Barbecue is just the beginning at Beachwood

Spanishchef.net recommends these products

Barbecue is just the beginning at Beachwood

By LORI BASHEDA / THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Beachwood Barbecue is different from other barbecue joints in Orange County in one big way: It’s not just a barbecue joint.
The Seal Beach restaurant has 23 craft beers on tap, a long list of vintage bottle beers and a menu to rival the gastropubs popping up everywhere, with items like mini lamb corn dogs with habanero-berry ketchup ($9), wild mushroom stew on blue cheese grits ($7) and Tater Tot Casserole – porcini-dusted potato pieces cooked in duck fat and topped with smoked cheese curds.

Beachwood Barbecue, located on Main St. near Ocean Ave. in Seal Beach, is a local favorite. The seaside eatery is known for their unique brews and barbeque.

The only downside to Beachwood Barbecue is that it’s usually packed, especially on weekends, with wait times of up to an hour. There are about a dozen tables. Beachwood won’t take reservations, but you can write your name on a clipboard and then stroll around the Main Street shops to kill some time. There are also benches outside and sometimes a struggling artist (or college kid) who has set up camp on the sidewalk with his guitar and sings Beatles songs.

Beachwood has been feeding people for five years and it opened a second restaurant in Long Beach this summer. I’ve tried quite a few things on the menu since I’ve been dining there, so here are some of my favourites.

The dish I order when I bring someone who has never been there before is the Smothered Steak Fries ($7). A plate of fat steak fries is topped with just the right amount of melted cheddar and blue cheese, bacon, green onions and spicy wing sauce. It’s always better than I remember. The combination of salty, spicy, smoky and sharp is perfection. I could order just that and a cold brew and leave incredibly happy.

The barbecue chicken salad ($9 for half or $13 for whole) is another standby. Greens are mixed with grilled corn, tortilla strips, cheddar and smoked chicken, hand-pulled. The salad is tossed with a thin (sometimes too thin) chili buttermilk dressing. All of the salads come with a dense square of skillet-baked cornbread made from scratch with dried cherries and served with honey butter.

The chicken, like all of the meats at Beachwood, is dry-rubbed with spices and then marinated for 24 hours before it’s slow-smoked.

Unlike barbecue joints where the sandwiches come dripping with sauce, Texas style, the meats are dry at Beachwood, in the North Carolina tradition. Bottles of house-made sauces sit on the table so you can add however much you like. There’s a spicy barbecue sauce, a tangy red wine vinegar barbecue sauce and, my absolute favorite, a spicy mustard sauce that is thin enough to run out of the bottle like ketchup
.
The buffalo Sloppy Joe ($12), ground buffalo cooked in a beer-infused sauce and topped with fried sage and pickled onions, is a good choice, but my go-to sandwich is the pulled pork ($11). The pork is smoked for 13 hours and then lightly tossed with the vinegar barbecue sauce. A mound is piled high on a soft, chewy pretzel bun with a bit of vinegar-based slaw on top. All sandwiches come with a side, from smoky grilled asparagus to cayenne honey-glazed carrots.

I have tried the beer-and-coffee-glazed smoked ham sandwich ($11) with smoked onions and brie, but thought it sounded better than it tasted. The Barbecue Fondue for Two ($12) was also a letdown.

You can also order all the smoked meats as entrees off the dinner menu, as well as cold smoked salmon, albacore and shrimp. And, of course, Beachwood has ribs ($25 for a full slab, $17 for half).

Or you could just do what I usually do and make a meal out of the small plates, like Lena’s Famous Fried Pickles ($4) and the barbecue chicken nachos ($8), topped with smoked pulled chicken, aged melted cheddar, chili cream, guacamole and smoked tomato salsa.

The beer list can be intimidating, or liberating, depending on how you look at it. The rotating list of craft beers on tap is written on chalkboards on the wall. You can sample before ordering a pint.

Beachwood has a fun, retro vibe, with walls painted a pale, mint green and framed black-and-white photos of ’50s-era families. The music is typically indie rock or rock. With so many people, the place tends to get loud with conversation. Large windows look out onto Main Street for people watching. There’s also a small bar with a dozen stools for a meal or a beer.

Contact the writer: 714-932-1705 or [email protected]

Bill & Sheila’s Barbecue

_____________________________________________________________________
If you require a high quality printout of this article, just click on the printer symbol next to ’Share and enjoy’, and we will do the rest. This site is hosted by (click on the graphic for more information)

Return from barbecue to Home Page

If you want to increase your site popularity and gain thousands of visitors – check out these sites THEY ARE FREE. Spanishchef more than doubled its ‘New Visitors’ last month simply by signing up to these sites: