“Gumbo was called guck-bo, and I told him I wanted to eat the kind of food white people like!” she tells me, breaking into infectious laughter. Saucy Mama’s Jook JointĪs a kid, Yvette Bidegain hated her father’s Louisiana home cooking. Read on to discover two newly opened restaurants, one lesser-known mainstay, and one major deviation that will all, in their own unique way, deliver your hot weather, hot meat fix. Sonoma County is blessed with plenty of delicious barbecue-Sweet T’s in Windsor and KIN Smoke in Healdsburg are two notable ones-but for our summer issue, Made Local Magazine decided to take a less-traveled road. Though meat holds center stage, there are scores of side dishes for every palate and preference. What everyone can agree upon, though, is that barbecue brings people together for a feast. Countless regional iterations have ensued, leading to debates over whether barbecue can be anything but porcine and whether sauce should be added during or after cooking.
Barbecue, like so many American traditions, is rooted in Indigenous and West African cultures and practices-from the salting and seasoning that helped preserve large cuts of meat to the practice of cooking whole or parts of animals low and slow using green wood over indirect flames.
