Joe's Barbeque

We went to the locally famous Joe's BBQ Restaurant last night, taking Miss C with us. She had never been to that restaurant in Alvin (home of baseball great Nolan Ryan). Around here, whenever you mention Alvin, Texas, you have to mention Nolan Ryan's name. It's a rule not to be broken.

Miss C asked me if she could wear jeans to the restaurant, and I told her that jeans would be more than perfect for Joe's BBQ. So there was Miss C, dressed from head to cowgirl-booted toe in her best western outfit when we picked her up last night. On the other hand, my husband was wearing shorts, and I had on white capris. I told Miss C that she was more appropriately attired for Joe's than we were.

It's a good forty-minute ride, from here to Alvin, but the scenery is country-like, once you get past League City (we took all the back roads) and we saw a fair share of horses, goats, sheep and cows along the way. Not to mention the interesting and eclectic yard decor of some of those houses in the smaller towns.

There used to be one house in the Santa Fe area, real close to Alvin, that had about a dozen old toilet bowls and claw-foot bathtubs set up in the front yard-- all of them filled with the most beautiful flowers and plants. We found the house, but it looked abandoned, with boarded-up windows and badly in need of fresh paint. Sadly, all the yard decorations were gone and the lawn was filled with weeds, not colorful flowers. Only that house in that area, would flower-filled toilet bowls and tubs make perfect sense. If you tried that where we lived, you'd have all the "subdivision police" on your front porch by morning.

My husband ordered ribs at Joe's last night, C ordered a hamburger, and I got the salad bar, as always. And, as always, I have a taste or two of the ribs. That's about the only time I eat red meat here, or anywhere else-- Joe's BBQ ribs, certainly the best in this part of the state. My salad plate was half-filled with salad, half-filled with corn fritters. That's my weakness at Joe's-- the corn fritters. No matter how many of them you eat (they're just a bite's worth) there always seems to be room for more, and the tenth one (or the 20th one) tastes as good as the first.

So there we were last night, C and I, filling up on corn fritters. C also tasted the waffle-fries from the salad bar, and she said they were the best she's had. My husband says that Joe's waffle-fries tastes like Nathan's fries. (High praise indeed, if you're familiar with NY's Nathan's.)

We had a nice dinner, enjoying C's reaction to all the western decor inside Joe's... the mounted moose head hanging by the salad bar, the longhorns hanging up all over the walls, the collection of hundreds of license plates from all over the US making a unique wallpaper all over the dining room, the wide-plank wood floors that make everyone's shoes sound like cowboy boots (the only exception being if you're wearing sneakers). Sneakers at Joe's is like not tasting the ribs-- it's not really against the rules, but somehow it just doesn't settle right. The rest of Joe's is filled with photographs of Nolan Ryan when he played for the Astros, photos of John Wayne and Gene Autry, and Texas Rodeo stars whose names I don't know, along with boots, spurs, barbed-wire art, and everything else that screams out We're in Texas and don't y'all forget it!!

When we got home, C looked at more than half of the Germany photos in my husband's computer. It was getting late, so we saved the other half for another time. C was enthralled with the pictures from Germany... the castles, the fields, the cute little houses. She wants to go to Europe now, and I'm thrilled. I had told her that if she ever got the opportunity to be an exchange student in any European country, she should jump at the chance, and now her interest is piqued.

My husband said it would be fun to take her with us the next time we go there. That would be such an adventure, and I hope we get to do just that.