime rib chop with red onion confit and mushroom Dijon sauce; beef tenderloin with a truffle-port reduction; and seared tuna with pancetta and lentils — a far cry from the days of the four-veggie special.

“Things that were considered fine dining 20 years ago are commonplace now. I think everybody knows what goat cheese is. You can get a chipotle sauce at McDonald’s,” Bragg says. “I’m [not the kind of chef] who’s going to make some wasabi-crusted whatever. In French cooking you learn that if you eat a potato, you should taste the potato. The first taste going in and the last taste shouldn’t be ‘whatever.’ It should be potato.”

Before reopening La Montagne, Bragg worked for top-notch Memphis chefs such as Karen Carrier of Automatic Slim’s and Cielo, Erling Jensen, and Aubergine’s Gene Bjorklund.

“From Erling I learned that the most important thing you can do is to give the people what they want,” Bragg says. “You can get food service in a hotel, a hospital, or a prison. Dining is about accommodating. It’s about not saying ‘no’ to your customers. It’s about entertainment.”

One thing that La Montagne has kept from the old days is its cozy environment. The rooms are small, simple. During the winter months diners can eat next to a roaring fireplace near the bar. The color scheme has changed, however, from battleship gray and dingy greens to bright ochers that lighten the dimly lit café and contrast nicely with the dark hardwood floors. Murals by David Mah have replaced the giant, crusty map that once hung in the restaurant’s back room, and paintings and photographs by Memphis artists are hung on the restaurant’s walls.

Appetizers range from grilled scallops with prosciutto and asparagus to citrus-marinated olives with hummus. Desserts include fresh sorbets, fruit tarts, soufflés, and a chocolate, coffee rum, and mousse cake called Il Diplomatico. Prices for entrées range from $12 to $36, with salads and appetizers starting at $7. La Montagne provides a full bar, a variety of imported beers, and a solid, moderately priced wine selection. La Montagne is currently open for dinner and for brunch on Sundays but will open for lunch beginning in April.

“What I want is for people to enjoy their food,” Bragg says. “I want them to walk away feeling like they’ve gotten more than they expected.”

For all of its faults, there was something charming about the old La Montagne. It blended bistro ambience with the Memphis-style funk of no-frills “meat and three.” It was suspended in a time when sundried tomatoes sounded like a farming error, pesto was only a myth, and homemade pizza seemed exotic. But it’s hard to look at the new menu and the invigorated interiors and not agree that change can be a very good thing indeed.

La Montagne, 3550 Park (320-9090)