BBQ on the Bypass

posted at 2:45 am
on Oct. 7, 2008

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The Amazing True Adventures of Travis, Chapter XXXV

Some blog posts sit and sit and sit, clogging your brain and your queue and making you feel bad—my friend Shane just recently mentioned this phenomenon.

Sometimes it’s because it’s a huge issue that’s hard to write about, but for me, it’s just a silly little road trip that I’ve been wanting to talk about for a while.

So consider this a batch of the freshest nostalgia, like this year’s fresh beaujolais.

I went to BBQ on the Bypass in Langley, and I can sum it up in three words: Where’s the beef?

It was a BBQ competition, one where the organizers did a much better job of promoting it than planning it.  Or at least, what I thought it would be i.e. a chance to eat BBQ stuffs, wasn’t what it turned out to be.

I headed out after breakfast, with a car filled with friends: Rob, Rachael, Boris and [name redacted].  My navigational skills were crap, but when we finally arrived at the event, we parked and wandered through the roughly 60 tents set up in the parking lot outside the perogie deli.  Half the booths were from teams across B.C. who had been preparing the BBQ dishes the night before.  The other half of the booths were sponsors and vendors of BBQ-related stuff.

So, there was BBQ being made all around us, which was very exciting for the hundreds of people there.  Problem being, that the BBQ was being made for the judges, not for those people.  Each team would prepare dishes for the judges, and whatever meat was left over—usually enough for a snack for about 10 people—would be given out to the lineups of people waiting at each booth.

In fact, there just wasn’t enough food for the people there, and the folks in the booths didn’t have feeding the attendees as their 1st, 2nd or 3rd priorities.  So it was really not much fun, standing around and not getting fed, and the one booth that did actually SELL BBQ meat, ran out of buns, slightly before it ran out of meat, slightly before I got to the front of the line. Dang.

We got tired of being teased by pulled pork scents, so we headed into the heart of Langley, where we found a delightful restaurant called C-Lovers. They had an all-you-can-eat fish and chips meal, of which I availed myself.

Final verdict: Fish and chips are really yummy, and BBQ on the Bypass was a big disappointing tease.

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Previous entry:
Trip to the Airport

Next entry:
The Amazing True Adventures of Travis, Chapter XXXV