Over the last three years or so, I’ve written about nearly 20 new barbecue restaurants. That’s more than the steak houses, Italian joints, ramen-ya, boutique taquerias, and all the other overplayed restaurant trends of the moment. Reiterating the common flaws inherent to most of these barbecue spots has become just as exhausting and formulaic as they are.
I went into Mixon’s already skeptical. If you’ve ever judged any professional barbecue competitions, you know that the set of values that determines winning barbecue isn’t the same as lovingly smoked commercial barbecue, which comes with its own challenges with regard to consistency and longevity. For one thing, competition barbecue frequently places too much emphasis on sauce, which can be and often is used to disguise weak meat. So I was immediately disarmed when, after placing an order for brisket, pulled pork, and ribs with sauce on the side, I was told that the kitchen never reflexively sauces the barbecue. Myron Mixon had my attention.
But when the meat hits the table, what’s painfully clear is that Rylon’s doesn’t fall in middle of this perceived spectrum. It isn’t even on the spectrum. The best that you can say is that it uniformly falls into the ignoble category of meat Jell-O. Ribs slide from the bone like they’re melting. Serve the brisket with some kasha varnishkes on the side and it wouldn’t be out of place at a seder. Most damning of all, nothing—including the pulled pork, perhaps the most smoke-absorbent meat of them all—tastes of the crucial element of woodsmoke. You can call this roasted pork, but you can’t call it barbecue.
