Mt. Hermon’s Ribs Take the Hungry and Make ‘Em Believers

Somehow, Pico Boulevard is a little small-townish along this stretch. Middling traffic. Unpretentious little houses. Sea breezes. An egg store. Santa Monica College.

OK, so there’s a college. So we’ll say this part of Pico Boulevard is like a small college town.

Yes, of course, a small college town. Behold the old alma mater with its tall, graceful trees; its wide, peaceful lawns; the tides of youth surging across the lawns on paths that the landscapers disdained to foresee; baroque concertos and reggae without end going out over the airwaves from the college’s own FM station.

Tour’s over. Let’s get serious: Where do we eat? A vegetable hut? A falafel palace? A burgerteria? Mt. Hermon?

No question; let’s go to Mt. Hermon. Very conveniently for our tour, it happens to be right across the street from the Santa Monica College auditorium.

Mt. Hermon is not exactly a restaurant, though. It doesn’t have--well, there isn’t much point spelling out all the things the usual restaurant has that Mt. Hermon lacks, starting with walls and a roof. It’s actually just the parking lot of a Baptist church. However, you can get some very good Southern barbecue here.

The barbecue operation is a fund-raiser for the church, which is why there’s a list titled “Donations” instead of a price list. It’s undoubtedly why the people serving you are so sociable because they’re clearly volunteering parishioners rather than restaurant professionals. They’re as genuinely sociable, in fact, as the waiters who tell you their first names in real restaurants are pretending to be.

The cooking is done in as many as three giant oil cans-turned-barbecues, which billow impressive quantities of smoke whenever any of them is opened. You place your order in the vicinity of the donations list, then somebody goes over to the appropriate oil can barbecue, pulls out the requisite pork ribs, sliced beef, chicken or sausage and brings it back to where you are, which is also where the beans and the barbecue sauce are being kept hot.

Whatever you’ve ordered is put in a Styrofoam carton, and there are plastic bags to help out if there’s more than one carton in your order. You figure out for yourself where to eat it all.

Here’s what you get with your order of a dinner: meat with sides of beans and potato salad, a slice of bread and a slice of pound cake. With a combination, you get the same, but with two kinds of meat. With a sandwich, you get less meat, no cake.

The beef is tender and extremely smoky, though I’ve had a report of less tender meat at 3 in the afternoon one day, perhaps between shifts. The chicken is moist and tender, and you can specify dark or light meat. And it’s very smoky, of course. The links are good ones, rich and slightly spicy, and very, very smoky. The ribs are meaty and tender with just a little chewiness. And plenty of smokiness.

The barbecue sauce is rather mild (after all, we’re practically in church here), sweet and sour and scarcely hot at all, but it’s the real homemade item. It’s served out of the pot it’s cooked in.

The sides are uniformly beans, meaning very plain boiled pinto beans with no flavored sauce (they can be perked up by mixing in some of the extra barbecue sauce available in little plastic cups).

The potato salad is the most variable thing. Sometimes it’s the usual style with a particularly eggy dressing and pickle relish, and sometimes it’s more like mashed potatoes with green onions (particularly good). The only dessert is pound cake. If you want something to drink, you can buy a can of soda, making your own selection from an ice chest.

There’s usually one table around, sometimes apparently set up for people to dine at and sometimes just as a place for somebody to keep the accounts. It may seem that there is a spur-of-the-moment quality about all this, but Mt. Hermon is serious enough to have its own telephone number (the telephone is on a little stand toward the back of the parking lot, with the cords going into the church).

Eating here is always a social occasion, once in a while spiced up by a genial argument about the correctness of someone’s views on barbecue (having been brought up in Texas and always having had it such and such a way regularly seems to be a decisive argument). Pico Boulevard is just a small town, after all.

Recommended dishes: chicken sandwich, $2.75; sausage dinner, $6; beef and rib combination, $9.50.

Mt. Hermon Baptist Church, 1827 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica. (213) 450-1777. Open for lunch and dinner 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays. No alcoholic beverages. Street parking. No credit cards. Lunch for one, food only, $2.75 to $9.50.