3/7/2003 - Smoke & Mirrors: Craig Hofman heats up Belmont Shore in Long Beach with the barbecue at his new Lucille's
Smoke by the water. The Belmont Shore landmark Hof's Hut is now Lucille's Smokehouse and packing in the barbecue lovers.

By Al Rudis
Restaurant Editor
Long Beach Press Telegram

Time marches on. Yesterday's gone. What have you done for me lately? The public is fickle.

Clichés are clichés mostly because they're true. And all of the above apply to the restaurant business.

That’s why Craig Hofman’s new Lucille’s Smokehouse now sits in the heart of Long Beach’s Belmont Shore area, where his Hof’s Hut used to be.

The location was where in 1961 his father, Harold Hofman, opened a counter seating 15 with a hut over the cooking area, hence Hof’s Hut restaurants.

“I thought long and hard about it,” said Hofman, “because of all the history and the fact that it was the original one. But in the end, I just felt that the Marina was awfully close, and (with the Hof’s Hut there) we had two restaurants too close to each other. We made the conversion in November, and we’ve more than doubled the sales since we made the conversion.”

The first Lucille’s was in the Long Beach Towne Center, and almost immediately, it had customers lining up to get in. After that hit, Hofman converted a sports bar type of placed called Hof’s Bar and Grill in Brea into Lucille’s, and the same thing happened.

But if you’re one of the many longtime Hof’s Hut customers, you don’t need to worry. “There are no plans to convert any more Hof’s Huts,” Hofman said. “Either the architecture of the buildings or the leases or the area they’re in we don’t find suitable to do conversions.”

But that doesn’t mean there won’t be more Lucille’s restaurants. Hofman was calling from his car. “I’m on my way to Henderson, Nevada, a suburb of Las Vegas, where we singed a lease. We’re going to start building there in October and hope to open maybe next April.”

The Belmont Shore Lucille’s is a fraction of the size of the expansive restaurant in the Town Centre, but the use of strategically placed mirrors makes it seem larger. It does have room for the same Southern Pride smoker that holds 500 pounds of cooking meat at a time, and like the other restaurant, the delicious smoky smells greet you as soon as you enter.

One difference I noticed when I ate there recently was that nearly every dish tasted peppery, even the mountain of onion straws served as an appetizer. Executive Chef Chris Ferrell confirmed this. “I did pep it up a little,” he said. “I just had them increase the pepper in the flour for some of the other applications to make it more multi-purpose. We use that flour with our fried chicken, chicken fingers, pretty much anything that gets dredged in flour.”

Since the Lucille’s barbecue sauce is also peppery, that puts almost every dish on the fiery side. By the end of the meal, my mouth felt the same way it does after eating an Indian meal.

Apart from that warning, I can recommend everything I tasted, including:

Onion Straws. Thinly sliced red onions are dipped in a mixture of buttermilk and powdered sugar. Then they are dredged in that spicy flour mix, containing cayenne and black pepper, salt, onion powder, and granulated garlic. “Then we lightly separate them and deep fry them in vegetable shortening until golden brown and crisp. Then we drain them and pile them on a platter.”

They’re served with barbecue ranch dip, a mixture of Lucille’s special ranch dressing. The ranch dressing contains mayonnaise, buttermilk, green onions, and black pepper.

The barbecue sauce is made from tomatoes, cider vinegar, molasses, onions, garlic and other spices, including plenty of pepper. This is what comes on all the barbecue dishes, except if you order the hot and spicy sauce, which also has Frank’s Red Hot, Tabasco and other chili powders and peppers.

Tri-tip quesadilla. Raw tri-tip is rubbed with a mixture of brown sugar, paprika, salt, cayenne and black pepper, dry mustard and allspice. “That’s massaged i