Peggy Sue BBQ in University Park closed for good last month. The Dallas mainstay hadn’t been open since the owners announced a temporary closure for renovations back in January. The building, perched on a prominent corner of Snider Plaza across from the SMU campus, had housed a barbecue joint for nearly 75 years. (The restaurant’s predecessor, Peggy’s Beef Bar, opened in 1946.) Peggy Sue is also where I ate my very first barbecue meal after moving to Dallas in 2001.
I remember the slices of smoked brisket, a cut of beef I had only eaten as corned beef before then. The spare ribs were red from the rub, with a smoky flavor I couldn’t quite identify, and they had a tender texture I’d never achieved with the ribs I’d cooked back in my native Ohio. The folks at Peggy Sue could have showed me their smoker, and I would have guessed it was an industrial-sized dishwasher. The point is, I knew nothing about barbecue then, but I knew there was something new and exciting about the food I was eating at Peggy Sue BBQ.
In the nearly twenty years since, I’ve had a complicated relationship with Peggy Sue. I took my parents there the first time they visited my new home. The first apartment I rented was one of the few inexpensive apartments in University Park, just a few blocks from the restaurant. Always looking for good dining deals, I noticed the take-home special at Peggy Sue, which included buns, a massive serving of chopped brisket, and barbecue sauce. I ate one of those sandwiches every day for five days straight. After the first night, the sauce had solidified in the fridge. It was alarming. Animal fats weren’t an ingredient in the grocery-store barbecue sauces I was used to eating…