The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and artist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.
San Bruno’s hip-hop-inspired late-night barbecue joint doesn’t simply play rap music while you eat your ribs; the actual name of the restaurant is Hip Hop BBQ Shack. Nearly every inch of the place is crammed full of assorted knickknacks and memorabilia, including a corrugated “Wall of Fame” that’s lined end to end with old vinyl and framed photos of hip-hop luminaries, both local and mega-national: Tupac, Kendrick, Mac Dre, Keak Da Sneak and, for some reason, Justin Bieber.
Waiting for our brisket plate, we fiddle with an NBA Jam mini arcade machine — itself an object of mid-’90s nostalgia. Over the speakers, Kid Cudi is off-key rap-singing about lonely loners.
It’s all a little on the nose. But the formula seems to work, mainly because the barbecue itself is so solid.
It turns out that Hip Hop BBQ Shack is a fairly recent rebrand of The Famous Rib Shack, a longstanding Peninsula destination for ’cue, with the old sign still lit up out front. For the last few years, Chef Mae, the one-woman force behind San Francisco’s popular (and now-shuttered) Hyde Away Blues BBQ, has set up shop, slinging a barbecue menu that’s slightly fancier and more newfangled than your typical old-time joint. The mac and cheese has truffle oil in it here; the sauces are boozed up with bourbon or whiskey.
Late on a Friday night, we cobbled together a plate of hot links and brisket, and found both to be legitimately tasty. The links were plump and fatty, bursting with juice, and had that good snap you look for in a sausage. The brisket was chopped into big chunks rather than sliced and seemed to have some of the burnt ends — that crunchy, well-blackened Kansas City innovation — mixed in so that you might get several different textures in a single bite: the crisp, peppery bark; the tender, pleasantly smoky meat; the little nubs of fat.
