Yeah, sauce is fine, but as a condiment, always served on the side. I like a vinegary North Carolina-style sauce with pulled pork, but for a brisket? Pretty much sauce-free, Texas-style.
My worst BBQ story, which I’ve told before on the SDMB…a family vacation to Washington DC. We went to a restaurant called Red Hot and Blues in Arlington VA, which was the original one of a chain that used to be in a few states including my state of Michigan. It had been founded by a few southern politicians who couldn’t find good BBQ in the DC area. If the place ever did good BBQ, it had gone far downhill by the time we ate there.
Seated at an outdoor table, there were a number of squeeze bottles of different regional styles of BBQ sauce, which I took to be a good sign, I ordered the brisket, because brisket is the most difficult to BBQ well, so it’s the best way to tell if the place knows what they’re doing,
What I got was some thin-sliced meat product, hardly identifiable as beef, let alone brisket, like the cook ran out of brisket and threw some steak-umms on the grill (nothing against steak-umms, but they ain’t brisket). And it came pre-slathered with a crap-ton of some overly sweet generic thick tomatoey BBQ sauce. Microwaved mystery meat from a kid’s Lunchable smothered in Open Pit would have been about the same.
