Best BBQ in New Mexico--dairy queen?

I recall, some time ago, someone posting either here or some other dubious site that i should make a stop at a Dairy Queen somewhere in New Mexico (carlsbad?) on my way down from Chicago, in order that i can procure perhaps the best bbq in the country. does anyone know anything about this? if so, what sort of info do i need before i drive from Las Cruces and show up for a good meal?
thanks,
parker

Here's the post.

Dairy Queen BBQ in Carlsbad
I haven't been, but have sent my Carlsbad-connected kin, and they agree.

Danny has split from DQ and his joint is called "Danny's Place". I believe he is closed for a few weeks for renovation and installation of a new grill.

The statement "Best BBQ in NM" is not entirely accurate. Probably some of the best commercial BBQ you will find anywhere in the world. Danny is quite a great guy and he cares deeply about what he serves his customers.

Again call before you go to make sure he has reopened:

Danny's Place
902 South Canal
Carlsbad, NM. 88220
505-885-6989

Bill/SFNM

Ann Fisher wrote:Here's the post.
Dairy Queen BBQ in Carlsbad

Ann,

BBQ circuit scuttlebutt had it, correctly it seems, Danny Gaulden parted ways with Dairy Queen, it's now called Danny's Place. BBQ list chatter also has it Danny G's BBQ is as good, if not better, than before. Though it was always about BBQ, not softserve.

Danny's web site mentions a remodeling project after the holidays so, in the the interest of good LTHForum citizenship, and my natural curiosity, I called. Danny's Place BBQ plans to reopen this coming Sunday, 2/6/05.

Danny Gaulden is recognized by many as being in the very top tier of Pitmasters and Danny's Place is high on my must try list.

ParkerS wrote: what sort of info do i need before i drive from Las Cruces and show up for a good meal?

Call first.

Parker, I envy you the opportunity to eat Danny G's BBQ. If you go please give Danny regards from Gary W in Chicago.

Enjoy,
Gary

Thanks so much for the updates, all. I will certainly post on this soon, as i expect to go perhaps as soon as next weekend (12th).
I will give him your regards, GWiv.

There will be a full review of this soon, when i can find the time, but I hit up Danny's Place this past weekend.
In short, best 'cue of my life. Had everything on the menu bbq related--turkey, ham, sausage, half a chicken, pulled pork, ribs, and brisket.
The pork was out of this world tender and succulent. The ribs draped over his hand as he picked up a slab to see if they were ready--their sagging a sign of their being ready, he explained to me. And, contrary to most joints that purport to serve ribs, this was all about the pig--a rib with perfect ripe pink meat and a wonderful char of crust around the rib, and not painted with some sugary excess of sauce--just pure pig. (though, he does have a very delicious sauce that he makes every night--sort of a cross between north carolina and KC--more the former, due to he vinegar than the latter, though there is a notable tomato tang to it). he has entered 4 rib competitions and taken first in every one.
the sausage was flecked with fat and just smoky and delicious--german style sausage, due to his Bavarian roots. ham outstanding. turkey buttery and wonderful. i'm running out of adjectives here, but there'll be a better report soon.
danny goes through 1000 pounds of meat a day, using nothing but pecan wood to heat his pit.
he is an extremely nice guy, and he gave me half a chicken as a departing gift--the best chicken that has graced these fine lands, the world.

Looks like its time for a road trip!

Any pictures?

I did have a camera with me, but I felt I was intruding on Danny's rather hectic schedule, and it was a whirlwind meeting, with him opening drawers and the pit and showing me how meat is done.
Simply put, I was in a meat coma, and forgot to take some.
Just picture meat that sings with succulence, or, meet me in Carlsbad.

ParkerS wrote:I did have a camera with me, but I felt I was intruding on Danny's rather hectic schedule, and it was a whirlwind meeting, with him opening drawers and the pit and showing me how meat is done.
Simply put, I was in a meat coma, and forgot to take some.
Just picture meat that sings with succulence, or, meet me in Carlsbad.

I've known Danny via email for about 5 years. I've read many compliments about the food at his restaurant. I would die with BBQ fulfillment by visiting Danny's Place in Carlsbad and the BBQ place in Ayden, NC who's name escapes me at the moment.

I do plan a road trip in the next couple of years to visit Danny.

Below is some stuff excerpted from a piece I wrote for a class (only the pertinent stuff--the rest is sort of a travelogue--forgive the delay in the full review and lack of pictures):

Danny Gaulden goes through 1,000 pounds of meat a day, which, in turn, means since opening he has gone through 6,000 pounds of meat, or roughly the weight of one of those Ford F-150s always parked outside. This morning, rolling into the slanted lot across from the Driftwood Inn in the familiar swarth of 4 a.m., Danny loaded up 21 beef briskets, 42 slabs of ribs, 12 whole turkey breasts, 16 chicken halves, and 4 pork butts, and he's gone back 4 times already to load it up again. And it's only 2 p.m.

