Outside the beauty supply shop on 49th Street South and 15th Avenue in St. Petersburg, a scrum of cars — from an upscale SUV with military tags to clunkers like mine — jockey for space in the parking lot. A tan pickup truck, trailing a well-used smoker, pulls into the south corner of the lot. As more people congregate, some on foot, I get out of the car and take my place in line. In front of me, a small boy, no more than 3, clutches his mama’s hand and stares wide-eyed as the man climbs out of the truck, opens the smoker and grabs his cleaver.
He smiles at the woman, who asks for chicken.
“You want a half?” he asks her. She does. After he boxes her chicken, she moves down and gets two slices of white bread — no whole grain gluten-free anything here — and a dose of sauce.
Glen, Kingston-born and Massachusetts-educated, once had a more conventional job — he remains vague about the details and there’s a hell of a line, so I don’t press — before deciding to run a smoker. For the two months I’ve been stalking smokers on the southernmost stretch of the 49th Street corridor, Glen has been the hardest of the smokers to track down, and his ribs don’t disappoint. The flavors are unconventional. I detect jerk seasoning and suspect he’s used oak logs, so his ribs taste much like I would imagine Jamaican scotch would taste. He serves ribs and chicken, bread and barbecue sauce, nothing more. These ribs, more so than any others along this stretch of highway, don’t even need sauce. They fall off the bone; it takes two of us less than five minutes to turn a heaping plate of ribs into a clattering stack of bones.
At the other end of the lot, you have more choices. A mobile ribs purveyor whose name I didn’t catch serves up ribs from a pickup truck-turned-food cart, along with a crunchy iceberg salad and rice and peas as well as the requisite two slices of white bread. Cornbread? Don’t ask him; he doesn’t have it. You can ask him about the Soup Nazi, though, because he used to run a food truck down the street from that NYC establishment immortalized by Seinfeld. He tells us that people who’d been refused soup would emerge from the shop in tears and, as his was the next closest food venue, order his food instead.He made a good living off the Soup Nazi. Now he makes a good living on the 49th Street corridor.
Welcome to Hog Highway, where the smokers appear as if by magic and the few brick-and-mortar barbecue joints often sell out early. The stretch of smokers runs maybe 10 blocks and you can, on varying days, find five or more smokers going, not counting the crab joints. That’s a pig every two blocks or better, and it doesn’t count the smokers you may or may not find on some of the side streets.
Baker’s Hogley Wogley Next Generation has a habit of taping a sheet of notebook paper to the front door, reading “sold out.” This appears, on some days, as early as 4 or 5 p.m. Inside the mostly-takeout rib shack, the family displays a CL Best of the Bay award from the 1990s: “Best Off The Beaten Path Barbecue.”
Since then, Gulfport’s popularity has grown; “off the beaten path” no longer applies. While diners who focus on Backfin Blue or Pia’s won’t likely divert plans to get ribs, those who do stop indulge in some of the tenderest ribs in the Bay area.
In 2015, the city of St. Pete designated its side of the street (the other half belongs to Gulfport) a tax increment financing designation. Over time, the street and the Childs Park neighborhood could see the TIF’s benefits.
But the roadside smokers don’t need to wait; the rib business along this stretch of road is booming. We can’t tell you for sure where the smokers might be, but based on what we’ve observed, we’ve put together the accompanying map. Depending on the day, smokers might be everywhere, or at least it will seem that way. Other days — Mondays, for example — pickings are scarce.
Persevere, and you’ll get rewarded with a bounty of smoked pig.