SUNDAY SPECIAL: On A Lark, A Man Goes After A Brisket Sandwich...

By RICARDO KLEMENT
Food Writer of The Tribune

McALLEN, TX - On this gray, rainy Sunday morning, chances are you and yours will be feasting on the local culinary staple known as Barbacoa to the Mexicans and as cow head meat to everybody else, except the good people of India.

I'm not big on smoked meats that come from holes dug in the ground. For obvious reasons. My parentage includes people who roasted, toasted and gassed enough Jews during WW II to bring me the sort of shame, say, a Mexican-American dad might live with when he knows he's failed his old lady and kids. Life is funny that way, but there it is.

In any case, I'm nothing if not a food roustabout, one of those guys who will take that longshot drive to check out a joint someone has told someone stands above the mobbed taquerias and hamburger joints. Which reminds me, does anyone get this: I stopped in at a Whataburger and stood in line at the counter one day last week. I get up to the front of the line and look at the pudgy clerk before saying, "Hey, what's good here?" People in line behind me let out some sarcastic guffaws. What's that all about?

Well, I finally made it to Ramos BBQ in the City of Palms. This woman I met at a bar down by the river west of here had said it was, well, special. There, on N. 10th Street about a mile south of State Highway 107, which takes you to Edinburg, was the neat frame building with the Ramos BBQ signboard out front. At best the size of a small Silverstream at its core, Ramos BBQ offers a nice screened patio with large window fans hanging from the ceiling and a sprinkling of signs on the walls. The floor is cool, as in concrete cool, and the tables are new-looking and well-polished.

I asked for the brisket sandwich, with my usual overfilling of onions and pickles. The woman behind the counter posed this: "Beans?" I said no, no thanks, but gimme a pie of somekind. "No pies," she shot back. "Chips we have." No chips, I said. "Potato salad?" she asked next. No, I told her, hate that stuff.

"Name?" she posed.

"Ricardo..."

"Oh, that's my last boyfriend's name!" Genuine shriek, like one you'd get from a woman after walking out of prison. I made a face and walked back to sit down and await my sandwich. "Ricardo!" I heard after a few minutes. There, at the counter and behind a plastic window between the patron and the hefty woman taking orders, was my sandwich, in a bag, as I had requested it. "Enjoy," she said in a voice that told me she said it a thousand times a week.

I sat there and scarfed it down while watching cars and trucks and pickups and buses and mobile homes and tractors and dump trucks and bicycles and motorcycles roar up and down N. 10th Street. As a sandwich, the BBQ brisket special was no big deal. It wasn't bad, no. Perhaps, as with everything, I expected something fantastic. It's a BBQ joint, For Chrissakes! It's always tough leaving a BBQ joint, but...

"Goodbye," I said to the counter clerk who'd come out to clean an adjoining table.

"Come back, Ricardo," she said, staring at me.

I was sure her last boyfriend had likely heard her say that a jillion times...

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