Hill Country Barbecue Market, Penn Quarter, Washington, DC

You may remember Sean Ludwig from our back to back dinners at Smokecraft and Ruthie’s All Day. Sean, of course, is the genius behind NYCBBQ, which has all the news in the Smoked Apple, and with Ryan Cooper publishes The Smoke Sheet, a guide to barbecue news and events everywhere. The Smoke Sheet recently has migrated to Substack, a paid platform. They have great plans for expanding their already extensive coverage, to branch out into additional areas of original content and who knows what. It was a treat to talk with Sean about their exciting plans. I’ve signed up, and I urge you to join in the journey. It’ll be huge fun.

But back to Sean — he was in town for a day job-related conference, and contacted me about getting together for dinner downtown. We met at Hill Country, down at 410 7th Street NW, convenient to the Verizon Center (now Capital One Arena) and several theaters. Hill Country also has a location in Manhattan at 30 West 6th Street with which Sean was well familiar. Here we are —

We entered, looked around, and chatted with Sean, the energetic and enthusiastic pitmaster. He showed off the three big Old Hickory gas-assisted cookers. Those smokers have cooked a lot of barbecue.

As usual with Sean, we ordered everything. Well, almost. There’d been a run on chicken wings at lunch and they were out of those. So instead we had the diet plate, with brisket, pork, chicken, turkey, two kinds of sausage, only three sides (chili, macaroni and cheese, and a cucumber-onion salad) and just one dessert.

That’s a lot to take in. Let’s zoom in, starting with the ribs, sausages, and pork.

Pork isn’t a strong suit in Texas, and it wasn’t at Hill Country. The ribs, on the other hand, had a good meaty texture and flavor and a dose of smoke. They had a glaze and were a bit too sweet for my taste, but most people like that sweetness. Both types of sausage were good — a nice red hot and jalapeño-cheese that tasted especially smoky to me, perhaps because the jalapeños weren’t as profound as usual. I liked it a lot.

Let’s zoom in on the other platter, with brisket, chicken, and turkey under there.

The brisket was a mixed bag. It had a good smoke flavor, and parts were deliciously moist and delicious, while other parts were … not. The turkey was excellent, everything you’d want smoked turkey to be. I wonder if they sell whole turkeys around Thanksgiving and Christmas. They should. The chicken soaked up some smoke, but — and I’ll have to note that I recently had the world’s best smoked chicken at B’s — Hill Country’s wasn’t as meltingly tender and fell short of the Platonic ideal.

The sides — I was quite impressed by the macaroni and cheese — had great texture and great flavor, and the cucumber and onions were just the thing to balance all that rich food.  The chili, oddly enough, had virtually no chili powder or cumin flavor, which unless you’re from Cincinnati, are the whole point of chili.  The dessert we shared was a blueberry-peach cobbler, which I’d tried before at Wilson County Barbecue in, of all places, Portland, Maine.  Hill Country’s version was a very well put-together cobbler, but in the end both Sean and I would have preferred cobbler with either fruit alone, rather than in combination.

I’d been to Hill Country several times before, after which I posted this report.  Hill Country can be very good, but not dependably so.  They seem not to have advanced since Aaron Franklin revealed the Eleusinian mysteries of cooking great brisket, as have 2fifty here in the DC area, ZZQ in Richmond, Lewis in Charleston, and, as the invaluable Barbecue Bros report, Prime and Jon G’s outside Raleigh and Charlotte respectively.  Still, you can make a very fine meal at Hill Country, and I urge you to give it a try.  I’ve been to several places downtown recently, and while having federal employees and many others working from home may have done great things for the pajama industry, it’s been terrible for downtown restaurants and merchants.  And frankly, restaurants add much more to a well-lived life than pajamas.  Please, head downtown. Get some sausage and ribs at Hill Country, and get a pound or two of smoked turkey to take home for sandwiches.  Have lunch with friends and organize a happy hour — and report back on Hill Country’s wings.  You’ll be much happier.

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