Ryan Wisniewski
Order your brisket lean, fatty, or a mix of the two, here with smoked apple pie baked beans and potato salad.
Barbecue is a myriad of styles — encompassing different cuts of meat, different woods, and varying methods of smoking and sauces. Styles are usually tagged to a region — Texas, Kansas, North Carolina — but there are micro-localities and micro-micro-localities.
Wisconsin is not the barbecue belt. Cheeseheads generally have little grasp of the differences among regional barbecue styles. The “I know what I like” attitude seems to suffice. But people get excited when a new barbecue spot opens, and that’s certainly been true of Beef Butter BBQ, which took over a freestanding building in the parking lot of Northside Town Center in November. Beef Butter had been working out of a truck for events and catering, so it hit the ground running with its Texas-style beef, pork and chicken.
The joint was jumping on a recent Friday night. My plan had been to call in a takeout order. But my calls went straight to a “caller has not set up voice mailbox” message. Did I not have the right number? I did have the right number. But business was brisk enough (the large group behind me in the ordering line had been drawn to visit after picking up Beef Butter buzz in the madisonwi subreddit) that the staff had taken the phone off the hook. That was one explanation, anyway, given to me by one staffer. Another said that’s what would happen if someone was on the line when a second call came in. At any rate, don’t expect to call in takeout on a Friday night. (Another visit at 3 p.m. on a Sunday was predictably less hectic.)
Dinners come with about a ½ pound of meat and two sides. The back ribs are great, but mildly smoked: tender, with plenty of meat on the bone. The brisket can be ordered lean, fatty, or as a mix of the two, which is nice if you have a Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat situation. The lean brisket was lean without being dried out yet carried something akin to a corned beef flavor. The chicken is fine (served in sliced pieces) if someone has to have chicken, but a fattier meat has more smoked flavor, and the smoking here is mild even at its most intense.
I was the least drawn to the pulled pork — it was shredded so finely and carried so much grease, it was on the verge of turning to mush.
I know that barbecue traditionally comes with a slice of bland white bread to soak up the heat — but Beef Butter serves a dry S. Rosen-style dinner bun, perhaps if diners want to make the meat into a sandwich. It’s not a great bun. And the sweet-tart, tomato-based sauce isn’t hot enough to require a bland absorber. The sauce comes mild, medium or spicy, but these are hard to tell apart.
Not always first on anyone’s barbecue order, but very fine here, are two house-made smoked sausages, a regular and a jalapeno cheddar. The regular has some of the flavor of a breakfast sausage, but is milder, drier and meatier; the jalapeno cheddar has a little more pop. These are served sliced into coins, with the same dry, flavorless bun. In a nod to Wisconsin, maybe try a decent brat bun and no slicing?
Of the sides, the best is the homemade kettle chips, thin potato slices fried crisp and salted with a spicy seasoning blend. The next best side is the baked beans, called apple pie baked beans — they are notably sweet and have slices of apple in the mix, but for those who prefer deeper, more molasses notes to beans they may seem like a child’s side, or dessert. The macaroni and cheese is creamy, but without discernible cheese flavor; the coleslaw comes with cabbage cut in a very fine dice, overwhelmed by a sweet creamy dressing, and the potato salad is likewise dominated by a too-sweet creamy dressing.
Nobody is throwing any bones to vegetarians or vegans. There’s no barbecue tofu, or salad. Willy Street Co-op North is across the parking lot if you have foolishly brought a vegan along to dine.
While I appreciate more restaurants coming to the north side, in this instance, we now have two barbecue spots within an eighth of a mile of each other. Is Beef Butter BBQ a better choice than neighboring Smoky Jon’s? I’d go with Smoky Jon’s for pulled pork; Beef Butter for ribs and brisket. And come up with a better bun and those sausages could be a hit before Mallards games this summer.
Beef Butter BBQ
3001 N. Sherman Ave.; 608-640-5000; Beefbutterbbq.com
$9-$18; 10 am-8 pm Wed.-Sun.
