Soul Food from the Heart... in Venice, CA!

We watch Food Network a lot because cable is where it's at, baby! I swear, if the networks come up with one more of those staged 'reality' shows, I'm gonna barf. So we watch HGTV and Food Network. I even watch the Green channel to get tips on little things I can do to help. And naturally, The Sports Fan channel changes through multiple sporting events along with DIY, HGTV, and Food Network. He has to in order to maintain his The Sports Fan moniker! But I digress.

One of the shows we love to watch is Guy Fieri's 'Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives' not because I'm in love with Guy's classic 60's Camaro convertible (though I am!), but because it features just unpretentious plain old good food! And Guy is just a regular, well, guy. I admit to finding his tattoos icky and fascinating all at the same time. His ability to wear his sunglasses in various places they were not originally meant to be worn is kind of interesting. (I keep waiting for them to fall off into a pot of something.) We love the show.

One day while watching a marathon of DDI&D one Saturday, we started looking up the places Guy was talking about on the internet while we watched. TSF said we should make a list of them so that we could visit some on our travels. We were watching an episode about BBQ and just knew that we'd by-passed one of these places in favor of a chain restaurant on our way from the airport in Charlotte, NC to visit my brother in Charleston, SC. So I started a list in my Pocket PC. We love finding special restaurants in the places we visit.

While in Anaheim for a couple of days, we decided to take a drive to one of the places we'd seen on the show. There is no shortage of great places to eat in LA. The only question was how to choose one in the five or ten minutes we had to decide and get ourselves on the road before they were all closed for the night. TSF suggested looking up one of Guy's places and I pulled up my handy list and chose the only one I had down for LA. We got on the way and spent more time looking for a gas station in the land of Mickey and Minney and Donald and Pluto than we did in deciding to eat dinner at Baby Blues BBQ!

Their website said they were open til 10 and it was just after 8 PM when we got on the way. The GPS said that it would take us an hour to get from Anaheim to Venice and it did. We were driving down Lincoln Boulevard in Venice taking in the varied businesses and some of them frankly had us wondering what we were getting into. But as soon as we got there, we knew that Baby Blues BBQ was going to be worth it.

And it was! The gals who seated us were soooo genuinely nice. Suzanne assured us that their hostess was a miracle worker at squeezing in more and more people into this tiny bistro.

And tiny is the word! The tables are the sort they serve drinks on at nightclubs and bars. With a small bucket of sweetener packets, salt and pepper, a roll of paper towels that was about to come in very handy, and squeeze bottles of hot sauce, the regular BBQ sauce, and their special XXX sauce, there was barely room for our place settings, TSF's sweetened tea, and my regular iced tea. (In case you don't know, iced tea is THE drink of the South after Coca-Cola (pronounced Co-Co La with the accent on the second 'Co').) Baby Blues brews their tea sweet. You can smell the sweetness as you lift the glass to your mouth. It goes down like it is the nectar that humans were meant to drink. I had unsweetened tea, diabetic philistine that I am. It was strong, certainly able to stand up to the flavors it was meant to accompany.

The kitchen is behind the wall to the right of the window you see in these photos (this one taken by the lovely Suzanne, thank you!). So I was able to get some glimpses of the food being prepared. That kitchen is TI-NY. I don't think I'd fit through the doorway! Through the window, you can see the counter and beyond that another food prep area. While we waited for our food, we saw several people come in and sit there after shaking hands with a guy behind the counter wearing a Yankees cap, obviously regulars. The man's food is incredibly good. (He wishes his baseball team was. Their in last place this season. We're D-backs fans.)

I had the Bones and No Bones: a half slab of Memphis ribs with a half pound of pulled pork, cornbread, and two sides. I chose stewed tomatoes and collard greens, which I ended up not liking as they were the bitter variety. Our sweet waitress (I'm telling you that every single person there was really nice and welcoming!) brought me an order of mac-n-cheese to go to make up for that. The stewed tomatoes were nothing like what I expected, having been roasted, just slightly charred, with a beautiful, delicate smokey flavor set off with some garlic and I have to tell you that they were fairly salty. I couldn't get over how terrific they are! The meats. Ummm... to die for! The ribs were a little dry on the top (but hey! that's what the sauce is for, isn't it?) but nice and moist underneath the topmost layer. The bones just pulled right out. YUMMM! My favorite was the pulled pork. I happen to love pulled pork and Baby Blues' pulled pork is worth a three hour drive.

The hot sauce was just that. Hot sauce. The BBQ sauce is of the vinegary variety but still has a bit of sweetness to it. I loved it and I usually opt for the brown sugar kind. The XXX sauce was stellar. It had the vinegary taste and lots of heat but with so much smokey flavor that it took your tongue on a little ride on the way to the heat. Very yummy.

The Sports Fan opted for the Memphis Queen: a half slab of Baby Backs and half a slab of Memphis style ribs, again with cornbread and two sides. We both enjoyed a taste of the cornbread but what we really came for was the meat, so he concentrated on that. He'd ordered the mac-n-cheese and the mashed sweet potatoes as sides. The mashed sweet taters were dee-lish but I didn't think they were particularly special. But how can you not like them? We gobbled most of them down between the two of us.

On the other hand, the mac-n-cheese was the very best I have ever had, anywhere. Including any that I've made myself! We adore macaroni and cheese (see the photos of me, above, for verification!), so we think we are qualified to say that these are fabulous. We inhaled them!

Now, if you come here, remember that this place is tiny. The tables are tiny and you might end up sitting on the sidewalk outside as we did on a beautiful night (where it was actually quieter than inside), or at the counter inside. The service is good and attentive but casual. Everyone was as nice and as welcoming as they could possibly be. But this is a dive after all. It's damned good eats but it's no elegant restaurant. You'll get a napkin but you'll use the paper towels! For me, what really tells you that a restaurant has good food is how many cop cars are parked outside. We counted 4 cars outside with 7 cops from nearby Culver City parked inside when we left. It was after their closing hour of 10 PM but they didn't turn anyone away and the place was still going strong when we left at 10:30.

Baby Blues, please do not change a thing. You're a funky, friendly place with fabulous food. If you must expand, open another place just like this one in another neighborhood. Preferably our neighborhood!

If you are coming to LA, you have to go to Baby Blues and taste the BBQ and the mac-n-cheese! No matter where you are in LA, it's worth the drive. We're thinking about going back again on Friday night!