...Uniformity is the key to fast food, it is said, but this previous owner of the Dairy Queen had a little side project going. He would take some beef tips ('Stew meat, really'), put them in a 10-gallon pot of water, boil them overnight, come back in the morning and dump some Kraft sauce on them, and sell them along with his burgers and Blizzards.
You gotta be kidding me, said Danny. That ain't no barbecue. And Danny knew this because he knew good barbecue; his grandfather would barbecue whole hogs North Carolina-style, using a mop ('A regular floor mop, really') to baste the pig all day, waiting until the skin crisped a penny-coloured crisp, until the apple in its mouth went soggy, until the meat sung with succulence.
And so Danny took to making his own barbecue.
How'd he get so good? "Trial and error, I guess," he says.
If ever there was error, it's long been extinguished.
Come on, he says and, stubbing out his cigarette, leaps up. Let's go check on the pit.

...Danny throws a latch and swings open the pit. In its black bowels rotate steaming hunks of meat, all browned or browning or nubile in their rawness. It is a Ferris wheel of meat, and my eyes go wide. Wow, I say. Yep, says Danny, and he too seems to admire the contents of this pit, which sits like a generator in a glass-encased room only slightly larger than the pit itself. He takes me around to the side, where a hatch near the floor opens up to reveal the impetus for the heat, a small cove of coals and logs. Danny makes sure to point out that his pit is 100% wood-heated, which differs markedly from those silly pits with the gas heaters whispering their sissy whisper to the maiden logs. There are quite a few embers in there, but, really, only two or three whole logs--a lot less fuel than I would have guessed.
"I use Pecan," he says, handing me a thigh-sized chunk. This is how you know that you know what you're doing, he says, hurling some in for sacrifice. Pecan's a little green, you see, and if he doesn't throw this piece in now it's never going to catch in time, and the temperature'll drop from the preferred 240 to 250 degrees, and he'll be out of commission for about an hour.
When you're turning over as much meat as Danny is, that's a lot of foregone commission.

...So, we found ourselves in the strip of stores, "from the Wal-Mart to the Sonic" the bartender at Lucy's would later declare, that constitutes Carlsbad, New Mexico, and one of these stores was Danny's, just up there, on the right, beside the rather dubious-looking (though quite agreeable) Driftwood Inn.
Yes, that's right: Danny's. It is no longer a Dairy Queen. Danny fired them because he wouldn't go along with the company's code of uniformity. They could tolerate the barbecue, but when he was asked to appear on a Food Network special about good barbecue across America and they wouldn't let him, that was the beginning of the dissolution of Dairy Queen in Carlsbad. Or, it could just be that Danny had finally had enough of hearing about every little thing from them and, having wanted to do this for ten years, finally just went ahead and did it. At any rate, on Sunday, February 6, 2005, like Prometheus from the heavens, under a new name the pit roared back to life in Carlsbad.
So, Heather, Travis and I entered our reason for being here.
It was nothing like the barbecue joints I've been to in Carolina or Memphis or, even, Chicago, which are grimy and sparse and generally a mite clamorous, with the kitchen shouting orders and the patrons raucous with beer and the staff yelping for the next in line.
In Danny's hung an almost funereal silence. I can adduce now that this is on account of a delicious meat coma having fallen over the crowd, but it was a little alarming.
There's an awful lot of Friday-night family action here--the sign out front says "Barbecue and Home Cooking"--we thought. Should we procure a few beers at a local establishment and wait for the crowd to thin out a little? But then the waitress was upon us, and we were at a table, staring at a menu and the promising piles of bones on people's plates around us. We noticed that Danny's is a very diet-friendly place, being that food is part of one's diet.
Incidentally, if actually you do find yourself in the circumstance of a funeral, sick of the clammy corn-dogs and limp pasta salad, you can order from Danny's a 'Bereavement Tray' (or, depending on who kicked the bucket, a 'Party Tray').
Recalling that the chief cause of human death is not currently the consumption of barbecue, but, rather, simply the act of being alive, we ordered four complete dinners, the constitutions of which were a melange of St. Louis-style ribs (spareribs from the belly, behind the shoulder, that are trimmed and have the brisket bone removed, a slab of which usually contains 11-13 bones), beef brisket, turkey, pulled pork, potato salad, coleslaw, fries, onions, pickles, beans and bread.
We waited, and then waited some more, used the rest room, noticed the many pictures of Danny at his pit, the one of the unidentified man who looked as if he'd been caught in congress with a melon, took in the red brick wallpaper, the old trinkets on the wall, the homespun succor this restaurant offered.
And then, the food.
The physical description of pork, or any food, can only go so far. You've seen it. You know what slow-cooked shoulder looks like. Well, conjure it up, because what matters to me is taste, and taste this pork did. It caroled with taste. If you've ever eaten pork, well, conjure that up too, and then forget it, because this is like eating a South Carolina July tomato after all your life eating that pallid void of spirit that resembles more a dying kickball, goes for $4.99 a pound, and sits sadly through winter under the sterile lights of a Wisconsin supermarket.
Or going from the banana-like offal of an antibiotic syrup to the real deal, ripe and canary and fresh from the tree.
Lo, forget the madeleine! Give us Remembrance of Things Pork!
And the turkey! Like eating butter, only non-dairy butter made of slow-cooked turkey.
And the brisket. So this is what beef cooked for 14 hours tastes like. Have you ever seen a prettier smoke ring? Red as a lipsticked kiss from Cybil Shepard, circa Taxi Driver, before she became a bit** and could go directly to hell.
And the ribs. Pure pork, distilled to its cloven-hooved essence. The fat had dripped away (into a rather large bucket I caught sight of later in the pit, like a bucket of melted black crayons), and the ribs were already cut, flaring a disquietingly sultry pink, with a thin blacktop of char that afforded a perfectly toothsome quality.
And the sides. Well, that's a little like making the primal focus of your Wham! biography Andrew Ridgeley.

