San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The future of Bay Area barbecue
is in their nofrills, bluecollar demeanor.
Horn is a young, black former college football player, though his playing days are more than a decade past. He still carries himself like an athlete though, nimbly moving around his smoker, lifting heavy containers of meat and spice with ease, standing at a counter chopping meat with perfect posture.
He’s also affable, goodlooking and stylish with his unofficial uniform of slimfit, black, shortsleeved shirts and a roster of new baseball caps. He speaks slow and methodically, the auditory equivalent of barbecue sauce seeping onto a a rack of ribs. But his laugh explodes from his lungs and can quickly fill a room.
“I’m not playing ball and I know I’m bigger than I used to be,” he said with a laugh, tugging at the sides of black tshirt. “But there’s something I use from those days: the focus. The same kind of focus that you have in football, it’s kind of what I use in barbecue. I can just shut things out and focus on exactly what I’m trying to do in the moment — making a rub, smoking a brisket a certain way.”
Horn wasn’t born into a barbecue family. He found a love for it on his own. Barbecue is inherently a Southern enterprise and sure, Horn has family in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas, but he grew up in Southern California. His dishes skew to the Lone Star State, but he hadn’t ever actually been to Texas until a few years ago.
“I was just doing what felt right, what felt normal to me,” he said. “I just really got into the idea of smoke and how it affects flavors. There’s a science to it that became an obsession for me.”
This manifested itself in Horn spending hours each night watching his smoker cook ribs or brisket. He’d manipulate the wood, mixing in splashes of water, just to see how it would impact the collagen in a piece of meat. He credits this