Super Dave’s

People love an all-American success story. The best-seller lists are peppered with inspiring rags-to-riches stories — a friend of mine calls them “I pulled myself up from the gutter” memoirs. A loser is just a pathetic failure. But a loser who finally finds that pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow?

Meet Dave Anderson, the founder and chairman of Minnesota-based Famous Dave’s of America Inc., whose story is heart-wrenchingly detailed in his publicity materials. “In 1979, Dave Anderson was bankrupt and penniless, forced to sell everything he owned in order to put a roof over his family’s head. To provide food for his family, he resorted to digging for coins in seat cushions and begging fast-food restaurant owners for leftovers.”

It’s easier to make those kinds of confessions when you’re looking backward at misery. Anderson is now a millionaire, the chairman of a company with 88 restaurants in 23 states, including the four-month-old Famous Dave’s Grill and Barbecue, across the road from the Nebraska Furniture Mart in Kansas City, Kansas. To call this honky barbecue joint an overwhelming success would be an understatement: There’s usually an hour’s wait for a table in one of the dining rooms on weekends, and only slightly less of a logjam on weeknights.

And baby, it’s not cheap. I toyed with the idea of going outside and digging around the seat cushions of my Dodge on the first night I dined there, when my friends insisted on ordering the $52.99 “All-American Barbecue Feast.” This generous sampling of the restaurant’s most popular dishes — from ribs to chopped pork — comes attractively arranged on a metal garbage-can lid.

At Famous Dave’s there’s no shame in being trashy. The place has been designed, quite brilliantly, to look like a redneck roadhouse. Instead of napkins, there’s a roll of paper towels on each table, and the décor leans heavily to vintage beer signs and memorabilia, including a full-color illuminated “Land of Sky Blue Water” sign promoting Hamm’s Beer and, just above the bar, a plastic Hamm’s bear.

Naturally, though, the bar doesn’t actually serve Hamm’s. The place may be designed to look like a party shack off some gravel road, but the beer offerings (Bud and Bud Light, Fat Tire, Boulevard and Miller Lite) as well as the stuff on the menu are pretty conventional choices. There’s an unenthralling (and limited) wine list. The servers aren’t exactly wine-savvy, but it only added to the absurd charm of the place when “Famous Abiyah,” a somewhat ditsy eighteen-year-old with copper-colored cornrows who told us he had spent the summer dancing at the Renaissance Festival, informed our little group that the wine list included “Marlo” and “Cabaret.”

“I’ll have the Cabaret,” said my friend Ned, pointing to the BV Coastal Cabernet Sauvignon on the menu. Bob considered the “Marlo” but ordered a frosty mug of Bud instead. Our server took the rest of our order somewhat grudgingly after I had to firmly nix his suggestions and insist on getting what I wanted. “Whatever floats your boat,” he said.

We were dining in the bar that night because the wait to get a table in the dining rooms was too long. Oh sure, the pretty hostess at the front desk handed me a pager and said it would be 55 minutes “or so.” But 55 minutes later, when the pager wasn’t lighting up or vibrating, I took a peek at the still-lengthy list in front of Miss Hostess and realized that her sense of timing was all off. It would be another thirty minutes easy before anyone would usher us out of the bustling bar to a dining room. So we quickly got chummy with a family finishing up their dinner in the bar and snagged their table as soon as they paid. We nearly got into fisticuffs with a trio of chubby drunks who’d had their eyes on the same table, but I gave them my nastiest “fuck you” look and sat right down, figuring that if things got ugly I could use the paper-towel holder as a weapon.

[page]

“Jeez, where do some of these people come from?” Bob said, shuddering. “The group at the table over there looks like they were all in Deliverance.”

Even more terrifying was a quartet of expensively clad (and perfectly coiffed) Wyandotte County homosexuals sitting at the bar sipping martinis. It wasn’t that they seemed out of place; they were just oddly juxtaposed with the loudmouthed woman at the other end of the bar: bad teeth, bad perm, ratty Chiefs jacket, guffawing at her own jokes.

“I love this place,” Ned gushed. “It’s so bizarre, how can you not love it? Look at all these healthy, overfed people! Such a welcome relief from all the pretty people on the Plaza. There’s not an anorexic in the place.”

That included us. We greedily chomped down on everything we ordered — except for the watery and vile-tasting chicken-and-wild-rice soup. Dave’s thick Famous Chili packed a little heat, but I’ve tasted better at Wendy’s. And though I loved my puffy lodge fries, the pulled-chicken sandwich they came with was surprisingly small.

The ribs — described as “pit-smoked, St. Louis-style spareribs” — more than made up for all of that, though. Succulent and meaty, fragrant with clove and cayenne, they were the best choice on the menu. Ned passionately doused each one with a splash from the squeeze bottles of sauces on the table: fiery “Devil’s Spit,” tangy “Texas Pit,” sweet “Rich and Sassy.”

A few nights later, I returned with Bob, Jim and Marie. Again, we snagged a table at the bar rather than wait forever for a real table. This time our server was “Famous Matt,” a brawny college-athlete stud. He was fast on his feet, too, quickly bringing us a Dave’s Sampler Platter — a combination of the awesome ribs and peppery chicken wings along with a pathetic little jumble of onion strings, salty and overfried catfish fingers, and unremarkable chicken tenders.

We went on to order more meat — the All-American Barbecue Feast, which offered up a rather undistinguished roast chicken and bland brisket — along with some wonderfully tender chopped pork in addition to the ribs. On the side were gratingly sweet “honey-buttered corn muffins” and baked “dunkin’ apples,” along with disappointingly dull “Famous Northwood Beans” and crunchy cole slaw.

“You can get all of these dishes, as good or better, at the independently owned places in Kansas City — without the hassle of waiting for a table,” Jim said.

True enough. But like the Cheesecake Factory, that other mediocre chain restaurant with idiotically long waits, Famous Dave’s gives hefty portions. Even the desserts are supersized, including a caramel-drenched slab of hot, quivering, custardy bread pudding.

OK, so other local barbecue joints are much more well-known than Famous Dave’s — unlike Arthur Bryant’s, Little Jake’s and KC Masterpiece, it isn’t even mentioned in Steven Raichlen’s The Barbecue Bible. But who cares if Dave Anderson is a legend in his own mind? His rags-to-riches recipe is clearly working. He’s earned the right to call himself famous.