BBQ!? In Seattle!?

Several weeks ago we decided to try out a restaurant that we had been eyeing for some time.  I did my Undergraduate work in Kentucky and completely fell in love with southern food.  When my then-bf’s mother offered me a glass of sweet tea and I assumed this was the Sweetened Iced Tea I knew from NY, I nearly choked on the sugar in it.  But after the initial coughing and sputtering, I was hooked.   At this point, I am probably made up of at least 23% sweet tea (that number is based on very precise calculations).  It is addicting and delicious.  Along with sweet tea, I fell in love with pulled pork, fried pickles, hot browns, Chik-Fil-A, and numerous other not-so-good-for-you-but-to-die-for-delicious stuff.  It was an indulgently wonderful four years, and I have carried certain parts of KY with me back to NY and now to Seattle.  I can make some killer ribs, have tried my own fried dill pickle slices and sometimes crave sweet tea so badly that I make a giant pitcher that lasts us about 2 days.  When we went to KY in July because one of my best friends was getting married, I had the entire trip planned around food (and the wedding, of course).  We ate way too much, but Matt had never been to KY before and I was really missing it.  Thankfully, I have some equally indulgent friends and we had lots of company at our various food-detours.  I’ll hopefully be heading back there in June (for another wedding!) and I am already trying to decide what the best use of my time will be food-wise! 

Anyway, in my near-constant yearning for southern yumminess, we came to the subject of this post: RoRo BBQ, formerly the Rowdy Cowgirl, on Stone Way in Seattle.  I was skeptical, simply because this was a bbq place in the Northwest…the farthest we could get from KY, practically.

The decor was really cute…it’s a small one-room shack of a restaurant, with a mish mash of cowgirl/cowboy knick knacks, paper towels & wet naps on the tables, a giant collection of empty hot sauce bottles, etc.  A few tables and a window bar-top (the picnic tables outside are probably fun when it’s not freezing cold!) were the only seating aside from the counter looking into the kitchen.  Inside, the only other people there when we arrived were two little boys and their parents.  On the flat screen TV in the corner, they were playing old Bugs Bunny cartoons from a DVD. Fun! The kids were loving it.  The TV was muted and old country music was playing.  The only thing I recognized was some Johnny Cash every once in a while, which made me pretty happy.

It smelled delicious and properly bbq-y when we walked in, and the wonderfully sweet woman running the place was really friendly and welcoming.  She asked us if we’d ever been there before and pointed us to the menu.  

Pretty basic and all written up on a large board behind the counter—various combinations of bbq choices, sides, sandwiches, a couple desserts, sodas mixed in-house (neat!) and sweet tea!! SWEET TEA!!! We ordered ribs and a pulled pork sandwich deluxe (with coleslaw and pickles on top).  For our sides we had their shoestring fries, baked beans and cornbread.  When I ordered my sweet tea, she asked “How sweet? Alabama Sweet or Seattle Sweet?”   There was half a second where I debated saying “KENTUCKY SWEET!” but with very little actual hesitation it was without a doubt, Alabama Sweet!  Matt got the same thing (he’s a sweet tea convert, thanks to me) and she told us to grab a table and she’d come over to explain the sauces to us.

Explain the sauces?? Could that possibly be necessary?  Turns out, yes!  They had 7 squeeze bottles on the table….one was ketchup, one was their standard bbq sauce…the rest were variations on their sauce, with different levels of heat, smokey and sweet flavors.  After her really wonderful explanation of them all, we of course taste-tested them with our fries!

The fries were so delicious…I love shoestring fries!! And there were a ton of them! With any meal you get two sides OR an order of fries. At first we were grumpy about this, but it made sense when we saw how many fries there were!

Actually, everything was delicious…the baked beans had noticeable pieces of bacon in them, the ribs were completely falling apart and the pulled pork was perfect for adding your favorite bbq sauce from the table-top selection.  All I could have asked for would be some fried pickles, which were NOT on their menu.  They also didn’t have cheese grits, but I have only really ever seen these at Billy’s BBQ in Lexington.

About 5 minutes into our meal, I had finished my first glass of sweet tea, and she brought the pitcher out for a refill…she also suggested that she loves the tea with a splash of their homemade blueberry syrup (which they use in their sodas).  She thought I’d love it, and I DID! YUM!!! Sweet tea + Blueberry Syrup = Enough reason to go back to RoRo’s. 

Our meal wasn’t necessarily cheap, but that was largely because we ordered WAY too much food.  You get a ton of food for the money, and the meals are definitely splittable.  Plus, they have compost and recycling!! We bussed our own trays and split the garbage into compost and recycling and then the rest went to the counter, where the sweet woman, who had been calling everyone  “baby” the entire time, let us know that we better be back! We assured her that we would, and that is definitely the plan.  Yummy food that was fast and fun! Plus they have a take-out window, just in case you need to eat your ribs on-the-go… a very common problem for me.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 at 7:25 am and is filed under Fun, Life, Matthew, Southern Love, Yum. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.