Tag: Ace Biscuit & Barbecue

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Culture Food & Drink

A reintroduction to Ace Biscuit & Barbecue

The Ol’ Dirty Biscuit is a crispy chicken, gravy, pickle, and pimento cheese combo that’s landed Ace Biscuit & Barbecue on the foodie swoon list. Photo by BJ Poss.

By BJ Poss

Barbecue is nestled as deep in Charlottesville’s roots as any homemade brine. You’d be hard-pressed to find a self-respecting plate of pork barbecue in Virginia that didn’t start out submerged in coarse salt dissolved in water full of sugar, spices, and citrus zest, a chef’s emulsion that absorbs into the meat and, when touched with smoke and fire, blooms into a succulent delight.

One player, noticeably absent on the smokin’ scene, returned last month after an unfortunate hiatus: Ace Biscuit & Barbecue is back to serving the heart of Virginia barbecue classics with a kiss of the South.

Ace shut its doors in late March 2024 after being vandalized beyond the point of recognition. The vandal (who was fittingly charged and sentenced on the day of the restaurant’s re-opening), did $50,000 of damages to wiring, fryers, and flooring—and even the toilets took a beating. To top it off, an eye got smashed out of a portrait of Hunter S. Thompson that, if we’re being honest, would likely earn a smirk from HST himself.

With the kitchen intact again and the dining room close behind, Ace is prepping out a full menu, showing that Southern gastronomy far exceeds crispy lard and baked buttermilk. “Southern food should pull out a memory,” says Ace manager Scott Hewitt. “It isn’t simple; it’s science.”

Ace’s kitchen culture relies on the creativity of the staff to treat the menu as a conversation rather than a rulebook. “We’re all chefs, and we’re all artists,” Hewitt declares. Art plays a role in layering flavor and texture in each dish. Look to Ace classics like the Ol’ Dirty Biscuit—southern fried chicken dripping in sauce gravy, cut with acidic, crisp pickles and smoke of house-made pimento cheese—and the Ace Dip, with jerk chicken sitting atop soft pepper jack to be dunked in Ace jus.

Ace’s housemade pastrami hits the biscuit with an over easy egg, pepper jack cheese, and brown mustard. Photo by BJ Poss.

With an influx of creativity lining its kitchen, Ace is ready to push the envelope on what it means to whip up some low and slow fixings. Charlottesville chef Chris Humphries of Bonny and Read brings an elevated eye to the table as he’s begun to oversee the kitchen in hand with staff who have been spritzing the smokers since Ace’s early years. 

Since the break-in, Ace has become resourceful in reconnecting with its customers by forking out brisket at pop-ups, rolling breakfast burritos at the Charlottesville City Market, and offering dinner pairings like Gochujang sticky ribs with a German riesling at The Wine Guild. 

“We just wanted to get the smokers rolling again,” explains Operations Manager Will Curley, who is downright giddy over how Charlottesville has welcomed back a parking lot of bellowing hickory smoke. “Hearing customer’s bits and pieces reminds you of the sort of community keystone Ace is … makes you really happy to be involved in a project like this.”

Ace used the closure as an opportunity to rethink its space. They’ve done everything from moving the waffle maker to plopping an elevated stage in the dining room, giving Charlottesville a new venue to let loose. “We can’t wait for the first Friday night concert in the dining room, where the band is rocking, the bar is cranking, and the barbecue is smokin’,” says Curley.

Hardcore metal pairs with barbecue as well as any acid-driven riesling. Like a crispy, smoky, protective bark that softens to a tender, melodic center-cut spare rib, hardcore shows have found their Charlottesville home among red brick and carbon steel. “Every time we have a hardcore or metal show, it’s like a dam break,” Curley says with a grin. 

“We’re listening to what Charlottesville wants from us. We’re excited to see where Charlottesville takes Ace in the future.” 

Ace Biscuit & Barbecue is serving its full menu from its barbecue window with outdoor seating. Stay tuned for the dining room’s official re-opening.

