Chef Ara Malekian takes a puff from his cigar, the smoke swirling around his black flat-brimmed cowboy hat. He wears silver bracelets on his wrists and a turquoise ring on his right hand. The ends of his gray mustache are twisted and dangle on either side of his mouth as he describes how he aged the bourbon we’re about to taste. The bottle (not for purchase) is branded with a sticker (available for purchase) that features a line drawing of his face. Sitting in the back room of his restaurant, Harlem Road Texas BBQ, in the Houston suburb of Richmond, we alternate sips of the liquor with freshly brewed Armenian coffee, a nod to his ancestral homeland, though he was born in Iran. Malekian doesn’t look like other pitmasters—and he doesn’t cook like them either.
In Texas, smoked meats usually deliver a salvo of salt to the taste buds, but Malekian’s barbecue offers a subtler symphony of flavors. Perhaps that’s a result of his years spent cooking in a French kitchen in Switzerland and later under Wolfgang Puck in California. As a salt fiend, I found the first bite of his pork shank (available Sundays only) to be lacking the saline punch I’m trained to anticipate. But after several more bites, notes of smoked paprika, sumac, and black pepper came to a crescendo. Molasses brushed onto the raw pork and the brown sugar in the rub added a gentle sweetness and golden color. “Because I use such a great-quality meat, I think the salt really takes away from it,” he says. Harmony over domination.
Malekian feels the same about the wood he uses. He burns only staves from red-wine barrels trucked in from Napa Valley, in California. “It’s a cleaner, gentler smoke,” Malekian explains. His pork shanks spend seven hours cooking, the first three gathering smoke and the next four tenderizing in a foil-covered pan. The pork drippings are collected and used as a base for the curry sauce he serves alongside the shank. Malekian combines fenugreek, turmeric, paprika, star anise, dried ginger, garlic powder, and cayenne and blooms the spices in hot butter. Then he adds the mixture to the drippings and thickens the resulting sauce with potato starch. The pork easily falls away from the bone, making it great for dipping into the thin but flavorful sauce.
At $25 for a pound and a half, the pork shank is a generous serving for two people. Malekian will even pack up the bone if you want to take it home and use it for stock, which would be great for a soup made with your leftovers—but there probably won’t be any.
This article originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “Salt, Meet Sumac.” Subscribe today.
