Out in Southern California for a couple meetings and a trade show, I decided to find some barbecue near my hotel in Irvine. Southern California barbecue isn't like barbecue in the South or Midwest - there's a lot of Korean barbecue joints and not as many traditional barbecue places available. And the barbecue joints around the Irvine area are usually "to-go" only places or don't have beer to go along with the barbecue. I did a search for a barbecue place that offered sit-down service and - most importantly - beer, and I came up with a place in nearby Tustin by the name of Lucille's Smokehouse Bar-B-Que.
Lucille Buchanan's grandmother ran a little barbecue shack outside of Greenville, South Carolina where patrons felt her food was not only the best in the county, but it may have been the best in the state, and just could have been the best in the South! And growing up, Lucille didn't know any better as she didn't travel any more than 30 miles away from Greenville.
Since she was tall enough to look over a table top, Lucille was working in her grandma's restaurant clearing and washing dishes during the summer months and on weekends. Lucille and her grandmother were very close and many of the secrets to her barbecue cooking were passed along to Lucille with the promise never to divulge any of the recipes with anyone. The spices, the sauces, the mop concoction, and the low-and-slow cooking techniques over hickory wood that Lucille's grandmother used were all learned by Lucille in hopes of possibly running her own barbecue place someday.
Lucille met Joe Buchanan in the late 30's and were married in South Carolina. When World War II broke out, Joe signed up for the Navy and was sent out to the shipyards in Long Beach, CA. Lucille followed him out there and soon found out that there wasn't any barbecue to be had like her grandma's back in South Carolina. Lucille opened a little lunch counter in Long Beach in the early 40's that featured barbecue, along with her grandma's recipes for buttermilk biscuits, cheese grits and cole slaw.
It wasn't long before people discovered Lucille's barbecue and said it was the best in all the Southland. From there, Lucille opened a larger barbecue joint followed by more locations in the later years.
That's a good story, right? The hell of it is - none of it is true.
This was the backstory that the Hofman Hospitality Group - which owns Lucille's Smokehouse Bar-B-Que - used to promote the brand when they opened the first Lucille's in Long Beach in 1999. Company owner Craig Hofman is the son of Harold Hofman who opened the first Hofburger stand in Long Beach in the late-40's. Harold Hofman turned Hofburger into a coffee shop restaurant called Hof's Hut that grew into a small chain of locations in Southern California. At one point, there were 18 Hof's Hut locations across the region.
In the late 90's, faced with pressures of smaller coffee chains such as Starbucks, Craig Hofman decided he had to refocus some of the Hof's Hut locations into a new concept. Hofman realized that there weren't a lot of good barbecue joints in Southern California, so he went off on a barbecue odyssey that took him to restaurants in Texas, North Carolina, Kansas City and Memphis to learn about barbecue. When he accrued all the information he needed, he turned a Hof's Hut location in Long Beach into the first Lucille's Smokehouse and Bar-B-Que in 1999.
Hofman's hunch was correct - Lucille's became pretty popular and more locations followed. Today there are 15 locations across Southern California with one location in Rocklin, CA, a suburb of Sacramento; two locations in Las Vegas; and a single location in the greater Phoenix area.
For years, corporations that had been selling the public on fake stories that depicted black people and the stereotypes they portrayed as part of the back story of products (read: Aunt Jemima) had decided that it was time to quit using black charactactures. Even though Hofman Hospitality came clean with the fact there was no Lucille in 2013, they continued to use the back story as part of their restaurant's lore.
During the Black Lives Matter movement during the pandemic of 2020, Las Vegas-based Culinary Union published a web site that questioned and denounced Hofman Hospitality's back story about Lucille Buchanan that was so prominently featured on menus and on Lucille's web site - down to a grainy black-and-white photo that was supposedly Lucille. Once the web site went on line, Hofman Hospitality immediately took down the back story about Lucille Buchanan and promptly changed their menus in their restaurants. Hofman Hospitality has never acknowledged or commented on the Culinary Union web site that is still up to this day.
Now, had I known all that, it would have given me pause to go to a Lucille's Smokehouse Bar-B-Que location. But I went and I pulled up at the Lucille's in Tustin which is located in the District at Tustin Legacy shopping complex around 7:30 one evening. (see map)
In front of the restaurant was an outdoor patio area with a covered overhang. Sturdy wood-topped tables with metal chairs were on the decking. It was a beautiful Southern California evening, but no one was out there eating on the patio.
The main dining room is just as you come in the main doors to the restaurant. It was sort of art deco-ish in nature with mahogany-hued high booths and matching table tops. 1930's era light fixtures hung about the tables.
I waited at the host stand for a moment until someone came to greet me. He told me that it was open seating that evening and that I could sit anywhere. I decided to sit at the bar as it was clearing out from three or four people getting up ready to leave. No sports were on that evening and there was a news program on one TV and some syndicated show on the other TV. There was a large group in a room off the bar area that was used for parties, private dining or overflow from the main restaurant. Metal signage that was obviously made for Lucille's covered the walls to the left of the bar.
