During last summer’s typical local restaurant business famine, Jinx Kern “was living on credit cards,” he tells us. This summer is a different story. The proprietor of the 8-year-old Jinx’s Pit’s Top Barbeque is having a surge. And it’s all thanks to several national and regional publications recently declaring him master of the barbeque universe. O.K., they didn’t say that exactly, but in a May 27 Wall Street Journal travel piece on Charlottesville, reporter Jesse Drucker said Jinx’s hickory-smoked barbecue “ranks with some of the country’s best.” In the June issue of Nothern Virginia Magazine, Warren Rojas advised NoVAtians to trek to Jinx’s for “sublime” pulled pork and “slide-off-the-bone good” spare ribs. And most recently, Maxim magazine included Jinx’s in its August 2008 food awards, proclaiming the place home to the “best pulled-pork sandwich.”
 The surge is working: The Wall Street Journal and other publications have showered praise on Jinx’s Pit’s Top Barbeque, leading to a surge of business for proprietor Jinx Kern. |
Now, we are thrilled that the wider world is taking notice of Jinx’s slow-roasted, pit-cooked pork (according to him, the only authentically made barbeque in town), but we wondered, just how is Kern’s little shack of a shop dealing with all this newfound fame and foot traffic?
“It fills me with a little dread,” says Kern, somewhat jokingly, though understandably when you envision throngs of New Yorkers flocking to Jinx’s glorified roadside stand on the corner of Meade Avenue and E. Market Street, demanding pork sandwiches by the hundreds.
“No, it’s wonderful,” says Kern, who is glad that folks near and far are taking notice of “real” barbeque, rather than the boiled, simmered-in-sauce kind. (Purists like Kern call the makers of that kind of sacrilege “stews,” by the way.)
And he’s tickled that out-of-towners are making a pilgrimage to eat his pit-made goodness. Kern says that in August, one such faraway customer is coming all the way from Los Angeles, purely on the strength of the Wall Street Journal piece. That guy called ahead to make sure Kern would be open when he got here, which is a good thing as Kern, who mans the shop all by himself these days, keeps irregular hours.
Though food tourists are great, however, Kern says his ultimate dream is for local folks to line up outside the shop for a regular pound or two of barbeque to take home, just as Kern’s family did from their local pit-barbeque proprietor in Kentucky. And if it’s good enough for the boob-blinded schmucks at Maxim and travelers from LA, then surely it’s worth a regular visit from you who live mere miles or blocks away.
Rumors and rumblings
Yes, it’s true, Bryan Emperor has left Ten. It happened about a month ago, and despite the rumors swirling about, Michael Keaveny, Red Light Management’s director of restaurant operations, says, “He didn’t walk out. He didn’t leave us in any kind of a bad situation. It was a mutual decision.”
Recall that in Restaurantarama’s recent profile of Emperor, the decorated sushi chef announced plans to open another modern Japanese restaurant in Manhattan. Emperor claimed he could make it all work by spending four days a week up there and three down here, but apparently, the bistate set-up did not sit well with management.
“We want a chef that’s committed to our restaurant. He [Emperor] is a very talented chef—I wish him all the luck,” says Keaveny.
The good news is that Emperor already has a replacement. His name is Chul Kee Ko and he’s coming to us most recently from a stint at Jean Georges in New York. We’ll give you Chef Ko’s full story when he gets to town in a few weeks.
Finally, we are quite tired of the broken record of rumors that Rapture is for sale/has sold. Aren’t you? We thought we cleared the air on this two weeks ago when we reported straight from co-owner Mike Rodi’s mouth that Rapture was not on the table. And yet last week, another local blog—outskirts.com —claimed the place has been sold and will undergo renovations. We kindly asked co-owner Rodi to comment, and he had this to say over e-mail: “Rapture did not sell, nor is it closing for renovations, though if I had the budget, there’s work I’d like to do.”
