Foodie Q&A

07/25/08 00:00:00

Jeff Freitas
Owner, Ribs & Tips
575 Divisadero St., Fresno

Age: 51

How long have you owned the restaurant? About 15 months. ... I've been in business, catering, going on 12 years.

What's your favorite thing on your menu? The tri-tip. Nobody else goes through the trouble that we do. The marinating process and all that stuff just makes it come out totally different. What I've tasted [elsewhere], all the spices are on the outside of the meat. Ours, you can taste it on the inside, way on the inside, just as well as you can on the outside. I like to let it sit at least a day so that everything kind of marries a little better.

What's your favorite food on someone else's menu? At El Bajio, the chile verde. ... That's usually the first thing I have at a Mexican restaurant because if that's good, then everything else is pretty good, too.

The junk food you simply can't resist? Rocky road ice cream. It's usually really good chocolate to start with, then the nuts and marshmallows and all that.

What's the fatal mistake people make with barbecue sauce? Once you start saucing your stuff on the fire, you've got to pay attention to it or you're going to burn your sauce. That kind of ruins everything. You've got to stay with it, and turn it. You let it caramelize a little bit, roll it over and put some more on it, just keep going back and forth.

Enchiladas or burritos? Enchiladas. I like the sauce. I'm going to end up wearing part of it anyway. Burritos tend to fall apart.

Potatoes or tomatoes? I like both of them. If I had to choose, potatoes. That's going to keep you alive a little better than tomatoes would.

Red wine or white? Red. It's not as sweet. I don't like the sweet wines. The cabernets and zinfandels, those are my two favorites. I don't care what the fancy chefs say; they go with pretty much everything.

What's your earliest food memory? Helping my dad barbecue when I was 5, 6, 7. I was in the way probably more than anything, but that's where I got my taste for it. I remember having a steak there to sample as he cooked it. We were always tearing that up.

Favorite food-related movie moment: It was silly, but I thought it was cute: In "Hot Shots," [Charlie Sheen] is frying bacon and eggs and stuff on [Valeria Golino's] belly. At one point, I think he was shooting grapes out of her navel, and she was catching them and eating them. That was funny.

What's the weirdest thing you've ever seen ordered? A fish dish at F. McLintocks in Shell Beach 20 years ago or more. It was probably a trout or catfish. I saw it go by and said, "Keep that thing away from me." It was whole. It still had the head on it. ... For some reason, the picture of the fish skeleton came in my head -- you know, from the old cartoons?

If I didn't work at a restaurant, I'd probably be ... a mechanic. I've been wrenching since I was a child. I can work on just about anything that has wheels, tracks, wings, whatever.

-- Don Mayhew, The Fresno Bee