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Living

Liquid gold: Local cidery and coffee roaster garner national awards

The Harrison apple, an heirloom variety once thought to be extinct, was reintroduced by Tom Burford of Albemarle CiderWorks—and used to make an award-winning cider. Photo: Courtesy Albemarle CiderWorks

On Friday, January 17, Albemarle CiderWorks and Mudhouse Coffee Roasters scored top honors in the 2020 Good Food Awards in San Francisco. Among more than 2,000 entrants, the cidery and coffee producer were regional (South) winners in their respective categories—ACW for its Harrison cider, and Mudhouse for its Geisha Moras Negras roast. Bestowed annually by the creators of Slow Food Nations, the awards recognize “players in the food system who are driving towards tasty, authentic, and responsible food in order to humanize and reform our American food culture.”

Albemarle CiderWorks’ Harrison cider took top regional (South) honors at the annual Good Foods Awards in San Francisco. Photo: Courtesy Albemarle CiderWorks

As the name suggests, the ACW cider is made from the Harrison apple, an 18th-century variety that fell out of use and was thought to be extinct until its rediscovery in the late 1970s. Years later, ACW’s Thomas Burford became the first contemporary orchardist to cultivate the yellow, black-speckled Harrison, and today it is widely grown and popular among cider makers (but too ugly for supermarket sales).

The story of Mudhouse’s award winner begins in 1960, when the Geisha coffee variety was introduced in Panama. Mudhouse sources its beans from a third-generation family farm there. Grown at an altitude of about 5,400 feet, the fruit is hand-picked by migrant laborers from the Ngäbe-Buglé indigenous region, and it is quite precious. Eight ounces of Mudhouse’s Moras Negras will set you back $75. That’s more than most of us would be willing to pay. But at the 2006 Best of Panama event, an executive from Vermont’s Green Mountain Coffee remarked, “I am the least religious person here and when I tasted this coffee I saw the face of God in a cup.”

If you’re into that sort of thing, you can buy the stuff at mudhouse.com.

Speaking of awards…

Five local vineyards wowed the judges at the 2020 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition, securing prestigious awards and doing the Monticello American Viticultural Area proud. Jefferson and Barboursville vineyards, Veritas Vineyard & Winery, and Trump Winery earned Double Gold designations for five wines, and newcomer Hark Vineyards was the only Best in Class winner from Virginia, singled out in the classic packaging category for its 2017 chardonnay label design. The Chronicle’s annual event is the largest in North America, drawing 6,700 entries from 1,000 wineries this year. Judges dole out Double Gold medals sparingly but found worthy recipients in the Jefferson Vineyards 2018 viognier, Barboursville’s 2018 vermentino, and Trump Winery’s 2016 meritage (a red blend consisting primarily of cabernet franc). Veritas nabbed two double-golds for cabernet franc bottlings, the 2017 reserve and 2017 standard in the $40-and-over and under-$30 categories, respectively.

This is nuts!

Sorry, fans of dairy alternatives like soy and almond milk, you may have to adapt to new terminology. A bill just cleared the Virginia House Agriculture Subcommittee defining milk as “the lacteal secretion, practically free of colostrum, obtained by the complete milking of a healthy hooved mammal.” The measure is intended to protect the commonwealth’s dairy industry from the surge in popularity of plant-based “milk” products. The legislation is moooving up the lawmaking food chain for further consideration.

Munch madness

C-VILLE’s Restaurant Week 2020 kicks off Friday, January 24, with 40 restaurants offering three-course meals for $29 or $39 (plus tax and a huge tip, please)—and presenting some tantalizing dishes. We’ve got our hungry little eyes on a few, including: Little Star’s seared rockfish with escarole, chipotle, manchego, and pimento fundito; Fleurie’s pan-roasted Polyface Farm chicken with braised cabbage and bacon; Kama’s grilled Virginia oysters with uni butter; 1799 at The Clifton’s rainbow trout with sweet potato, kale, and orange emulsion; Three Notch’d’s truffled mushroom ragout with potato gnocchi, vegetarian bordelaise, baked kale, and pecorino; and to top things off, Common House (aka Vinegar Hall)’s buttermilk panna cotta with persimmon jam. A portion of the proceeds benefit the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank, so eat up!

