12 Legs Travel

I have no business evaluating restaurants, in a blog post or Yelp! rant or any other published medium. The reason is simple: I have the palate of a child.

I start my mornings with sugary cereal. I inwardly cringe when foods touch on my plate. And under no circumstance does a vegetable pass my lips. Jill diplomatically describes me a “meat and potatoes” guy, but this categorization is too expansive. I’m really just a meat guy; potatoes, to me, are overkill.

So when Jill suggested I write a little something about our visit to Jocko’s steakhouse in Nipomo, Calif., I was hesitant. She might as well have asked me to submit an article to Architectural Digest based on my prepubescent reputation as a masterful Lego builder. My lack of sophistication in gastronomical matters is laughable, really. I can’t tell an artichoke from an asparagus, and I don’t even know what most brightly colored foods taste like.

But I’ll tell you what, despite these inadequacies, there’s one thing I’m comfortable stating with supreme confidence: Californians don’t know shit about barbecue.

I came to this conclusion after driving through the Central Valley and passing a slew of restaurants with neon “BBQ” signs hung in front of them. The first time I saw such a sign, my heart leapt. I assumed, reasonably, that a Southerner had moved to town, built a pit, found a supply of hardwood, and was now smoking pork and sausage and brisket to the delight of a new and appreciative audience.

But after passing another “BBQ” sign, then another and another, I realized there couldn’t be that many transplanted Southerners populating the same swath of the state. Something smelled — and it wasn’t hickory smoke and pork fat.

What I soon figured out is that Californians confuse barbecuing meat with grilling it. All those California restaurants with “BBQ” signs? They’re actually steak joints. Nary a one serves pulled pork with a tangy, vinegar-based barbecue sauce.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with steak — I love steak — but these days I can’t afford to eat one. Words matter to a hungry traveler on a budget, so shame on the Golden State for false advertising.

The facts: In this country, barbecuing means cooking meat with hardwood smoke over indirect heat. Grilling, on the other hand, refers to cooking meat directly over hot coals or flames. I’ve heard and read several theories about the origin of barbecuing, but the most credible concerns a culinary exchange between American Indians and Spanish colonists five centuries ago in what is now South Carolina. The Spanish introduced pigs to the New World, and the Indians showed them how to slow-cook one with smoke. A delicacy was born.

What Indians and colonists were doing in the 1500s “barbecuers” in Californian still aren’t doing today. But just because Californians don’t know what they’re cooking doesn’t mean what they’re cooking isn’t good. Take Jocko’s, a restaurant one of Jill’s old high-school friends practically demanded we visit when she learned we were holed up in a dive motel in nearby Pismo Beach. Jocko’s menu proclaims the restaurant has been serving barbecue since the 1950s, but in reality Jocko’s specializes in grilled meats — lamb chops, pork chops, chicken, spare ribs, linguisa and, above all, steaks.

Jocko’s is special-occasion dining for locals, most of whom work on vineyards or ranches or farms. These are the sort of folks who put product before presentation and value good food over frills. You don’t get a lot of the latter at Jocko’s. If not for the dimly lit bar you see when you open the front door, you might think you’d walked into a church basement for a potluck social. The walls are block, the light yellow. Laminated-wood tabletops are set with paper placemats, and water is served in textured plastic tumblers like the ones used in your neighborhood Pizza Hut back in 1978.

The service moseys a fine line between no-nonsense efficiency and homespun apathy. Our waitress, tall and brusque, possessed the jawline of Linda Hamilton and the tableside manner of Murphy Brown. When she forgot to bring the root beer I ordered, I was a little afraid to call it to her attention.

The steaks at Jocko’s start at 20 bucks. I ordered the “Large Spencer” and kissed three days’ worth of budgeted meal money goodbye. The steak — a massive, bone-in ribeye — turned out to be a worthwhile splurge, arriving charred on the edges and glistening as though dipped in lacquer. It was a little tough for a thick steak prepared medium rare, but its smoky flavor and aroma overshadowed the sinewy texture. It’s not the best steak I’ve ever eaten (that title is held by the bone-in ribeye I once had the pleasure of masticating at Talavera in Arizona), but it made for the tastiest dinner I’ve had on this trip.

At meal’s end, I fetched a toothpick and wandered out back where the magic happens at Jocko’s: at a pair of open-air, brick pits that adjoin the long, narrow kitchen. There I found grill man Aubrey Mayo presiding over a raging oak fire. Several steaks sizzled on a crisscrossed iron grate about a foot and a half above the flame, and Mayo controlled the grate’s height via a simple pulley system. The pit was hot. I leaned against the back wall and was rewarded a soot stain on my t-shirt.

Mayo told me he cooks 400 to 500 steaks “on a good day,” and about 1,000 on Mothers Day and Fathers Day. He is one of only two men who mans the grill at Jocko’s. He rose to the job when his predecessor retired with a torn rotator cuff after turning steaks for 19 years. I detected a Southern tinge to Mayo’s accent and asked him where he was from. “Elizabeth City, North Carolina,” he said. “Been out here for about seven years.”

Mayo has a gift for cooking multiple orders of meat while carrying on easy conversation with a curious stranger. He is obviously used to the presence of onlookers. Like the grill at a backyard cookout, the pit at Jocko’s tends to attract manly loiterers who feel all the more manly for the loitering. As I chatted with Mayo, a fellow with a receding hairline and protruding paunch swaggered out from the dining room. Addressing me but speaking loudly enough for Mayo to hear him over the crackling fire and sizzling steaks, he volunteered that he had come to Jocko’s all the way from Pasadena. “They make the best steak I’ve ever had in my life, and I’ve been all over the damn place,” he said. “You just can’t beat the beef that comes from this part of the country.”

Mayo turned a steak without looking up. When the paunchy fellow left, Mayo confided to me that Jocko’s doesn’t actually get its beef from California suppliers — it comes from a ranch in Colorado and has for the past 35 years. But visitors to Jocko’s bar room will still find local cattle brands burned into the pine-paneled walls. Another example of Californian false advertising, I guess.

After being entrusted with this mildly conspiratorial fact and having previously established that Mayo and I are fellow Southerners, I finally posed the question I had been dying to ask the grill man: Why did Jocko’s and other California steakhouses categorize the meat he was cooking as barbecue?

Mayo smiled behind a haze of gray smoke. “I don’t know,” he said. “They don’t call this barbecue where I’m from. But Californians sign my checks, so I’ll call it what they want.”

— Scott