5/31/2002 - The real deal on Lucille: Southern-style barbecue finds a home in Brea.
By Elizabeth Evans

Is there really a Lucille? I ask myself as I snuggle into a table in the country-cozy dining room of the sprawling restaurant named for the character in question.

After all, there’s a straight-from-central casting story printed on the menu.

The restaurant is filled with homey touches, including mismatched garden furniture on the crowded outdoor patio, and piped-in blues music. All of which gives the place the feel of a Southern roadhouse – even if it is freeway-adjacent in Brea and opened in September 2000.

It would be easy enough to believe that there was indeed a real Lucille Buchanan, who grew up eating at her grandma’s lunch shack in a small town outside of Greenville (no state mentioned in the menu story).

Still, I grew up in the days after Betty Crocker was outed as a creation of some marketing department and know better than to take the word of the unlikely Mr. Whipple or the Maytag repairmen. Plus there are two other Lucille’s locations, in Long Beach and Torrance. And the first one opened less than five years ago.

I eat that first meal in wonder. Fictitious history or no, the food is genuine.

About 80 percent of it comes from the stainless steel Southern Pride smoker that dominates one small dining room. In that hickory wood-fooled beauty, hundreds of pounds of meat are cooked low and slow every day.

That method imbues even the tri-tip-filled quesadillas (8.25) with a powerful whiff of smoke. This appetizer is also filled with stringy Jack cheese, pasilla peppers and caramelized onions (an example of south-of-the-border tastes we imagine Lucille encountered in her move to Long Beach with her naval yard working man, Joe). I’m getting a clearer image of Lucille when the entrees arrive this night.

We’re talking a lot of food per serving. I order center-cut pork chops (18.95), which come two 8-ounce chops to an order over a mass of sweet apples sautéed in bourbon and sided with sweet potato cakes. I like the thick port slow-smoked and lightly glazed. They are sweet and moist.

Barbecue specialties are also well-prepared. Chicken ($14.95 for a half) is a mahogany-colored treat topped with a splash of the house barbecue sauce and made fall-off-the-bone tender by time spent in the smoker. Baby back ribs ($18.95 for half rack, $21.95 for a full rack) are as the barbecue judges say they should be: The meat comes from the bones with the mildest of tooth tugs.

Barbecue dinners come with a choice of two sides. I like the sweet potatoes, whipped light and richly sugared, as well as the flame-roasted sweet corn that comes to the table with grill marks and the flourish of husks still attached and flaring off the oversize plates.

Soup and salad are offered with the meal for $1 more, but in view of the size of the meals and the basket of buttermilk biscuits and apple-flavored butter that are served upon arrival, such fillers aren’t recommended.

In addition, there are the desserts. These behemoths are seemingly designed to be shared. Peach cobbler ($5.95) comes with thick slices of the summer stone fruit in a thick syrup and a thick thatch of pale biscuit topping.

Melting over it all is a base-ball-size scoop of vanilla ice cream.

This is the food that made America big.

Our next visit comes after I’ve learned the truth about Lucille and Joe. The space is still a welcoming place with improbably small and attractive servers delivering massive portions of food with a smile. Even the beverages are large. The house-squeezed lemonade ($2.95) and the more refined strawberry lemonade ($3.45) are brought to the table in quart-size jars and include free refills.

At lunch, the place is less crowded than it was at dinner, and there’s a less-expensive, though abbreviated, lunch menu that includes a handful of sandwiches and barbecue selections with one side.

On this visit we sample the onion straws ($7.25). This is a mountain of deep-fried onio