Bird is the word

Bowerbird Bakeshop, that is. The team behind the City Market stalwart recently announced a brick-and-mortar location at the Tenth Street Warehouses this spring. On Monday, co-owners Earl Vallery and Maria Niechwiadowicz surpassed their $5,555 GoFundMe target (by about $500) to defray part of the $70,000 start-up costs. Ten percent of all donations above the goal benefit City of Promise, the nonprofit working to empower underserved populations in Charlottesville.

Movin’ on up

It’s last call at Ace Biscuit & BBQ’s Henry Street location. The charming storefront next to Vitae Spirits will close on January 26 as the kings of carbo-loading move to bigger digs at 600 Concord Ave., just a couple of blocks away. No opening date at the new location has been announced.

Plus ça change

Less than a year after taking the helm at Gordonsville’s Rochambeau, Michelin-starred chef Bernard Guillot has returned to France, citing personal reasons. But the restaurant won’t miss a beat, as Jean-Louis and Karen Dumonet step in to fill the void in early February. The couple met long ago at cooking school in Paris and have been collaborating on restaurants all over the world for 35-plus years. Their latest project, Dumonet, was a popular French bistro in Brooklyn.

It’s mai-tai o’clock somewhere

Now that it’s actually cold outside, Brasserie Saison is hosting a Tropical Tiki Getaway so you can mind-trip to a warm, sandy beach. The intimate downstairs Coat Room will be decorated like a luau (we see a fake palm tree in our future) and paper-umbrella cocktails will be served. Wear your Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops. 6-10pm, Thursday, January 30. 111 E. Main St., Downtown Mall, 202-7027, brasseriesaison.net.

Categories
Living

Secret Specials: A guide to infrequently-offered or off-the-menu local dishes

New England travels south and arrives in the form of the happy-hour lobster roll at Public Fish & Oyster. Photo: Tom McGovern

By Meg Irvin

Certain dishes and meals around town are elusive—available only during particular hours, on a specific day of the month, or exclusively by request. But with a little planning—and some insider info—you can indulge in these delicious off-the-radar items, from a New England staple to a belly-filling hangover cure.

Most regulars at Ace Biscuit & Barbecue know about the chicken and waffles, the sausage gravy, and the fried green tomatoes. The Dirty Waffle, though, is another story. Not listed on the regular menu, the only way to know about it is, well, to know about it. The dish adds sausage gravy, pimento cheese, and pickles to the standard chicken and waffles. “There’s a lot happening with The Dirty Waffle,” says Andrew Autry, the Ace Biscuit manager who’s also known as Wolf. “It’s the best secret hangover cure.”

Every Saturday starting at noon, cult-favorite butcher J.M. Stock offers a different sandwich selection. Most make a one-time appearance, but a few, like the Italian and the Smoked-Chicken Bacon Ranch Salad, have been popular enough to be brought back a time or two. Sometimes, the weekly special can be found on social media, but calling or showing up is the easiest way to find out what the team is making. Sandwiches are available until they sell out, which can be as early as 1pm, but usually the goods are available until 2pm or later.

The Hellboy Pizza at Lampo is on the specials menu about 80 percent of the time, but its absence doesn’t go unnoticed—the restaurant regularly fields questions about the availability of this particular pie. Spicy, sweet, and salty, the Hellboy pays homage to Paulie Gee’s in Brooklyn, where Lampo got the inspiration for the pizza that brings the heat. Soppressata and housemade mozzarella top the inventive pie, which is finished with a generous drizzle of honey infused with scorpion pepper oil.

“It’s rough to source soppressata, and it’s hard to keep up with the demand we have for the Hellboy, which is why it’s not always available,” says Loren Mendosa, co-owner of Lampo. No Hellboy when you visit? The next best bet is to ask for that special honey on top of the Diavola pizza.

On the last Sunday of every month, Mas tapas opens its doors for brunch from 11am-2pm. You’ll always find something sweet, like French toast or orange rolls, alongside Mas favorites like the papas bravas and chorizo. Selections change with the seasons—new dishes pop up as local produce becomes available. Since Mas doesn’t take reservations and there’s often a line for the regular dinner service, the once-a-month brunch is a great opportunity to indulge with less risk of a long wait.

