Bob Kantor grabs a bottle of his homemade Texas Red Sauce and brandishes it with the gusto Nikita Khruschev exuded when wielding a shoe.
He is about to make a very important point.
“Now, I have some red sauce here. We call this barbecue sauce,” said Kantor, a chef and the proprietor of San Francisco’s Memphis Minnie’s, a Haight Street barbecue joint hailed as the best in the city if not all of California.
“But if I were to pour it over my head, that wouldn’t make me barbecue.”
Kantor laughs and leans back beneath a wall overflowing with degrees, citations and proclamations issued to him by myriad barbecue associations and societies.
The son of a kosher butcher, Kantor is a trained gourmet chef. But his love for a traditional American cooking style — and all things porcine — led him into a line of work in which he can market a sauce labeled “It’s STUPID hot!”
A taller-than average man of 58 — and he “earned every one of those years” — Kantor pulls his black hair back into a tight ponytail. He wears black, Coke bottle glasses and sports a pair of salt-and-pepper sideburns and a gargantuan, snow-white walrus mustache befitting a Prussian cavalry commander that almost totally obscures his ready grin.
And while Kantor is always ready to laugh, you won’t catch him joking around about barbecue. Because barbecue — that’s serious business.
First things first: You have probably never had barbecue before. Because when Kantor talks about barbecue, he isn’t referring to Korean, Thai or the stuff you do in the back yard, and he most certainly isn’t talking about barbecue-flavored potato chips.
When it comes to barbecue, Kantor borrows the catchphrase from the film “Highlander”: There can be only one. If it’s not “slow-smoked, Southern-style barbecue,” it ain’t barbecue at all.
“In the past 15 years or so, as barbecue has become more and more popular, I think there’s less and less real barbecue in the United States. You need to cook at a low temperature, slowly, for a long time and it has to come from wood or
coal. That’s it!” he said with a flourish.
For the record, Memphis Minnie’s uses whole logs of white oak to feed “Olivia,” Kantor’s 2,500-pound smoker. The campfire-like smell of the burning wood mixing with the otherworldly aroma of meat slow-cooking for as long as 18 hours dominates his restaurant and stubbornly clings to one’s garments long after leaving the building.
“Many places essentially rely on a red sauce to convey the taste of barbecue. But barbecue isn’t about sauce. It’s about the meat, the way it’s seasoned and cooked. You can’t have barbecue without smoke and wood. I can’t say that enough.”
And, thankfully, he does not douse himself with red sauce just to prove a point.
As Kantor pontificates on all things smoke and wood surrounded by country-fried memorabilia with Robert Johnson’s appropriately smoky voice trickling out of the sound system, he can’t help but pause and marvel at the strange set of events that led him to become “a barbecue evangelical.”
“One of the many things I like about barbecue is that it has an organic quality. Who would have thought this chubby little Jewish boy from Brooklyn would start out his days lighting a fire?”
Kantor’s mother, Minnie, did indeed grow up in Memphis before heading to The Big Apple with hopes of becoming a Yiddish teacher. There, she met her future husband on a picket line, where he was demonstrating with the rest of the kosher butcher’s union.
Much of Kantor’s youth was spent in kosher delis, where he worked for years as a busboy and, later, the counterman.
He moved to San Francisco in 1970, rubbed shoulders with R. Crumb during a brief (but happy) career in underground comics, and later drove trucks and buses. But his real love was always cooking, which he did in any restaurant that would have him.
Kantor graduated from the California Culinary Academy in 1983, and embarked on a career “in fancy-assed restaurants serving fancy-assed food.”
That, to put it mildly, wasn’t Kantor’s ideal career. He dryly notes that it took longer to read the descriptions of his creations on the menu than it did to consume them, and he burned out after several years.
He then worked for the Max’s restaurant chain and got into consulting before a career epiphany when a restaurateur asked him to do some research and devise a few barbecue dishes. The result was a two-year barbecue odyssey crisscrossing the nation in search of every last bit of barbecuing lore.
He even bumped into fellow Jewish barbecue mavens in Alabama, Nebraska and Tennessee while blending regional traditions into a synergistic net of barbecue goodness.
And the proof is, literally, in the pudding. Kantor’s homemade banana pudding, that is. And his “potlikker greens,” “Memphis sweet smoked pork” and “Texas beef brisket,” all Kantor creations based on traditional barbecuing styles but tweaked, ever so slightly.
“You wanna see my PDA?” he asks with a laugh, removing a fistful of multicolored index cards from his pocket, each with a recipe he wrote down in a fit of creativity.
Kantor can sign his name next to every item on Minnie’s menu, save the “fried grit stix,” which was the brainchild of his college-age son, Ben, a graduate of Brandeis Hillel Day School.
Kantor pulls a brisket roughly the size of a Buick Riviera out of a stainless steel drawer and flashes a proud smile.
“Yes, we do get orders for Rosh Hashanah,” he says with a laugh.
“I enjoy that.”
Seated back at a red-checkered table in the front of his busy restaurant, Kantor is visited by John Bullin, a basketball player-tall, blond-haired chef, showing the boss some of the Southern goodies he hopes to serve on Minnie’s future brunch menu.
The culinary expert in Kantor emerges, as he and Bullin talk shop, discussing the deep-fried salmon croquettes’ taste and texture, with both chefs agreeing the creation would go well with black truffles. Kantor finally pronounces his preference for the Dixie Fry croquettes over the cornmeal variety and deems Bullin’s efforts a “damn fine start.”
A few moments later, the tall chef returns with a new plate of croquettes and places them in front of Kantor.
His face breaks out into a wide grin.
“I’m gonna like these. I know it.”