RESTAURANT REVIEW : Nostalgia, Gumbo Set Village Apart

When I walked into the Village Bar-B-Que, a man at the register greeted me warmly and grabbed a menu. “One for dinner?” he said. “Or are you meeting someone?”

“We’ll be three,” I said and peered down the row of pine booths to see if my friends had arrived. Just as I spotted them in the last booth, they called my name. “There they are,” I pointed. “Here I am,” I called back to them. “Hey! Hi! I can’t believe you beat me here!” I suddenly realized I was just hollering these happy greetings the length of the restaurant. Such noisomeness is not particularly like me. But I wasn’t to blame. There are so many pigs--plastic pigs, wooden pigs, pig signs, pig memorabilia, pig paintings--adorning the Village Bar-B-Que’s walls, it pulled the hog caller right outta me. “Hey Richard,” I sang, “Hey Joooo-leee!”

“We like this place already,” Julie said as I sat down. “Especially that play car.” She pointed to a yellow, kid-size roadster in a row of toy tractors, tin trucks and an antique miniature steamroller: the Village Bar-B-Que is as much a private toy and nostalgia museum as a restaurant. Warm, cozily dim lighting comes from hanging, glass-shaded, converted gaslights from 1917. Tin signs advertise Kayo soft drinks, Chesterfields and Old Gold Cigarettes--”not a cough in a carload.” Flowers hang in old Roseville pottery wall vases. We looked and looked and kept forgetting to look at our menus. Our waitress, obviously used to such distraction, cheerfully forgave our inattention. “You think this is a lot of stuff?” She sniffed. “Wait’ll we get that back room remodeled and the owner fills it up.”

Eventually, we turned our attention to our menus, which were divided between special Creole entrees, barbecue and sandwiches, and Julie asked a question nobody could answer: “Are spareribs like extra ribs? . . . Like some auxiliary set on a pig?”

We started with a hot-link appetizer; good, garlicky sausage rounds served with toothpicks; and a “Creole” gumbo, which I thought was some of the tastiest, most authentic--and reasonably priced gumbo--I’ve had in these parts. The sausage was spicy, the chicken cooked to shreds, the sauce rich and murky and thick and there was file powder served on the side so that we could thicken it even more. Then Julie tried to stump us again with another question. “What is file anyway? Is there a file plant?”

Luckily--or not--I had recently done some research on the subject, so I gave a little speech about how file is a powder made from dried wild sassafras leaves. Sassafras leaves are used as a flavoring agent, an aromatic stimulant, a diuretic and a diaphoretic (sweat-producing agent); also, they’re helpful for skin eruptions, rheumatism, gout and arthritis. My 1979 edition of “Joy of Cooking,” however, says that file powder has been banned by the Food and Drug Administration as carcinogenic and suggests that “to reproduce its mucilaginous texture, use tapioca flour.”

After the dinner, I called George Bigner, technical director at Zatarain Foods in Louisiana, to clarify this last point. “It’s true that the FDA banned the root and woody portions of the sassafrass plant, because they have been able to isolate safrole, a known carcinogen, in those parts. But they have not been able to isolate it in the leafy portion. We have been in close contact with both the FDA and USDA about file’s possible carcinogenic properties, and I have to say I really don’t think there’s a problem,” George said. “In fact, the source of all the concern has come from that paragraph in ‘The Joy of Cooking.’ ”

During the meal, I tell my friends, “Back in the early ‘70s, some hippies I knew in North Carolina used to take sassafras as a psychedelic.”

Julie was wide-eyed. When our friendly, wonderfully good-natured waitress reappeared, Julie said, “Did you know that file powder is a psychedelic carcinogen?”

“I don’t know what it is,” the waitress said, “but people sure go crazy for our gumbo.”

Along with our gumbo, we tried some hush puppies, which were too heavy and dense and dry and not crunchy enough but probably would’ve been just fine for their original (namesake) function.

For dinner, Richard tried the shrimp Creole, spicy rice covered with a pretty good Creole sauce. “It’s good, but I think the shrimp aren’t very tasty,” he said. Julie and I both had barbecue.

A statement on the front of the menu had warned us that the barbecue is served with sauce on the side. “Since we start with ribs of the highest quality, lean and meaty, and barbecue them slowly and patiently for hours in hickory-wood smoke . . . we feel you should have the opportunity to taste the delectable product undisguised.”

Unfortunately, Julie’s chicken and ribs came from the kitchen looking like, well, plain old meat--the spareribs, especially, which I’m accustomed to seeing all drippy with sauce, were oddly unappealing, not even toasty brown but, well, the color of boiled pork--although they’re obviously not boiled. Sauce came on the side in little paper souffle cups and, although both the hot and mild sauces were delicious, they didn’t disguise the fact that the spareribs and the white meat of the chicken were dry.

I’d ordered the Texas-style ribs--hot. The thick beef ribs, although smoky and tasty, were also dry, but I liked the way they were cunningly hot. And my sauce didn’t come on the side--the cook had dipped my ribs back in the kitchen, and done so before cooking them too. It took awhile for the hot sauce to kick in, but then we were all snuffling merrily into our I--RIBS bibs.

“What this place needs is antique tissue-holders on each table,” Richard said.

Instead, we got Wet Naps for our hands and then dessert. The sweet potato pie wasn’t sweet, which I liked but Richard didn’t. “It tastes like a vegetable rather than a pastry,” he said. The peach pie was classically good, but the bread pudding, served with an intoxicating, rum-rich hard sauce, was downright heady.

After we were done eating, we lingered for an hour more, chatting and enjoying the memorabilia. I may have wished that the food were more inspired, but the amusing atmosphere and the good-natured staff couldn’t have made us feel more relaxed. I mean, how uptight could we be sitting in a room full of toys and looking at a pig-shaped sign advertising Big Red’s Pig Farm?