While Mexican food is my all time favorite food group, good BBQ comes a close second. In NYC, it hard to find a good all around BBQ place – I recommend people to go to Dinosaur BBQ for their ribs and visit Blue Smoke for their pulled pork platter and yes, their mac & cheese. The mac & cheese there is the best in the city – hands down. And they make a mean fried chicken platter that the Ex just loves. But enough about Blue Smoke, this is about R.U.B. (Righteous Urban Barbeque). We decided to visit R.U.B. as it’s been in our book of places to visit for quite sometime (we save good food reviews so we know where to go later) – so we trekked down to 23rd on a Saturday night and found ourselves inside of a packed BBQ restaurant.
2 meat platter: Pulled Pork & Pastrami
Collard Greens
I ordered the 2 Meat platter you see above with a side of collard greens and potato salad. Don’t see the potato salad? Well that’s because it never arrived. The pulled pork was good – but after having pulled pork from Blue Smoke, there was no comparison. The pastrami was delicious as pastrami usually is and I even found myself using the leftovers the next day. The collard greens were my favorite part of the meal – nice and salty with good greens flavor.
“The Short End” – Pork Spare Ribs
the Ex ordered the “short end” of the pork spare ribs which are “the last 7 ribs off the slab-the tender end”. She enjoyed the ribs – but they were not nearly as tender as the ribs at Dinosaur BBQ. And the R.U.B. ribs cost just as much as an entire rack with 2 sides at Dinosaur BBQ. But she did give them a thumbs up for giving her white bread with the ribs – even though that didn’t make much sense, I think she was just happy to have white bread as it’s not something we typically have in our house.
Overall: R.U.B. receives a lot of hyped up reviews in the New York publications. And their all hype. Maybe folks that are born and bred in the city think it’s a great BBQ joint, but I think it’s a great pseudo BBQ place. The fact that all of the meals are served on metal trays with butcher paper is what gives R.U.B. it’s authentic feel, but that’s about it. Would I go back to R.U.B. again? Maybe – but not if I was the one paying or choosing the restaurant. It’s good like the way McDonald’s is good for burgers – it’s a burger and it’ll satisfy some sort of craving, but you won’t be completely satisfied until you get a real burger.