The Insiders' Guide to Twin Cities BBQ

SAUCE
Every cook who ever put meat over an open fire has an idea of what great barbecue sauce should, or shouldn’t, be. As far as we’re concerned, real barbecue is served with a barbecue sauce that is distinct from rubs, marinades, cures, bastes, glazes, mops, and slathers. Sauces can be sweet, smoky, and red Kansas City–style concoctions, or vinegar-based puckerers from North Carolina, or Alabama’s traditional mayonnaise-based white sauce. Most are meant to go with the meat preferred in that region. The thin, tart (mustard-infused) sauce of the Carolinas is the perfect foil for their pork, pulled or sliced. In our region, barbecue sauce is a hybrid of the Kansas City and Memphis styles: red, smoky, spicy, and tinged with a vinegar tartness. It’s served thick and is not as sweet as the sauce preferred in St. Louis.

1. Redstone American Grill
We were as surprised as anyone that a restaurant that doesn’t specialize in barbecue won out over so many specialists for best sauce in town. Redstone’s is thick, tart, and sweet with a subtle smoky finish and a heat that lingers.

2. Baker’s Ribs
This Texas-based outfit makes a Texas-style sauce with a little bit more ketchup and less spice than most Texans would recognize. In the Lone Star state, sauce is meant for beef brisket, and it’s thin, spicy, and tart. Baker’s accentuates more of the black pepper and brown sugar notes, but still comes up with a winner.

3. Cap’s Grille (tie)
Cap’s is proud of its sauce—and should be. The stuff is great—traditional, tomato-based, without a lot of heat or tartness, a sensible sturdy companion to Cap’s ‘cue.

3. Ted Cook’s (tie)
Syrupy and vinegary tasting, Cook’s sauce is a tart-sweet hybrid that bears little resemblance to the other sauces that predominate locally. If you like it hot, try the medium, and, if you dare, ask for the hot—it’s wicked.

Close Behind: Dixies Calhoun, Market Bar-B-Que (tie)

BRISKET
The prevailing beef cut used for Texas-style barbecue is brisket, a very tough and rascally muscle cut from the steer’s underbelly. Beef briskets are huge, weighing up to sixteen pounds. Like most working muscles, brisket needs to be cooked low and slow until tender, lest it end up tough and dry. The true test of great barbecued brisket is taste, but barbecue experts also use the pink ring of smoke-tinged flesh as harbinger of how low, slow, and perfectly handled brisket should be.

1. Market Bar-B-Que
The only local barbecue item to receive a perfect score from our tasters, Market’s pit-fired brisket (served thin-sliced) has a noticeable pink ring, deep beefy flavor, exceptional moistness, a smoky perfume, and melting grain when eaten. The only thing separating this from the Texas gold standard is the absence of charred crust.

2. Cap’s Grille
A great beef sandwich. The meat from a thick brisket is thinly sliced, placed on the grill to give it a brief char (not authentic, but a nice touch), then piled high, and drizzled with Cap’s Kansas City–style sauce. There’s no smoky flavor or pink smoke ring.