Phil's BBQ

The smell reaches the parking lot before you do: mesquite smoke off Sports Arena Boulevard, thick enough to taste. Inside there is a line, always a line, snaking past laminated menus to a counter where you order, take a number, and go hunt down a table. Phil Pace opened the first Phil's BBQ in Mission Hills in 1998 and moved it to this Point Loma barn in 2007 when the original could no longer hold the crowd. The El Toro, mesquite-grilled tri-tip sliced thin and slicked with his own sauce, has been on the menu since the first day; in 2012 it carried the place to the West Coast title on Travel Channel's Best Sandwich in America.

This is a grill line, not a tasting room, and it does three things hard: ribs, tri-tip and sauce. The baby-back ribs come off the mesquite with a char that snaps, sold by the half- and full-rack. The El Toro and the pulled-pork Broham sandwich both start around $8, which is why a full meal here rarely clears $20 a head. Get the onion rings, a tangle the size of a forearm, and a side of the signature sauce: sweet, smoky, a little sharp, the bottle regulars carry home. There is no wine list to speak of, no sommelier, no reservation. What there is, Phil Pace has been doing the same way for more than twenty-five years, and the queue is the proof.

Picture a barn: high ceilings, communal tables and four-tops jammed close, a noise level that climbs from hum to genuine roar when there's a game three blocks over at the arena. The light is bright and flat, the kind you eat ribs under without apology. There is patio seating outside, quieter and better in the San Diego evening, and that is where I would steer anyone who wants to actually hear the person across the table. Dress is whatever you walked in wearing. Service is counter-and-runner: fast, friendly, no ceremony.

Eat here alone because it asks nothing of you: no reservation to hold, no table for two to justify, no pace to keep up with. Take the El Toro and a number, find a spot at a communal table or out on the patio, and read your phone or a paperback while you eat. Nobody blinks. It is one of the cheapest good meals in San Diego to eat by yourself, which is rarer than it sounds. For more of them across other cities, the Solo Dining guide is the place to start, and the rest of the San Diego dining guide rounds out the city.

Not for a date you are trying to impress, or a quiet conversation of any kind. The room is loud, the seating is shoulder-to-shoulder, and you eat ribs with your hands off a paper-lined tray. Romance needs a different address.