The lobster roll at Public Fish & Oyster (market priced, but usually around $25) is one of the best things on the restaurant’s menu, but the item is only available during the daily happy hour from 4-6pm, alongside other specials like raw Virginia oysters for $1.25 apiece. The special sandwich is made with a fresh supply of Maine lobster, served on a buttered split-top brioche roll, and offered both Maine style (chilled, with mayo) or Connecticut style (warm, with butter). Lobster rolls aren’t known for being a steal, but it’s a treat that’s well worth the price tag. Don’t dilly-dally, though. “Because we only use fresh lobster, there are days where we run out,” says owner Daniel Kaufman.

So, now you know!

Categories
Living

Small Bites

A selection of Caromont Farm goat cheeses. Photo: Bill Parrish

Finally, a real Jewish deli in town

It’s about time, right? After a soft opening on January 26, Modern Nosh will be fully up and running at 111 Water St. on February 5. Owned by Stephanie Levin, a Norfolk native who graduated from UVA in 1990, the restaurant will serve corned beef and brisket cooked in-house, pastrami imported from New York, and other traditional Jewish fare, such as tongue, latkes, and homemade matzo ball soup. A specially selected marbled rye made in Baltimore will be trucked in every day the restaurant is open (Tuesday-Saturday, from 11am to 8pm).

Levin is pulling a Paul Newman, and donating 100 percent of Modern Nosh’s profits to local charities. “Our tagline is ‘you dine, we donate,’ and it’s combining two important things in my life—giving back to the community and food.”

Kidding around

Equally famous for its artisanal cheeses and baby goat-snuggling events, Caromont Farm will host a summer program bringing 8- to 12-year-olds together with their kid counterparts—you know, goats. The Field-to-Fork Day Camps will provide instruction on local food and sustainability, and include activities such as cheesemaking, vegetable gardening, foraging, and cooking.

“Kids should have an opportunity to see the whole picture,” says Caromont owner Gail Hobbs-Page, who will hold the four-day camps at the farm in Esmont, Virginia, this June. “There are so many teachable moments in farming.”

Hip-hop with your BBQ?

In what may be a first for a Charlottesville restaurant, Ace Biscuit & Barbecue has posted a parental warning. It’s for Wu-Tang Wednesday, a weekly event featuring classic hip-hop and rap. “Due to the nature of the music, there may be language which may offend you or your kids,” the posting says. “Unless, of course, you take parenting advice from Ol’ Dirty Bastard, in which case, WU-TANG IS FOR THE CHILDREN.” (That’s a tongue-in-cheek reference to rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s declaration at the 1998 Grammy Awards.)

“Every Wednesday we play unedited hip-hop music, anything of lyrical value, nothing that’s ‘drug use, drug use, drug use,’” says Ace Biscuit manager Andrew Autry, who’s better known as Wolf. “We’re trying to get back to ground level—we want fun customers in here.”

Categories
Living

The ham biscuit is named Charlottesville’s signature dish

JM Stock Provisions tops its buttermilk-and-lard biscuit with tasso ham and a drizzle of honey and hot sauce. Photo by Tom McGovern

By Sam Padgett

Considering our broad food and drink world, it’s difficult to imagine a single dish that could represent the city’s local food scene. Charlottesville, on account of its geography and demographics, has a more dynamic selection of foods compared to the seafood-obsessed southeastern part of the state and metropolitan areas of Northern Virginia. However, difficult as it might be to identify the dish of the city, a panel of four judges assembled by the Tom Tom Founders Festival made the executive decision that it is the humble ham biscuit.

Leni Sorensen, a culinary historian and the writer behind the Indigo House blog, sees ham biscuits as an inevitability of living in Charlottesville. Sorensen moved here later in life, and the ubiquity of ham biscuits made an impression on her. “They’re everywhere,” she says. “They’re a part of every cocktail party, every museum opening, every kind of festive occasion. I personally know people who would not dream of having a party without ham biscuits.”

Besides its abundance, Sorensen sees the ham biscuit as something that cuts across all spectrums of dining, from gourmet to everyday. Locally, the adaptability of the ham biscuit is extraordinarily clear.

Specialty foods store Feast! has a 2-inch li’l cutie of a slider-style ham biscuit made with local sweet potato biscuits, local ham and a dollop of Virginia spicy plum chutney.

