Ribfest Chicago closed Lincoln Avenue between Irving Park and Berteau from June 5 to 7, more than twenty barbecue vendors, two stages, $10 suggested donation. At the centre of it, as at every rib festival, is a judged competition.

Judging Is the Actual Event

Competitive barbecue is not a novelty attached to a street party. It is a formalised discipline with sanctioning bodies, scoring rubrics, blind-box submissions and judges who have been certified to evaluate appearance, texture and taste on numerical scales. People travel circuits. Reputations are made and lost on a tenth of a point.

What makes it interesting at a neighbourhood festival is the collision of that rigour with a crowd that is mostly there to drink a beer in the sun. The judging happens off to the side, in something close to silence, while two stages play to several thousand people who have no idea a technical evaluation is underway thirty feet away.

The scoring criteria are also a genuine argument about food. Appearance counts, which rewards presentation over pure flavour and annoys purists every year. Texture is scored separately from taste, which forces a distinction most eaters never make consciously. It is a more demanding framework than most restaurant criticism operates under.

Chicago and the Rib Question

This city has a complicated barbecue position. Chicago is not one of the canonical American barbecue regions — no claim comparable to Texas, Memphis, the Carolinas or Kansas City — and yet it has the aquarium smoker tradition on the South and West Sides, which is a genuine and largely uncelebrated regional style with rib tips and hot links at its centre.

A North Center rib festival with twenty-plus vendors and a judged competition is not really connected to that tradition, and the gap is worth naming. The city’s most distinctive barbecue is made in storefronts on the South and West Sides, and the festival version of barbecue happens on the North Side with a suggested donation at the gate.

The same pattern shows up all over this summer. Lakeview Taco Fest in August and Tacos y Tamales in Pilsen in July are two festivals about the same food in two very different neighbourhoods, and they should be read as a pair.

Twenty-odd smokers on Lincoln Avenue, two stages, and a panel of certified judges scoring texture in a tent nobody is looking at. The competition is the most serious thing on that street and the least attended.

Cover image: Victor Grigas / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)