Meet The Team / Josh Ozersky

It should surprise no one that, committed as I am to the consumption of smoked animal fat, I found little time to actually write about the tour while I was on it. Those intersticial periods between barbecues were spent either in productive slumber, or recumbent on an air-conditioned easy chair in my Hill Country headquarters. But having now returned, I feel the need to get the first of these four essays done. Today's post is hymn to the greatness of Kreuz Market; tomorrow a summary of the also-rans; then, an open-pit barbecue done collaboratively by myself, meat-master Zak Palaccio, and Robbie Richter, New York City's most decorated competition barbecuer; and lastly, I'll do my best to answer the questions with which I began this adventure (not that anybody cares.)

KREUZ MARKET

There is a special poignant paradox about starting at the top. Orson Welles spent a lifetime constructing the postscript to Citizen Kane; David knocked out Goliath with a single shot, and the next thing he knew, he was setting up Uriah the Hittite. My trip followed a similar path. The very first stop on our tour was Kreuz Market, the Bayreuth of Beef. Kreuz's isn't much to look at; it's a new building, unpleasing to the eye, offering no hint of the magic within. A story comes with it.

"The influence of meat on the brain-stem" might be a paper, submitted by myself, to the Royal College of Physicians -- if I wasn't too fried to write it. There has been a lot of meat going into the Ozersky system in recent weeks. Half a dozen episodes were worthy of Slashfood chronicles, and would have been, had they not been succeeded within days by other, equally meat-tastic adventures. I had meant to tell you about my Steak Symposium In a Strip Club; A Visit By the Baron of Bacon, a tale of pigs and madness; What The Pit-Man Told Me, a romance; and other meat-related narratives. I still might. But now something is around the corner that's so big that I will have to blog it over several days.

I'm going to Texas tomorrow. To eat barbecue in the Hill Country.

The Steakhouse of My Dreams is a special place -- but you can't go get a reservation.   It is my secret sanctuary. I repair there when the world is too much. Let the buxom belles of Avenue B ignore me; let editors repulse my pitches, and copy crones mangle my best phrases. I see what my life is like. I know that my Cadillac has a broken grill, and a big crack in the windshield. Indian boys pelt my windows with durian. I don't care. I just close my eyes, and I see that place of my most fevered meat-dreams.

Here is what it is like.

Steakhouses, as a rule, all used to market themselves the same way. The place was presented as a sanctum sanctorum, an all-male preserve where men could drink whiskey, eat charred beef, and revel in their temporary liberation from the tyranny of women.

But times have changed; and the New York steakhouse has changed with them, giving yesteryear's cultural baggage the heave-ho. A few classic exemplars of the old school persist, and are rightly celebrated as temples of meat-worship; but now they compete with a new generation of steakhouses, all of whom bring a new, metrosexual take to the most primal of all restaurant concepts.

Typical of this breed is Quality Meats, a tarted-up meatery from the corporate group that brought you 78 different Smith and Wollensky restaurants, not to mention Cite, Maloney and Porcelli, and the Post House.

 My adopted religion, or at least the ultra-liberal version to which I adhere, requires certain sacrifices. But I just don’t like to make them. In a way, that makes the rare fasting days, like Good Friday, a good test case for Catholic Spirituality. A more pious person would welcome the chance to deny himself something. A less credulous one would dispense with hardship entirely. My own solution, perfected after many years of not trying, is to embrace the letter of the observance, while violating its spirit in every way. This works pretty well for me.