Timberlake Drugs makes its traditional version with a fluffy white biscuit and ham, and there’s the option to add egg and cheese, too.

JM Stock Provisions tops a buttermilk-and-lard biscuit with tasso (spicy, smoky, Louisiana-style ham) and a drizzle of both honey and hot sauce.

The Ivy Inn uses Kite’s Country ham, a sugar-cured ham from Madison County, served with hickory syrup mustard.

The Whiskey Jar also uses Kite’s ham and offers the option of adding egg and cheese.

Ace Biscuit & Barbecue, Fox’s Cafe, Tip Top Restaurant, Commonwealth Restaurant & Skybar, Keevil & Keevil Grocery and Kitchen, Bluegrass Grill & Bakery and plenty of other spots that we don’t have room to name here have ’em, too.

What’s your favorite local version of the ham biscuit? Tell us at eatdrink@c-ville.com.

Is this the best IPA ever?

Luddites might want to steer clear of Champion Brewing Company’s new ML IPA, which debuted last week during the Tom Tom Founders Festival. In conjunction with local startup Metis Machine Learning (the “ML” in the name), Champion’s newest beverage was designed via computer. Using machine learning algorithms, information about the nation’s top 10 best-selling IPAs, as well as Charlottesville’s 10 worst-selling IPAs, was fed into a program that output the desired parameters for the theoretical best IPA.

While there are plenty of variables that make up the taste of the beer, they analyzed the beers’ IBUs (International Bittering Unit, a measure of bitterness), SRM (Standard Reference Method, a color system brewers use to determine finished beer and malt color) and alcohol content.

The results for each variable were 60, 6 and 6, respectively, possibly stoking more fear of a machine uprising.

Michael Prichard, founder and CEO of Metis Machine, wants to quash those fears. “All we really wanted to do was arm the brewer with some information they could work with,” he says. “It’s still a craft; we don’t want people to think we’re trying to replace the brewer.”

Hunter Smith, president and head brewer at Champion, confirms: “At the end of the day, all I was given was some parameters. After that, it was brewing as usual.”

Prichard and Smith met at a machine learning talk about a year ago, and they decided to collaborate; it seemed appropriate to have the ML IPA ready to serve during the innovation-focused Tom Tom Festival.

The ML IPA, which could stay on the menu after Tom Tom if the demand is there, is, according to Smith, a “spot-on typical IPA.”

Market Street Wine opens

Back in February, we reported that Market Street Wineshop owner Robert Harllee had decided to retire and sell his shop at 311 E. Market St. to two longtime employees, Siân Richards and Thadd McQuade. Market Street Wineshop 2.0—now called Market Street Wine—will open this weekend, with an open house from 1 to 4pm on Saturday, April 21.—Erin O’Hare

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Living Uncategorized

Vitae Spirits opens for sales and tastings

Ian Glomski makes a foray into the local drink scene with his molasses-based liquors at Vitae Spirits. Photo by Amy Jackson

For Ian Glomski, 2012 was a watershed year. He turned 40 and narrowly escaped a massive wildfire while on a birthday fly-fishing trip in Wyoming. He served as a juror for the George Huguely trial and fought cancer for the first time.

“All of that added up,” he says, and with mortality on the mind, he started thinking about what he wanted to do with his remaining years. He had a good job as a professor of microbiology specializing in infectious disease at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, but knew he’d regret it if he kept doing what he was doing.

But his midlife crisis wasn’t a red Porsche or a young girlfriend, he says with a laugh. It was a distillery.

Glomski left his professor gig to open Vitae Spirits at 715 Henry Ave., next door to Ace Biscuit and Barbecue. Since 2015, he’s been making high-quality rum and gin to better serve the Virginia cocktail community, which has a cornucopia of local beers and wines, but few local liquors.

Glomski says he initially got into alcohol production to skirt the law—when he was 18, he could buy hops and yeast, but not beer, so he started making his own while a student at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Frustrated with the “crappy beer” he was brewing, he took a microbiology course to learn how to isolate and remove the microorganisms that were ruining his brews.

For a scientist interested in alcohol, he says distilling was the next mountain to summit, and he started with rum. In his opinion, there’s “no better spirit to pair with fruit juice than rum, especially white rum.”

