Here is part of the article from Cook’s Country. Click here to see the entire online article.
Editor’s note: Cook’s Country executive food editor Bryan Roof and staff photographer Steve Klise visited Ruddell’s Smokehouse in Cayucos, Calif., in June 2015. Jim Ruddell, featured in this article, died in early 2018, but the Smokehouse remains open today.
BEFORE COOK’S COUNTRY EXECUTIVE food editor Bryan Roof and I head out on the road in search of unique local eats, our first step is to solicit recommendations for where to find the best food. We take hints from everyone—from fans to coworkers to visitors’ bureau reps—in hopes that we’ll zero in regional dishes worth sampling at as many different neighborhood restaurants as time and appetite allow.
When we began to lay out our plans for an adventure through California in 2015, it seemed like everyone wanted to vouch for a visit to their favorite taqueria, and the list of locations to scope out was taking a turn for the unruly. As exciting as it would be to drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco subsisting entirely on tacos, following every tip we got would leave room for little else.
Fortunately, just before we left Boston, a Californian co-worker stopped us in the test kitchen and spoke at length about a small taco shack, located in a seaside town just up Highway 1 from San Luis Obispo, that bucked convention filling tacos with smoked fish, not fried. Our itinerary had us passing right through that particular region, so our colleague’s enthusiasm left us no choice: we had to check it out for ourselves.
“People pay me to make tacos on the beach, man. I’m probably the richest guy I know,” Ruddell said in a steady baritone, spreading his arms wide. “I mean, this is my office!”
We arrived in Cayucos, CA on a Friday at 7:30 am, the headlights of our rental car cutting through the gray morning light as we wove westward through the narrow grid of streets. A few blocks off the highway, we found a wide swath of beach that looked out onto a cove studded with large, rocky protrusions. Just across from this sandy expanse sat Ruddell’s Smokehouse, where owner and operator Jim Ruddell had been up all night tending to his cabinet smoker and preparing for a busy weekend.
Ruddell’s passion for cooking with smoke goes back generations. To hear him tell it, barbecue’s been in his blood ever since his family put down roots in Chacahoula, Louisiana. His own forays into smoked seafood could be traced to a bit of backyard ingenuity, some ornery neighbors, and a fateful brush with the law back when he and his family lived in Los Angeles.
“I used to have an old pizza oven in my backyard, and I’d smoke in that. My wife thought I was crazy,” Ruddell said with a laugh as he leaned against a cooler decorated with a frayed, yellowing map of Cayucos. “I had this neighbor who would call the cops on us all the time for code violations, and that turned into, you know, ‘they’re drunks,’ or ‘they’re doing witchcraft…”
After a handful of visits from the authorities, Ruddell developed a rapport with the inspectors, one of whom recommended a new location for his seafood-smoking sessions. Eventually, Ruddell settled in his current spot across from the beach in Cayucos, where his new neighbors were focused more on smoked fish tacos than zoning regulations.