You can thank blink-182 for the best brisket in San Diego. Kinda. Fifteen years ago I was sent around the country to find the best dang barbecue. A trip like that’ll make realize what you’ve been told is barbecue was just a lie told by some sorely mistaken dad with oversized tongs and a funny apron. San Diego was pretty weak in the brisket arts until two places. Coops West Texas, and this place. Grand Ole BBQ y Asado.
This is the guy who did it. Andy Harris.
San Diego kid. In the ’90s, he was tour manager for rock bands. Like Finch and Guided by Voices. They traveled the country in smelly vans. Between gigs, they’d search out barbecue.
“It was my thing. I’d drag bands to every barbecue spot in the country,” Andy says. “I was really, really passionate about barbecue. We’d rate them.”
After tours, Andy’d have months off. So he stood in his yard pokin’ at meat.
“I’d sit home and make bad barbecue all day until I figured out how to do it right. I finally did it,” Andy says. “I told my mother in law I was going to open a restaurant and it’s the only time in our relationship she’s yelled at me. An idiot married my daughter.”
Lucky for us, his wife took a gig working with blink-182 in San Diego. So Andy did a pop-up on this corner in a little market. Lines got big quick. With mom-in-law’s blessing, he finally opened this massive urban barbecue shed. The first offset smoker in the city. Texas-style brisket, a smoked turkey that turns the ho-hum protein into food gold. And on Sundays it’s asado—Argentinian barbecue, an ode to his mom’s culture.
He opened another barbecue yard with a live music stage in Flinn Springs. I took Guy Fieri there. Nerve wracking as hell, cuz Guy’s blood type is barbecue. And he loved it.
