Simple taste of Texas
Beach Hill Smokehouse succulent sliced brisket and coleslaw on a simple, pink-paper-lined tray.
‘Meat with a sauce is hiding something,’ says Terrance Hill, Beach Hill’s pitmaster DINING OUT continued on L4
Beach Hill Smokehouse (out of four) Address: 172 Main St. (at Gerrard St. E.), 416-792-8275, beachhillsmokehouse.com Chef: Terrance Hill Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Reservations: No Wheelchair access: Yes Price: Lunch for two, with tax and tip: $35 Rub. Smoke. Eat. Repeat.
That is the mantra at Beach Hill Smokehouse, a scrumptious new eastend joint specializing in Central Texas barbecue.
We’re talking brisket, ribs and country music. The meat is gorgeous, the welcome is as sweet as the homemade peach tea ($3) and the takeout? Well, don’t be surprised to have dogs follow you home.
Central Texas barbecue, the kind smoked in Lockhart and Austin, is plain. Meat is sold by the pound on pink paper, there are no basting sauces, and tantalizing aromas float out the door. So it is here. Follow the smell of smoke towards the back counter, where you will encounter a short chalkboard menu and the charming team of Darien List and Terrance Hill, former football teammates at Louisiana’s Grambling State University and distant cousins.
List, from Buffalo, owns Beach Hill; he moved to Toronto for his Canadian wife’s sake around the time of Donald Trump’s election.
Hill, from Dallas, is the pit master. Yes, it’s still called a pit even when it’s a 1,800pound capacity Oyler smoker in the back of the store. He is the frontman, quick with a joke or an explanation. List, the counter man, is softer spoken but no less proud of what comes out of the smoker.
“What’s the first thing you think of when you hear smoked turkey? Dry, right?” asks Hill, as List hands over a sample.
Dry this turkey breast ain’t. It’s so moist, juices bead on the blush pink surface. The taste is simplicity itself — black pepper, paprika, salt and smoke.
“Meat with a sauce is hiding something,” Hill says.
Beach Hill is a stylishly bare space set with picnic tables and paper towel rolls. It opened Jan. 2 with longhorn skulls and something close to shiplap on the walls. The look will be familiar to fans of Texas lifestyle entrepreneurs Chip and Joanna Gaines, who along with Tennessee celebrity Reese Witherspoon, are shining a light on Southern culture. Or at least a white version of it.
Beach Hill represents “the other side,” says Hill, 42.
While travelling on the com- petitive Kansas City BBC Society circuit, Hill sees acclaim heaped on white competitors with thousands of dollars of gear while “some old Black man doing his thing with an oil drum” at a roadside shack goes unheralded.
“I’d like to see both sides represented,” says the 20-year pitmaster, pointing to barbecue’s beginnings as African slave food.
“A lot of people don’t know the origins,” Hill says.
I first encounter Beach Hill’s epic smoked meat in something called the Irish Texan ($12), a baked potato loaded with cheese, butter and two meats. One of the proteins, snappy smoked sausage made to Beach Hill’s specifications off site, is fine. But the brisket just blows me away. This is the apotheosis of beef, rubbed simply with pepper, salt and sugar and smoked 12 to 14 hours until as tender as a summer night.
The brisket is wonderful on its own ($13 a half pound), as a sandwich ($11) and even mixed into baked beans ($4) as burnt ends.
The turkey, as discussed, is perfection ($10 a half pound). Pork ribs ($10 a half pound) sport enough cracked black peppercorns to bite back. They suffer only in comparison to the Flintstonian beef ribs, a Thursday specialty that weigh more than a pound each. The bark looks like, well, burnt tree bark. Underneath is an 1⁄8- inch pink smoke ring, the rest soft meat and bone. Think of it as a small steak, with the $25 price tag to match.
Outside of its meat, Beach Hill can stumble. Not with Tex-Mex coleslaw ($3) laced with cilantro and poblano peppers; that is love at first bite.
The unifying burn of poblanos also improves spicy macaroni with five cheeses ($5), which in its non-spicy iteration comes across as plasticky sauce on boring noodles.
But bland potato salad ($3) is as forgettable as that cousin’s name you can never remember at family reunions. And peach cobbler ($4) can taste like warm canned peaches with too little crust. Even with these small missteps, Beach Hill should be much busier. Compared to Adamson BBQ in Leaside, another Texas-style pit, Beach Hill’s meat is leaner but juicier. And unlike Adamson, Beach Hill doesn’t sell out by1p.m., instead making sure to feed the dinner crowd.
Go now, before the lineups begin.