Blue Ribbon Barbecue, Arlington, MA

Blue Ribbon Barbecue
908 Massachusetts Avenue
Arlington, Massachusetts
(781) 648-7427

I’ve generally been unenthused by Fourth-of-July festivities or culinary fare. The advent of the day often depresses me because it’s the day I realize one-third of the summer is already gone, in many cases wasted away with missed opportunities to soak in sun or enjoy the longer days. And fireworks — a series of short-lived, superficial bursts of color—just aren’t intriguing enough for me to endure crazed, screaming, or drunken crowds. Aimee Mann touched on similar sentiments in her song “4th of July”:

Today’s the fourth of July
another June has gone by
And when they light up our town I just think
what a waste of gunpowder and sky

—from “Whatever,” 1993, The Imago Recording Company

Food-wise, for much of my teenage and young-adult life Independence Day meant a paternally imposed and catered under-the-back-porch cookout. The event was attended by my sister Bea and me and sometimes the family cat, with my mom “joining” us from the family room, just beyond the backdoor screen. Also present were the ol’ gnarly picnic table — which took up half the makeshift patio under the porch, the underside of which was laced with spider webs and other nests of nature (the locale was dark, dusty, and grimy, but definitely shady!) — charcoal-grilled hot dogs and burgers, buns, rolls, cole slaw and potato salad from DeMoulas/Market Basket, assorted beverages, and the ubiquitous squeeze bottle of Plochman’s yellow mustard. To thwart insectile attempts to join the feast, exposed food received additional shade in the form of a screen-food-dome-thingy most likely purchased from a Walter Drake or Lillian Vernon catalog. There was usually a fly swatter close by.

After I moved out of my parent’s abode, I was an independent Independence-Day reveler and diner, making a point of avoiding all July-Fourth-themed fetes and fare, until I met my then husband-to-be, who had his own Fourth-of-July ritual: lounging in a comfy beach chair on his North Cambridge seventh-floor Boston-facing balcony, peering at distant Esplanade and other local fireworks, and sucking on Redbones “Barbecue Belt” Ribs. And now our Independence Days revolve around this tradition, though with the balcony and fireworks now out of the equation for over three years (he often calls me “the girl who took his balcony away” after we started shacking up together in a new apartment), the focus is decidedly on the barbecued food. In early June we start counting down the weeks, then the days, then the hours, to this drippy, sticky, smoky, celebratory treat, replete with pulled pork, ribs, baked beans, collard greens, cornbread (the fake sweet and cakey kind), black-eyed corn, and whatever traditional or unexpected side the local BBQ joint offers.

That local joint is now Blue Ribbon Barbecue, just thirty minutes round-trip on foot. (The ritual of walking for your BBQ is akin to singing for your supper; we feel more like we’ve earned our Southern-influenced chow after strolling softly towards it.) I was first introduced to Blue Ribbon by a good friend who was wowed by the chow at the Ribbon’s Newton location and suggested we do Blue Ribbon takeout when she visited Arlington one day. Gary was familiar with the goods from patronizing their kiosk in the River-Street Cambridge Whole Foods.

Rarely are we disappointed by Blue Ribbon offerings; we often get Blue Ribbon takeout when we want to celebrate something, be it a birthday, a job offer, or the long-overdue market listing of an old condo. Below we comment on this year’s Great Independence Day Pig Out. Actually, if we insist on takeout from Blue Ribbon, it’s the Day-Before-Independence-Day Pig Out since they’re closed every year on July Fourth. (If they saw the crowd Redbones pulled in each Fourth of July, maybe they’d reconsider.)

Inside the Blue Ribbon

You can order many of Blue Ribbon’s barbecued meats as platters, though most are available in bulk and a few can be made into sandwiches. We usually order platters, which come with cornbread and a choice of two sides. Just this year I noticed the menu listed a Big Green Salad (just like on Seinfeld!), maybe I’ll consider this healthier alternative next time.

I alternate between the Barbecued Half Chicken Platter and the Pulled Chicken. This year, the Pulled Chicken. Though the chicken was dry and hard to swallow in spots, these tough spots were clearly the white-meat pieces; darker-meat pieces were melt-in-your-mouth tender. With a condiment-container-full of their sweet barbecue sauce mixed into half the heap, it’s quite the satisfying half-heap. The coleslaw was clean-tasting with a hint of celery seed (real or imagined), and wasn’t dripping with mayo because I transferred the slaw to a plate with a fork. As nice as the coleslaw tasted, I found it much more exciting when I combined each forkful with a bit of the saucy chicken. The baked beans were smooth with a nice molasses finish — a novelty to me since I’m used to my baked beans in a spicy or tomato-based sauce. The cornbread was dry but sweet, a great barbecue-sauce sopper-upper.

Gary got the Trio Platter, for which he chose North Carolina Pulled Pork, Kansas City Burnt Ends, and Memphis Ribs. The pulled pork had a nice smoky flavor and was not too tough. The ends were very moist, though the flavor from the sauce came through before the flavor of the meat. He liked that the ribs were not too saucy, had nice smoke rings, and their meat fell off the bone easily, but at least one of them was fattier than he would have liked. The greens had a “definite collard greeniness,” though he “didn’t get a whole lot of flavor” from the dirty rice. His take on the cornbread was the opposite of mine: “moist but not very tasty.” Go figure.

The platters from Blue Ribbon are so generous that both of us could eat just a little more than half and still have complete meals leftover (see the plated half-platters, below). These half-platters can be filling or downright gut-busting, but remain our Independence Day fare of choice.

Blue Ribbon BBQ platters and plated half-platters: Top Left: Trio Combo (with North Carolina Pulled Pork, Kansas City Burnt Ends, and Memphis Ribs), with sides of Collard Greens and Dirty Rice. Top Right: Pulled Chicken with sides of Baked Beans and Cole Slaw