Ron Meyer has been on the barbecue and blues trail for close to 25 years.

Monday, June 26, 2000

Ron Meyer has been on the barbecue and blues trail for close to 25 years. In that time, he’s dragged family and friends to barbecue shacks in Chicago, Biloxi, Memphis … the list goes on. He’s tried more than 90 recipes for barbecue sauce.

"I guess you could say I have a passion for barbecue," the owner and chef of the new Piggy Blues Bar-B-Que restaurant said. "I’ve been in the meat business since I was 16, and crazy about barbecue almost as long. It’s an amazing business – the opposite of fast food. When you run out of a certain meat, you’re out, usually until the next day. You can’t just say presto, and have more."

Meyer – who worked in Hy-Vee’s meat department the last 17 years, first as seafood manager and the last nine years as manager of the entire department – points out that the key to good barbecue lies in the cooking of the meat. He said it takes anywhere from four to 12 hours to cook.

First the meat – Meyers serves the traditional pork, also beef, chicken and turkey – is seasoned. Then it is put in the smoker and cooked long and slow for tenderness and flavor. Depending on the meat, Meyer said, it is either cooked over hickory or apple wood.

Started salivating yet?

Wait ’til you taste the sauce.

"We tested a lot of recipes on a lot of people, but this one was consistently the favorite," he said. "We leave it up to the customer to decide if they want the house sauce or one of the others on the table, and they put it on the meat themselves. How much, if any, sauce people like on their barbecue is a very personal thing."

Although barbecue, barbeque and BBQ is the main menu item, Meyer also serves shrimp and a number of side orders. Side orders are traditional southern fare: deep fried okra, BBQ beans, dirty rice – Meyer’s specialty, old-fashioned fried potatoes that look like potato chips and taste like heaven, and sweet corn puffs, cream-style corn covered with batter and fried.

The shrimp, according to Meyer, is the old-fashioned peel-and-eat cooked the way he learned in Biloxi, Miss.: spicy enough to make your lips burn. It’s the same recipe that restaurant in Mississippi used for crawdads, another dish Meyer might highlight when the time is right. His customers won’t get to have quite the same experience Meyer had, however.

"In Biloxi, what you did was sit on the dock and suck the meat out of the crawdad tails," he said. Then you would throw the rest of the crawdad up in the air and the seagulls would swoop in and grab it."

Although he only opened last week, Piggy Blues has been an almost instant success. Meyer said lunches have been so busy people have been turned away and evenings are very steady. The take-out side of the business is thriving, too.

He’s grateful for the help of the family and friends he’s got working for him in the little restaurant. Both daughters, Andrea and Ashley, work on the floor, and he’s training his son-in-law, Josh Diaz, in the secrets of being a barbecue master.

"It’s been crazy, but fun," Diaz said of the opening week. Diaz also is a former Hy-Vee meat man, and a barbecue nut.

"We’ve been everywhere there’s barbecue, haven’t we?" he said to his father-in-law.

Maybe not everywhere, but many, many places. Where he hasn’t been for barbecue, he’s probably been for flea markets and antique hunting.

"That’s my other passion," Meyer said. "Collecting. That’s why we’re closed on Sundays, so I still can hit some flea markets." Most of the items decorating the walls, floors and bathrooms of the restaurant are for sale.

Finally, the master barbecue chef gets to the real meat of the matter: Why Piggy Blues?

"We thought about a name for months and months," Meyer said. "Then one day I was driving and I got to thinking about Austin. You’ve got the pork connection here, so then I thought ‘Piggy.’ Add the blues music and you get ‘Piggy Blues.’

"Sounds like a barbecue place, doesn’t it?"

Restaurant hours are 11:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Reservations and carry out are both available; call 434-8485. The restaurant is closed Sundays.