Safeway Barbecue Battle

This past weekend, my wife and I finally made it down to the Safeway Barbecue Battle, 2012 edition. We're tempted to go every year, but it's usually beastly hot, and we've never been quite sure it's worth the price of admission. This year it was, again, beastly hot, but we figured we might as well go and see what all the hype was about. It's a pretty big festival, spanning Pennsylvania St. between 7th and 14th streets NW, with a bit of action on some of the side streets as well. There are several teams of barbecuers, being a battle and all, located in tents throughout the festival. For us, however, the main attraction was the food.

There were two ways to get fed here. You could depend on the free samples, or you could purchase some from a fairly substantial selection of vendors. We started off with the free samples. There was a pork table with a selection of four pork dishes to sample -- chop, tenderloin, burger, and I can't remember the fourth. It may have been another tenderloin. They were pretty good, and there wasn't a line, so it was a good start. Most of the samples, however, were in the Safeway Sample Tent, an amazingly bad idea. Putting them all in one place meant that instead of standing in several lines of moderate length, you had to stand in a single very long line. We waited an hour, and the line was even longer when we left the tent. The samples varied in quality. Most were pretty good, though not great, and some were pretty bad. The lamb was especially good, but overall, we felt that we spent more time in line than the samples were worth.

We weren't terribly hungry after the free samples, though, so we wandered around a bit more. Several of the booths had games like cornhole, which my wife enjoys more than I. PNC had a basketball court set up where you could play PIG. It was a good reminder of how bad I've gotten at basketball, but at least I beat my wife. Please don't take that out of context. I wanted to get some barbecue before we left, so we swung by one of the vendors to get some brisket. I think we picked the wrong one. The price was the same as the other vendors, but the serving size was not. Still, it was pretty good brisket, and I definitely wouldn't be heading down here again next year. Just remind me to avoid the free sample tent.