Off to the side of the bar was a sitting area that kind of reminded me of a Northwoods cabin's living room. Wooden chairs and sofas with pleather cushions were situated in a small space for people to sit and enjoy a drink rather than be in the bar area. I really couldn't figure out if Lucille's was trying to portray themselves as an urban barbecue restaurant with a hint of sophistication, or if they were trying to be an upscale Southern barbecue joint a few steps above a rural shanty barbecue place. All I know is that they were playing some great music while I was in there. I heard an old time Boz Scaggs tune, and I was surprised to hear a tune from one of my all-time Southern blues favorites Tinsley Ellis, and they had music from diverse artists such as Muddy Waters, Dustin Lynch and JJ Cale.
There were a couple bartenders working that night, but the one that took care of me was a young lady by the name of Emily. She gave me a menu and the beer list was on the wall and they had a number of beer spigots on the wall of the back bar. I saw that they had Kona Big Wave, but I drink that at home. I'm trying to drink some of the local beers when I travel and I saw that they had a Hazy Scuplin from one of my favorite California brewers Ballast Point Brewing in San Diego. I've had their Sculpin IPA many times in the past, but I had never had their hazy IPA. And it was very good.
It was a pretty full menu at Lucille's Smokehouse with appetizers, sandwiches, barbecue specialties, and Southern specialties such as fried chicken, jambalaya, New Orleans-style gumbo and a chimichurri-topped sirloin steak. Barbecue items included baby back and St. Louis-style ribs, pulled pork, smoked chicken, beef brisket, and tri-tip - a California barbecue specialty.
As I like to do at barbecue restaurants that I've not been to before, I wanted to get a combo plate to try two or three different items. They had a "Pick Two" combo plate that allows patrons to pick two of their smoked meats including 1/3 rack of pork ribs, 3 bones of beef ribs, 1/2 smoked or barbecued chicken, pulled pork, pulled chicken and some of their other smoked meats. I went with the smoked tri-tip and the smoked beef brisket that was served on wax paper on a small cookie sheet. For sides, I got the baked beans and the cole slaw. A small container of some sort of sauce came on the side in a small metal container. But it seemed to take a lot of time from when I placed my order with Emily before someone from the kitchen brought the platter out to me.
I'm a sauce guy and they had 3 different types of sauces available that evening. (Sauces and a bunch of other stuff are available at Lucille's General Store just as you walk in the door to the right.) The original was sort of sweet, but lacked originality. The hot and spicy was basically the original Lucille's sauce with a few spices mixed in. It was not hot, but it did wake up my tongue. And they had a tomato/vinegar Memphis sauce that was pretty drab. The hot and spicy was about the best, but I still wasn't all that impressed by it.
The brisket, I will say, was very good. It had a nice smoke ring around the outer edge of the meat and the bark had a bit of a sweet taste to it. The beef was tender and cut very easily. I really liked the brisket.
The tri-tip, however, was sort of tough and seemed to be over-cooked. Different accounts of where tri-tip originated from includes a butcher in the L.A. area in the early 20th century, a restaurant in Long Beach in the mid-50's, and on the cattle ranches of the Central Coast of California in the mid 19th century where ranchers allowed their ranch hands - usually of Mexican descent - to have the triangular bottom section of the sirloin part of a cow. It's usually a tough cut of meat, but the ranch hands - or vaqueros - were able to cook it over high heat very quickly which sealed in the juices and made it tender - or better known as Santa Maria-style Barbecue. In the 1950's, a butcher in Santa Maria, CA along the central coast came up with a concoction of seasonings including garlic powder, oregano, onion powder, black pepper and salt along with either some chili powder or cayenne powder as a rub to put on the tri-tip to zip up the taste a bit.
This tri-tip at Lucille's, however, was dull and lifeless. I tried dipping it in the watery sauce they had in the small metal cup to see if it would help the taste, but it really didn't. I make tri-tip at home every once in a while with my own Santa Maria-style rub. And while my tri-tip usually comes out a nice medium rare-to-medium, this was medium well-to-well. I usually don't put barbecue sauce on tri-tip, but I had to put some on this tri-tip to make it go down better.
And while the baked beans were pretty good - and even better when I mixed in some of Lucille's hot & spicy barbecue sauce - the cole slaw was horrid. I asked Emily what kind of cole slaw they had and she said it was a creamy-style. Well, this cole slaw was decidedly not creamy. In fact, I'm not sure there was any cream IN the cole slaw. I seriously think it was just chopped cabbage and shaved carrots with nothing else added. It was some of the worst cole slaw I've ever had, if not the worst.
Finding out that Lucille's Smokehouse Bar-B-Que was a corporate chain after the fact sort of soured me even more on my experience. While the beef brisket and the baked beans were good, the tri-tip was woefully overcooked and the cole slaw was a head-scratcher, it was so bad. Emily's service was fine, but it did seem to take an inordinate amount of time to get my food out to me after I placed my order. But the music they played was surprisingly very good. Maybe for Southern California, Lucille's is OK for barbecue. But I can think of numerous other barbecue places I've eaten at in Missouri, Tennessee and North Carolina that stomps all over Lucille's Smokehouse Bar-B-Que.