Now's the time to prepare yourself for meat, meat and more meat at next week's Ribfest.
L. KENT WOLGAMOTT / GZO | Posted: Thursday, August 2, 2007 7:00 pm
I went into training Saturday — at Ron’s Old Style BBQ.
Ribfest is coming up, and I’ve got to get in shape for my annual pig-out Thursday afternoon.
That’s when we’ll do our annual “Best of” judging, sampling two or three bones from each of the eight vendors that will set up on N street and Centennial Mall around Pershing Center.
If you do the math, that’s 16 to 24 bones — a minimum of a slab-and-a-half of thick St. Louis-style pork ribs.
That’s a lot of meat to consume in a single sitting. So I always start getting prepared a few weeks early, eating barbecue two or three times a week and gradually increasing the portion until I’m ready for anything — except Johnson’s BBQ’s Thermonuclear sauce, which I’ve seen literally bring a grown man to his knees.
Now in its 11th year, the Nebraska Pork Producers Capital City Ribfest has been the most enduring, popular downtown entertainment festival of the past two decades. July Jamm has come and gone. Haymarket Heydays is history. Other downtown festivals have been one-off events.
But Ribfest keeps marching on, drawing more than 30,000 people every year, all intent on chowing down.
“The people there, they eat,” said Lee Rice of Desperados. “They don’t mess around. We do a lot of events where they buy samplers or a sandwich. In Lincoln, they get half-slabs, slabs, maybe two slabs. People there really eat.”
That kind of demand has Desperados and the other seven vendors working nearly around the clock for four days. The Desperados team will arrive in Lincoln Tuesday night and set up their stand, smoker, ovens and preparation tables on Wednesday.
“We’ll start cooking on Wednesday evening and we’ll be going non-stop through Sunday morning,” Rice said. “Pork and beef cook all night long. They need 14 hours to cook. So we basically work 24 hours a day. We’ll have somebody down there from 6 a.m. to midnight and maybe a little longer. We pretty much go non-stop for four or five days.”
Because of the volume of ribs, beef, pork and chicken consumed here and the reception the cookers receive, Rice said Lincoln’s Ribfest is in his top five shows each year, and often in his top three.
“They support it 100 percent,” Rice said. “It’s very, very nice, and it’s been that way since the beginning. From the very first year, it just jumped off the map.”
When Ribfest kicked off, Lincoln was woefully short of local barbecue, with just one or two places that specialized in ribs. Now there is a handful of rib joints here, including Famous Dave’s, which used Ribfest to introduce itself to the market before opening its SouthPointe location.
That shortage of barbecue may have contributed to the early success of the event. But Rice says much of the credit for Ribfest taking off goes to the Pershing staff.
“The majority of it has to do with the job the arena does promoting it,” Rice said. “They get the word out. That’s the most important thing. When people come, they have a blast and they come back the next year.”
Credit for the success of Ribfest also goes to Rice, Dan Johnson of Johnson’s BBQ and the other vendors who came to Lincoln the first couple of years, said Pershing manager Tom Lorenz.
“They took a chance on us,” he said. “They really helped us out. They got out here and it really took off.”
The primary reason Ribfest has succeeded is simple, Lorenz said. It’s a matter of focus.
“We focused on a food festival,” he said. “We didn’t try to do a lot of things. We kept it pure, just on the ribs. We picked good music, number two. And the music is mostly covers, so when people are standing in line, they hear familiar songs. But the players are good players. Number three, we have plenty of tables and chairs on the grounds, so it’s easy to find a place to sit. That’s made the festival work year to year.”
The initial Ribfest was so unexpectedly popular, the vendors ran out of meat, forcing some to drive to Omaha to secure more ribs. That problem was taken care of by an arrangement with Pegler Sysco for a refrigerated trailer full of ribs and other meats on the festival grounds.
That was about the only setback for Ribfest in its first 10 years.
“Our biggest issue is how to keep tweaking it and making it a little better from year to year,” Lorenz said. “I wish we had more room to expand.”
Last year, Pershing kicked the music up a notch by featuring Shooter Jennings on Thursday night. A Nashville act was scheduled to headline on Thursday again this year, but the band broke up just a few weeks ago. Lorenz said a bigger name act will be part of Ribfest 2008.
The fact that there’s no musical draw isn’t likely to have much impact on Ribfest attendance or the satisfaction provided by a slab of ribs from any of the vendors.
I’m guessing I may be the only person who’s had ribs from every vendor every year since Ribfest began — a dubious distinction, I know. But it does let me authoritatively make this point:
Over the past decade, I can’t remember ever having a bad rib at Ribfest. I’ve certainly liked some better than others, for many reasons, sauce being one of the key elements that separates one rib from another. But there’s never been a rib that I couldn’t eat or wanted to send back or anything like that.
I expect more of the same on Thursday. So it’s back to the training table. I’m going for a half-slab Saturday night, then another on Monday. Must eat ribs, must get in shape.
Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.