If you love BBQ then this is the place for you. Don't take my word for it though. Following is a column from the Seattle P-I reviewing the place:
Thursday, June 7, 2001
By JON HAHN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST
If you're thinking of making a pit stop midway between Seattle and Olympia, best place to pull out of the I-5 madness is the Warthog Barbecue Pit here. It's a full-bore, down-home barbecue joint that will make barbecue lovers oink for more.
Gary Kurashima, with 25 years of Pacific Northwest restaurant experience under his belt, has come up with an eatery and fare that is well worth squeezing behind your own belt. But you'll have to let it out a few notches after waddling out of this log cabin eatery in the middle of the 20th Street East industrial area.
With a menu ranging from barbecued chopped pork sandwich ($4.95) to the farmyard sampler called "Moo & Cluck & Oink" ($9.95) and a widening (that's the right word) range of homemade pies and cobbler, this niche restaurant (and catering service) has pretty well established its reputation in the just over two years it's been open.
"My husband frequents the largest national chain of barbecued rib restaurants, and they can't touch the Warthog's barbecued pork ribs!" said Federal Way food consultant Amy Muzyka-McGuire.
"My daughter is nuts about the ribs!" she added. "They're meaty and smoked a long time and when you get them, the meat just falls off the bone. They're cut from the ends of the rib, so you get more meat and less bone. Whenever my husband, daughter and son go there, we usually have one meal and three sandwiches and we all walk away feeling stuffed!"
This kind of enthusiasm for barbecued ribs from a Chicago transplant who grew up on the famous Russell's barbecued ribs back home was worth checking out. We in journalism try to live by the maxim coined by my mentor, the late Ed Eulenberg, who said: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out!"
So I drove down I-5 one early afternoon last week and turned left once I'd gotten off the freeway at Exit 137 -- you know, the one that takes you to that other Fife restaurant. Only, to find Warthog, you turn left at the top of the exit ramp and go back over the freeway and then turn right at the 20th Street traffic light and go about a half-mile or so till you see the log cabin structure just past the United Parcel Service and Volvo dealership on your right.
If there are sunbreaks, you can eat outside or in the Little Red Barn adjacent to the main log cabin restaurant building. If you're just making a pit stop, you can place your order and dash back onto the freeway.
"I usually have eaten my sandwich within 2 miles of I-5, so get an extra if you plan to drive any distance," Amy advised. She noted that "truckers and suits alike frequent the place," which is in keeping with the atmosphere that Gary wanted to create.
I must needs qualify this sauce-stained endorsement by conceding that my Regular Dining Companion, who is not fond of food with a spicy edge, picked her way around the carryout meal that followed my drive-by luncheon stop here and judged the grits a tad too heavy on BTUs.
But she admittedly didn't have the opportunity then to get outside the delicious brisket sandwich I polished off for lunch. And I would've done better bringing home the pork sandwich for her and kept the souped-up baked beans and coleslaw (methinks there was a touch of horseradish therein) to myself.
Gary was an armed services brat whose family managed to settle down in Tacoma, where he graduated from high school and did a little community college work before going back into the restaurant work where he'd started years before as a part-time pot washer and line cook.
In the past couple of decades, he's worked some top-line shops in Puget Sound and in Alaska (the Alaska Salmon Bake in Fairbanks), but he and his family wanted to come home to the City of Destiny (he and his wife and their two children live in Tacoma's University Place neighborhood).
"I researched the type of restaurant I wanted and the location," Gary said, "and people thought I was nuts picking this place. But it's a niche market and there aren't that many good barbecue restaurants around. This is a place where the suits and the jeans can enjoy good food."
He puts in a 60-hour work week here, overseeing most of the cooking and operations and the small, close-knit crew that includes his sister, Pam Hill. Once Gary's barbecued ribs and meat sandwiches became established on the menu, it broadened to include special items such as the Mr. Warthog 22-ounce Porterhouse steak with seasoned baked potato, sauteed veggies and steak bread ($23.95).
The pies, cobblers and cornbreads are baked daily -- the kitchen fires up about five each morning except on Sundays ("closed for our day of rest," says Gary, who also squeezes in a couple half days of R&R to spend with the family).
Eventually he hopes to phase up and out to making and marketing his own meat jerkies, jams, jellies and sauces and pastries. The catering service, begun just over a year ago, offers all his barbecue items plus extras such as seasoned corn-on-the-cob, barbecued meatballs, chipolte pepper chicken ribs and smoked salmon.
I'll be making another pit stop there soon, if only to sample the Warthog chili and Warthog gumbo and maybe a side of a menu item called Nasty Rice.
If you make your own pit stop here, you'd be well advised to ask for more than one of those little pre-moistened cleanup tissues. And check the rearview mirror for sauce hanging in your beard. It's a dead giveaway that you've been off your diet again.
Enjoy!