...Danny has entered 4 rib competitions and has placed first in every one. In one of these he achieved a perfect score from every judge--a perfect 180. As he takes me through his kitchen, pointing out new grills, new choppers and mashers and slicers, I can't help but smile at his enthusiasm. He knows all the specifications, as any man who just poured his good, hard-earned cash into a business would. And not just any business, the restaurant business, the ilk of business possessive of the highest rate of failure. And not just any restaurant, a barbecue restaurant, the ilk of restaurant possessive of the highest rate of failure. So, he's working with slim odds here.
He opens a metal drawer--stacks of uncut ribs glisten briefly before my eyes, like the terse flash of a high school Physics classmate's panties, as she stands on top of the football bleachers and readies to let loose her duct-taped egg-drop conveyance.
He bounces around the kitchen, issuing a few orders to correct any minor snags in his operation. He says sometimes he feels the peril of Rodney Dangerfield, of not getting any respect. I suspect this latter to be false modesty, because he knows he's good, and we know it too.
Let's check on the pit again. Always back to the pit. Need more wood? Nope, it's running just right.
This is how you can tell the ribs are done, when they drape over each side of your palm like a well-thumbed, broken-spined paperback, and crack a little when you bounce 'em. He deems them done and throws them in a bin, to be cut shortly.
Goll-lee, since he's put up that "Open Now" sign in the window of this new venture, he's been busier than a hen in a rooster store.
He may need a bigger restaurant.
Back to the pit.
If you need a thermometer with all this meat, you're in trouble.
This is how you tell when the chicken's done, the beautiful copper chicken, when you can shake hands with it, and he wiggles the leg, it's just right, and then he wraps it up in some foil and hands it to me, courtesy of him, Danny Gaulden, world-renowned pit-master.
Take that and some sausage and ham up front, and you have yourself a meal, he says, walking me toward the front of the restaurant.
I turn to offer him another slew of gratitude for his generosity and time and brief glimpse into his infinite barbecue knowledge, but he's gone, already back to the pit.

...We returned to our room, 217 in the Driftwood Inn, and our Old Granddad and our leftovers that sat sagging in a styrofoam box.
We ate these leftovers with our hands and chopsticks made of pens, listened to classical music and then country and western, wallowed in our own insular knowledge.
The next morning we would get up and head to the Y Diner, because it's the only diner open in Carlsbad on a Saturday, and our eggs would come already hemorrhaging, and for our coffee there would be--because they got a honey of a deal back during the Hoover administration--a bottle of Liquid Sweetener, like toluene, and we would note in the Carlsbad Current-Argus that Arthur Miller had just died and that someone desperately needed a female donkey, and then we would head back to Las Cruces, where, as we crested the Organ Mountains, a billboard would declare, Smile, You're In Las Cruces, and then the fast food.
But for now, in 217, for now we held up a coin of glorious, fat-flecked, smoky German-style sausage and quoted Baudelaire, who said, "One should always be drunk--on wine, poetry, or love," a rather silly sentiment to ones drunk on whisky, meat and, well, maybe the French aren't so dumb.

ParkerS,

WIthout a doubt this is the best restaurant review and food post I have ever read. An outstanding piece of literary work. I doubt if your professor could do as well. I tip my rib to you.

ParkerS wrote:He opens a metal drawer--stacks of uncut ribs glisten briefly before my eyes, like the terse flash of a high school Physics classmate's panties, as she stands on top of the football bleachers and readies to let loose her duct-taped egg-drop conveyance.

I'll never look at ribs the same way after having my brain scorched by this simile.

Great review!

Bill/SFNM

Parker,

I read, I reread, I'm grinning from ear to ear.

Poetry, sheer poetry.

Enjoy,
Gary