Subject: Valley Ranch Barbecue
From: Mark
Date:
5/7/2020, 4:06 PM
To: phaedrus@hungrybrowser.com
On 5/6/2020 8:12 PM, Mark wrote:
Hi Uncle Phaedrus!
Love your site. There was a big BBQ chain in Southern California called Love’s Barbecue,
I’m sure you know about. I grew up in SoCal, and loved eating there. After Love’s closed,
one of the original partners of Dick Love had a restaurant called Valley Ranch Barbecue.
It was on Sherman Way in Van Nuys, and was there for many years, and was wonderful. It
had the same proprietary recipes and same basic menu as Love’s.
Both restaurants were famous for their BBQ beans and BBQ sauce. If you look online for
recipes/knockoff recipes, they are all pretty bad and few even close. Ha, ha — just
looked online and saw folks were already asking you about those recipes, but the results
were still not the real thing.
I am a French trained chef with over thirty years of professional experience, and have
come very close to reproducing the original recipes on my own, but just wanted to see
if you have had any more recent, more authentic recipe discoveries. Those real recipes
must be written down somewhere, right? Grrrrr….
Cheers!
Mark
Hi Mark,
Thanks for writing.
I could not find much about Valley Ranch Barbecue, just a handful of reviews and closure notices on Yelp
and the like. All of the posts that I have about Love's BBQ are linked on this page, and the only recipe
for the sauce that I have found is on this page: Love's BBQ
I appreciate your offer of assistance. The best way that you could help would be for you to look back
through past requests on my site that I was not able to find and choose any of those that you can help
with. I'm afraid there is no way to find the Southern California requests by location except to use the
Google search box at the top of every page and just to type in "California" or a city name.
Phaed
