You know how it is when you get your heart set on a certain something to eat and nothing else will satisfy? Well, that was us this week. Ohio may not be known for its barbecue, but there is a local establishment with a good reputation. Dr. Evil and I had a look at their menu online and we were lost from there, brother. It was going to be barbecue come hell or high water. We invited Dr. Evil’s folks to join us Wednesday, with a 6:30 dining time. Everyone was ready to get out of the house because it’s been raining for days now, and Wednesday was the first day with more clear skies than rain. We arrived at the appointed time to find the restaurant’s security gate halfway down and music blasting from the the back of the shop, telltale signs of a recently closed restaurant. Crushing. I walked casually to the entrance to find a sign “New Hours: 11-6PM.” We ended up at an alleged Cuban restaurant, and it was fine, but it wasn’t pulled pork, ya know?
Which brings us to Thursday. It turns out that I had lit quite a barbecue fire in Dr. Evil, because on Thursday morning when I asked her her thoughts on a farm project (more on that later) she wondered if that wasn’t a subject best discussed over barbecue. Cut to: Closing laptops, brushing of hair and teeth, the dust trail of a speeding car. We were barbecue bound, baby. We are still getting to know our way around here, so we were pretty proud of ourselves for remembering to approach the barbecue joint from the east to avoid a majority of traffic lights encountered when coming from the shorter western approach. Then it happened. The Sign. ROAD CLOSED AHEAD. We were a quarter mile from pig heaven and the damned road was closed. All that rain i mentioned? It drove the normally placid Hocking River from its banks and right onto State Street, our pathway to pork. Deflated but not defeated, we circled back to the western approach and found . . . you guessed it: flooded on that side too. Double crushed. This time we substituted burgers and local brews, and while it was tasty, it wasn’t brisket.
I’ll relieve the tension that each of you must be suffering by now—Will they? Won’t they? Did they? What else could go wrong?—and tell you that (after first calling to see if they were open) we had barbecue today. It was good. Very good, even. More importantly, though, it scratched that barbecue itch, and we are now free to obsess about something new. Maybe the weather.