Photo by Amy Jackson
Photo by Amy Jackson

Glomski says the production of Vitae rums (and gin) begins by fermenting sugar cane molasses into a molasses beer that’s about 8 percent alcohol (Glomski estimates Vitae uses about 27,000 pounds of Louisiana molasses every three months). They load the molasses beer into the custom-built copper pot still and heat it. Compounds in the beer that boil at low temperatures transition from liquid into vapor, and the vapors rise out of the top of the still. Once outside the still, the vapors are cooled back down to room temperature and turn into a liquid. Glomski says the very first vapors to boil off the molasses beer taste awful, but once they’ve boiled off completely, most of what’s left in the beer is water and ethanol (drinking alcohol). With continued heating, ethanol is next to vaporize, and those are the vapors cooled into a liquid to make rum.

The Alley Light bar manager Micah LeMon uses Vitae’s Platinum Rum in his Rose Hill Ruby cocktail; it’s different from most other white rums (e.g., Bacardi) in that it’s not filtered through charcoal, a process that can strip flavor from rum. “When you taste the molasses and then you taste the rum, you understand why people call liquor ‘spirits’: It is the fortified essence of molasses,” says LeMon.

The Golden Rum, infused with sugarcane grilled on Ace’s hickory next door, “is a great component for a split-spirit-based tiki cocktail” for its strong char, oak and molasses flavors, he says.

Glomski explains that to make gin, the Vitae team loads the still with ethanol drinking alcohol, and adds 17 different botanicals before heating it up. The vaporizing ethanol carries the aromatic oils from the herbs and spices out of the still and into drinking gin, while leaving the bitter flavors of the herbs and spices behind. Vitae’s gin is unusual in its molasses base: Glomski estimates that of the 800 craft distilleries making gin in the U.S., only about half a dozen of them use molasses, instead of corn and wheat, in the alcohol to make gin.

“The molasses is more muted in the gin [than in the rums], but still present, and complimented by lemongrass, lavender and pepper on the palate,” says LeMon.

All three liquors are available at Vitae’s tasting room, which opened October 15. The Platinum Rum hit ABC shelves April 1 of this year, but the Golden Rum and Modern Gin are special order bottles.

Per Virginia ABC laws, Vitae can serve a maximum of 3 ounces of liquor per person per day (that’s about two full-size cocktails), and can only serve alcohol produced on the premises. If Glomski wants to mix and serve a cocktail with a complementary alcohol, he must make it himself.

For those purposes, Glomski has a few other products in the works, including an orange liqueur made with local trifoliate orange zest, a coffee liqueur and an anisette made with fennel and Buddha’s hand zest. But for now, Vitae’s small bar serves up single-alcohol cocktails, such as the Gold ’n’ Stormy (Golden Rum, muddled lime, Reed’s Extra Ginger Brew), the Platinum Daiquiri (Platinum Rum, lime juice, vanilla bean-infused simple syrup) and the Modern Tonic (Modern Gin, muddled lime, Fever Tree Elderflower Tonic).

Vitae will sell about 3,500 cases of spirits per year, and while that’s enough to make it a successful business, Glomski expects the output to evolve as he incorporates more products and distillers reserves (like those liqueurs and some barrel-aged rums) into the repertoire.

He doesn’t plan to match big-distributor output or visibility, but he does plan to invite the community in. He’ll test plenty of products on adventurous tasting room customers and offer tours of the facility. He’s open to hearing tasters’ ideas and even doing custom production runs for those who have the means.

“We can’t beat the big guys on production, on quality control,” says Glomski. “So we have to offer something else—and that’s the direct connection to people who are vested in the product. We can adapt quickly, and we can be creative.”

Contact Erin O’Hare at eatdrink@c-ville.com.

Categories
Living

Author traces rich history of Virginia barbecue

Locally, both BBQ Exchange (owner Craig Hartman pictured) and Brian Ashworth’s Ace Biscuit & Barbecue are doing Virginia barbecue right says author Joe Haynes. Photo by Eric Kelley

Barbecue is like religion. There are many different styles—Texas, North Carolina, Kansas City, Memphis—and people tend to think that their way is the right way, the best way. People argue over which is most delicious, the original, the one true barbecue.

