As I’ve occasionally mentioned here — here, for example — I was a huge fan of a now-lost-and-gone restaurant chain called Love’s. There used to be a ton of them around the country but mostly in Southern California. Like too many good things in life, they went away and on the ‘net, you can find an awful lot of people who miss their ribs, their chicken and especially their beans. Best beans I ever had in my life.
You’d think someone somewhere would see dollar signs and do whatever you’d have to do to bring all that back in some form. These days, with so many delivery services like Doordash and Grubhub, you wouldn’t even have to open a physical restaurant. A lot of the places you can order from on those apps are what they call “Phantom Kitchens,” meaning that all they have is the kitchen at some location where the drivers for Uber Eats and the others can pick up. They don’t have to have a building large enough to seat diners. They don’t have to have tables or silverware or servers or a big sign or a parking lot or any of that. Starting one up is a much smaller investment.
But no one’s done that. The website for what’s left of the Love’s company says — and I quote — “We are planning to open new restaurants.” That would excite me but it’s been saying that for a couple decades now with no action.
So us Love’s fans can dream…and some of us (not me) try to track down or recreate the recipes for Love’s sauce and/or Love’s beans. I don’t for the life of me understand why people keep trying to make the sauce since that website I linked to in the previous paragraph sells it. But they do…and on the ‘net, you’ll find an awful lot of recipes that someone claims are the real thing. Most of them obviously are not.
But this guy, who cooks under the handle “Ballistic BBQ” seems to have actually done it. He seems to have located the original recipes and he seems to have made reasonable clones of ’em. I haven’t tasted one bean of his but this video is pretty convincing…
I don’t expect any of you to try and make this. I would but I don’t have (a) a smoker, (b) ground rosemary, (c) the time and patience to cook anything more challenging than a Hot Pocket and (d) any ability whatsoever for food preparation. Sometimes, I can’t even get the Hot Pocket to thaw, let alone heat. But if you do try making these beans, lemme know how it comes out. If it doesn’t result in the most delicious beans you ever tasted, you failed.
By the way: I complained here the other day about how hard it is these days to order a hamburger that doesn’t come with sixty jillion things on it that I don’t want on my burger. It’s become equally difficult for me to find barbecue food that hasn’t been smoked to the point where all you can taste is smoke. That was one of the secrets of Love’s. They knew when to stop.
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