I said here yesterday that I wanted to go down to Brea and see Frank Ferrante play Groucho later this month, and that an added bonus was a dinner at Riley's, a restaurant down there that used to be a Love's Barbecue and carried on with the same cuisine. Alas, a reader of this site — Brent Walker — informs me that Riley's is outta business. This is sad because it was the last remnant of the Love's chain. The Love's website claims there's still one in Jakarta, Indonesia but I'm dubious. I'm also not likely to be in that neighborhood so that one might as well be non-existent, insofar as I'm concerned.
This might not be the end of Love's, however. That website still sells the Love's sauce. In fact, I just received a case that I ordered…and they've redesigned the bottles, which is probably a sign of something. The site also claims they will soon begin selling the famous Love's beans over the Internet, which would be a glorious thing if they're as good that way as they were in the old Love's restaurants.
A couple of you are probably wondering, "What's the big deal about Love's?" No big deal, really. Just something that interests me, which is all a topic has to be to get onto this page. I liked their food and I like their sauce. You might, too. It's a sweet barbecue sauce and I usually don't like sweet sauces. In fact, during a period when all the Love's around me had closed and the sauce was not yet available over the 'net, I went out and sampled about a dozen brands of sweet barbecue sauces searching for a taste-alike. I was pleased by a grand total of none, I'm afraid. Since there are 720,000 barbecue sauces one can buy (conservative guess), I'm sure there are many that are good and maybe even a couple that are indistinguishable from Love's. But I sure didn't find them.
Don't bother suggesting your fave, at least as long as I have that case of Love's in my garage. As I mentioned in my piece on Baskin-Robbins, I'm not big on trying new things. Also, I should mention that I almost never put barbecue sauce — Love's or any other kind — on barbecued ribs, barbecued chicken or barbecued anything. I put it on foods that aren't barbecued to make them taste barbecued.
Anyway, my thanks to Brent Walker. He saved me from a week of getting my tastebuds in an uproar for something they're not going to get.