For years, “every time we’d say we do Virginia barbecue at our restaurant, people would laugh at us” as if there were no such thing, says Craig Hartman of Gordonsville’s BBQ Exchange. Virginia is known for its ham and bacon and it’s salting and smoking processes, Hartman says.

Not for much longer. Joe Haynes, a tech consultant and curious lifelong barbecue fan, has spent the past six years uncovering the rich history of Virginia barbecue and giving Virginia barbecue cooks like Hartman fuel for the fight against the naysayers.

In fact, Haynes declares in his heavily-researched book, Virginia Barbecue: A History, what we call Southern barbecue was born in Virginia’s Tidewater region in the 17th century.

It did not begin in the Caribbean, he says (though a 2013 Smithsonian Magazine article claims as much). In the 15th century, Christopher Columbus was the first European to observe and report the Taino Indians’ “barbacoa” cooking technique, but “barbecue didn’t need a European to witness it for it to start,” he says.

“Barbecue—the cooking technique where you take meat, put it over coals and slowly cook it for hours—is ancient,” Haynes says. Nobody really knows where it started, though Haynes suspects it started in Africa, spread to the Middle East and Asia, then the ancestors of Native Americans brought it to the Americas.

Haynes’ research shows that Powhatan Indians threw festivals (pow wows) where they’d cook hunted game (venison, rabbits, squirrels, birds) for hours over beds of coals. When the Virginia settlers arrived, they were dependent on the Powhatan for food. The colonists brought cookbooks that included instructions on how to cook meat on grills using vinegar, salt, pepper and a little butter—the basic components of a Southern barbecue sauce, Haynes says—and showed that basting method to the Indians.

As Virginians migrated they took barbecue to the Carolinas and elsewhere.

Haynes didn’t set out to prove that Southern barbecue as we know it started in Virginia, but that’s where the sources led him. “It’s not like I’m pulling this out of thin air,” he says. Washington Post barbecue and grilling columnist Jim Shahin declared Virginia Barbecue “as deeply researched as any barbecue book I’ve read.”

It’s the sauce and, to some extent, meat choice, that defines a region’s barbecue, and here in Virginia there are four distinct styles. Southside and Tidewater’s tangy tomato- and vinegar-based sauces usually contain a hint of mustard.

The Shenandoah Valley and mountain region’s Virginia-style barbecue chicken is typically smothered in a vinegary sauce seasoned with sweet herbs, garlic, salt and black pepper and, occasionally, celery seed.

Northern Virginia’s tomato-based, herbed sauces sometimes include fruit and tend to be sweeter than other area varieties.

Our own central Virginia and Piedmont regions offer full-bodied, richly spiced tomato sauces, usually with cloves, sassafras and ginger in addition to salt, pepper and vinegar, Haynes says.

Locally, both BBQ Exchange and Brian Ashworth’s Ace Biscuit & Barbecue are doing Virginia barbecue right, in examples such as Ace’s Virginia red and BBQ Exchange’s Hogfire and Colonial bacon sauces.

Ashworth, who didn’t intend to make authentic Virginia barbecue (he just wanted to make good, smoky barbecue, he says), is glad to be a part of the long history that Haynes has brought to light. “If we’re not rebuilding a name for Virginia barbecue, we’re building the name now,” Ashworth says. “It’s cool to be part of that.”

TASTE TEST

Dying to taste authentic Virginia barbecue for yourself? Here’s what to order.

Ace Biscuit & Barbecue

Virginia red sauce: Brian Ashworth makes his own tomato base for this sauce that Joe Haynes calls “just amazing.” Ashworth says it was inspired by Coca-Cola sauces he’s had further south, and it also includes red onion, root beer, fresh ginger and “choice spices.”

Brisket: is not a traditional Virginia barbecue meat (that’d be pork), but Ashworth cooks brisket—a Texas barbecue staple—Virginia-style, directly on the coals (which Ashworth sources himself from trees on his Barboursville farm).

BBQ Exchange

Hogfire sauce: A classic southside Virginia barbecue sauce, says Haynes.

Colonial bacon sauce: “A whole lot of onions, a whole lot of bacon,” and similar to a sauce Haynes found in a book of colonial Virginia recipes.