At Leo’s Rib Joint, It’s Bone-Appetit

For starters, Leo’s is minimal, even for a barbecue place. As an all-takeout operation, it doesn’t have a single chair. You place your order and then stand around in the bare, steep-roofed room (it looks like a Bavarian chalet after an eviction), shifting from foot to foot--unless you’ve commandeered the lean edge of a windowsill--and just wait for your number to be called.

And yet people do it, as they’ve been doing for the last 32 years. From midday snackers to evening partyers to well-dressed people straight from church on Sunday afternoon, they come to the corner of Crenshaw and Adams boulevards and wait patiently for Leo’s Bar-B-Que’s St. Louis-style ribs and that one-of-a-kind hot sauce.

This is excellent and, above all, distinctive barbecue. The ribs may not be as moist and soft as at some other places, but they’re determinedly smoky. The beef ribs have developed that pink layer that only long smoking gives, and it’s almost a quarter of an inch thick. The pink color is so dark the meat looks like the ripest parts of a country ham. (A sign at the window advertises Leo’s will smoke a turkey for you for $1 a pound.)

The mild sauce is no more than a faint, sweetish, molasses-tinged shadow of the hot sauce. The hot sauce itself is as hot as a 75-watt bulb, not sweet but pleasantly sour and bitter, full of pepper flakes and chunks of something chewy, which I’ve always suspected of being coffee grounds. This is a dazzlingly brusque, self-confident sauce, and it goes wonderfully with the barbecue.

The menu is basic: beef and pork ribs, sliced beef and pork, chicken, homemade link sausage. The ribs and meat are available as “orders” with bread and little cups of Boston-type baked beans and a creamy potato salad flavored with pickle juice. You can also get ribs by the full or half slab, and there are sandwiches (where the meat actually appears in a roll or between slices of bread, for once, not with the bread on the side, as at most Southern barbecue places) of links or sliced meat.

The “orders” are fairly sizable. If all you want’s a snack, you can order a quarter portion of chicken or a little sandwich of chopped beef on a burger bun.

Everything is quite good. The homemade link sausage has a soft, slightly granular texture, the flavor running more to spices and smoke than meat. Leo’s barbecued chicken is generally tender and moist.

The pork ribs are meaty and a little chewy; the beef ribs are for those who really like to gnaw their meat from the bones, because it may be a little dried out. But as earlier stipulated, it’s good and smoky.

In addition to the regular pork ribs, there are rib tips--another item for bone-gnawers--and very tender, meaty small ends, the most expensive “order” on the menu. I’m quite fond of “odds and ends,” which is a large miscellaneous portion of well-done and overdone bits of every meat on the menu. Think of it as a combo plate, extra well-done.

Those sliced-meat sandwiches are messy looking but quite luscious (the beef is sometimes a little fatty). Whether you order them on bread or a roll, they have a tendency to get soggy and fall apart. Eat them with plenty of paper towels on hand.

In addition to the usual beans and potato salad, you can order coleslaw (light, fairly fresh), collard greens (scarcely bitter, lightly flavored with ham and vinegar) and the health food sort of carrot salad, easy on the raisins, again very fresh.

The peach cobbler is just OK--the pastry suffers from being shoveled into a pint cup, as usual. There are a couple of cakes, such as 7-Up cake, a lemony pound cake. The best desserts are the pies, which are baked in individual pie tins. You might think they were purchased from outside, but the young woman at the counter says they bake their own.

They include a pecan pie with a good custard layer and plenty of nuts, and a sweet-potato pie unusually flavored with nutmeg, butter, not much sugar and a dash of lemon juice. That’s Leo’s for you, going its own way in a sugar-oriented world.

BE THERE

Leo’s Bar-B-Que, 2619 Crenshaw Blvd., Los Angeles. (323) 733-1186. Open 11:30 a.m.-10:30 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday; 11:30 a.m.-midnight Friday-Saturday; 1-10 p.m. Sunday; closed Monday. No alcohol. Parking lot. MasterCard and Visa. Sandwiches $5.90-$6.10; orders $7.75-$8.45; desserts $1.40-$1.95.

What to Get: pork sandwich, beef ribs, pork ribs, small ends, odds and ends, pecan pie, sweet-potato pie.