12/21/2001 - WHERE THERE’S SMOKE…Lucille’s fires up barbecue worthy of a Southern roadhouse.
By Merrill Shindler

Lucille’s Smokehouse Bar-B-Que is a theme restaurant, where the theme of choice is smoke. You can smell the smoke when you enter the door.

You can taste it in the smoked tri-tip and the smoked chicken. It permeates the baby backs, the St. Louis spare ribs, the beef ribs, the wings. There’s a smoke in the pork chops, smoke in the jambalaya, smoke in the beans. If they could find a way to squeeze some smoke in to the desserts, they probably would – hickory smoked apple pie or bread pudding.

I like the taste of smoke, the same way I like the taste of char—it’s primal, it’s roots, it makes me feel especially hairy-chested.

Lucille’s—a growing minichain with three branches (Long beach, Brea and now Torrance)—has a fine sense of the importance of smoke, and char, and big portions of good food served to hungry crowds of locals who have long longed, craved, dreamed of having a ‘que shop worth the pilgrimage.

This may be a chain, and it may be amusingly cartoonish (Rodger Rabbit goes to dinner). But from what I’ve tasted, Lucille’s gets its food right. This is a destination for the Heavy Forks of the world; satisfaction (qualitative and quantitative is guaranteed).

Lucille’s sits on the Hawthorne Boulevard side of the Del Amo Fashion Center, in the space that used to be home to Houlihan’s. It’s ostensibly named for one Lucille Buchanan, who I assume is fictional (my apologies to her if she isn’t), whose backstory fills the cover of the menu, something about her grandma’s Lunch Shack, and various culinary secrets handed down from one generation to another.

I’d say the story was there to fill the time while you wait for a server to show up. But the service here is so maniacally swift, there’s no time for reading; this is the Energizer Bunny of restaurant staffs, a youthful crew who literally run between kitchen and table. My chow showed up jus seconds after I had enunciated my desires for it.

The kitchen sits adjacent to a big ‘ol stainless steel smoker, built by a company called “Southern Pride” (though the waggish design team has renamed it an “Original Do-Rite Smokin’ Machine.”) It’s a rube Goldberg bit of infernal machinery, with a door that says “Too Hot!’ on it, and a chute that says, “Hickory and Apple Wood Only!” There’s a honey sprayer off to one side that looks like something from an old-timey filling station.

Indeed, the design teem at Lucille’s has been busy; there are sings everywhere, offering inspirational messages such as, “Now Is The Time For What You Dream About” and “It’s Okay To Expect Perfection”; this is a barbecue by Norman Vincent Peale.

They did a good job as well of coming up with the sort of loblolly pine floor you might find in the Deep South; even the tan and white checks in their booths look real. They’re clearly fond of details—form the barbecue sauce bottles that are constantly refilled, to the small boxes of toothpicks, to the much-needed towels at the end of the meal; if God is in the details, then the Deity eats ‘que at Lucille’s.

The menu demands a crowd, simply because the temptations are many, and with one or tow, what you have to order is proscribed—unless you’re up to taking home bagfuls.

If you’ve got the sort of crowd, happy to head for the trough, go for the Appetizer Platter of “tongue slappin’” barbecue wings, onion straws, deep-fried jalapenos stuffed with four cheeses (for the luvva Mike!), fried green tomatoes, Dixie egg rolls (chicken, sausage, corn, greens and jack in an egg-roll wrapper, with “old-fashioned blue-ribbon fruit ketchup”; the rolls are gimmicky, the ketchup is silly, but whatever…), chicken strips and a tri-tip quesadilla.

That same crowd will dive happily into the Backyard Family Feast ($66.96 for four or more; there’s also a Super Feast for $139.95 for 10 or more; per person it amortizes out well) of two racks of ribs(of your choice), a whole chicken, and a choice of four sides. The menu notes tha