Eat at the Cock

I read somewhere that in another dozen or so generations, we’ll all
look more or less like we’re of the same race—after so many
interracial couplings, everybody will look a little Asian, a little
African, a little European…
We’ll just look like Earthmen.
(Whatever. Earthpeople.)

Jon Davis, owner of the Fightin’ Cock Roaster in Interbay, likes
Cuban coffee—a holdover from his time living in South Florida. He
has a fondness for the barbecue of his youth in Texas. He also likes
Thai food, having lived in Thailand and been part owner of two
restaurants there. The red cement counter he poured for his tiny
rotisserie is inlaid with coins from his travels in South America. If
there’s a restaurant in Seattle striving toward Earthcuisine for
Earthpeople, it’s the Fightin’ Cock Roaster.

Davis has a hand in everything happening at the Fightin’ Cock (or,
if you prefer, the Cock Roaster). He built the 300-gallon smoker out
back from a secondhand barbecue and an old wood-burning stove he
Frankensteined together. He gives instructions to his staff in both
Thai and English, counseling one woman to put the knife away and tear
the chicken apart with her hands, while showing another that the cheese
goes both under and over the beans. When I ask for a Cuban
coffee, the barista at the counter cedes to Davis, saying, “He’d just
stop me and step in anyway.” Somehow he manages to do all this without
seeming like a control freak.

There’s a reason you can’t find Cuban coffee (cafecito) most
places—making it correctly (the sugar goes in the portafilter
basket with the espresso grind) tends to muck up and ruin your basket.
The trade-off for mucking up your basket is that the cafecito is a
distinctively smooth, sweet pour. Davis is meticulous in his
preparations: adding a little sugar, moving it around the filter,
taking a little out… he counts the seconds under his breath during
the pull, then waits confidently and watches to see that it’s all
right. Which, of course, it is. Sweet and rich, it’s the best of what
can happen when Italian espresso machine meets Cuban sugarcane and
South American beans.

The six barbecue sandwiches at the Fightin’ Cock bridge a bizarre
(but somehow intuitive) connection between Austin and Bangkok. The
signature sandwich, the Texas Slugger, is a foot of pulled, smoked, and
roasted pork slathered in barbecue sauce, served up on a lovely
baguette made by Seattle Roll (a Vietnamese family bakery). The bread
has a light, airy interior and just a wink toward a crisp crunch in the
crust. The pork is succulent (a word, I believe, invented to describe
pork). The pork reminds you that it’s pork. The pork is smoked by
smoldering apple logs and moistened by the wood’s own tannin water (the
logs are soaked prior to smoking). The pork is a contradiction: It’s
soft and sweet and sloppy, and it’s also alert, bright, and sharp.

The side of coleslaw did its job, which is the best thing you can
say about coleslaw. It called no attention to itself—it was cool
and smooth and (some would say) bland—but that’s coleslaw’s role.
It understands that the meat is the fun one. Coleslaw is the Bud Abbott
of barbecue.

The smoked chicken (hormone-free, anti-biotic-free, but not
free-range) is an epic poem told through the medium of chicken flesh,
smoked for a day and roasted for a night. It’s the story of a smoky
campfire in North Carolina that gets quenched and blown back to life
over and over in your mouth. It resonates on the lips for an hour.

The Fightin’ Cock Roaster recently took a hiatus of four months.
Davis split from a partner, reorganized, and reopened three weeks ago
with a new menu and schedule: serviceable breakfast from 5:30 a.m.,
with sandwiches taking over at 11:00 a.m. and going until 2:00 p.m. or
whenever the day’s chicken runs out, and Cuban coffee throughout. He
has given up on dinner service for now—the neighborhood’s traffic
dies off too sharply at dinnertime.

Davis started in restaurants as a teenager, and through mini-careers
in music, video production, and the army, restaurants were always
sneaking back into his life. When, finding himself in Thailand with a
bit of money in his pocket, he bought into a small restaurant and
introduced himself to the staff by showing up as the dishwasher. This
wasn’t a management stunt; he didn’t show up as the dishwasher for a
day. He showed up as the dishwasher for six months before
outing himself as the new partner. “Aaah, you like Thai people,” Davis
says the other staff kidded. “You sneaky.”