Horse trailers in the parking lot, Carhartts and cowboy hats in the dining room — Nordy’s Bar-B-Que & Grill is perfectly located to feed the farmers and ranchers who congregate around the Larimer County fairgrounds at The Ranch.
It makes me think of that line from “The Blues Brothers”:
“What kind of music do you usually have here?”
“Oh, we got both kinds. We got country and Western.”
Nordy’s has both kinds of barbecue: Southern and Western. The menu takes its cues from Out West and Down South: brisket, spare ribs, pork, chicken and ribeye, all hickory-smoked, some dry-rubbed, others mopped.
Owner Eric Nordhagen spent a couple of years working on the recipes for the four sauces that sit on each table: Kansas City, Carolina, Texas and jalapeño.
“Kansas City is by far the most popular,” says Nordhagen, who seems to have barbecue sauce running through his veins. “That sweet smoky flavor is what a lot of people think barbecue is. I almost like the Carolina sauce best. It’s a hybrid, more like Georgia and the southern Carolinas where they use more mustard.”
The sides match the meats for flavor. Smoky bacon cuts the sweetness of Aunt Judy’s beans (yes, it’s his mom’s sister’s recipe — black, white and Great Northern with lots of brown sugar).
Macaroni livens up the creamy but tangy cole slaw. (“My grandmother used to make it in northern Minnesota,” Nord- hagen says.) French fries come out in a hot, golden pile, but the onion ring serving size could be more generous (come on, just five?)
As for the cornbread muffins, “I messed around with those for a real long time. We add maple syrup and sweetened condensed milk.” How can you go wrong with that combo?
Situated just south of The Ranch/Budweiser Events Center in Loveland, the modern exterior opens onto a bunkhouse-style dining room, with chinked log walls, mounted longhorns, cowhide, saddles and barbed wire accents. The south-facing bar has a great view of soon-to-be-developed land around Draft Horse Drive and Clydesdale Parkway.
In addition to the four sauces, each table sports a paper-towel holder topped with a Western-style finial. “People keep stealing the tops of my paper towel holders — the longhorns and marshalls stars,” says Nordhagen.
Kristen Browning-Blas: 303-954-1440 or kbrowning@denverpost.com
Nordy’s Bar-B-Que & Grill
Barbecue. Lunch and dinner daily. 4260 St. Cloud Drive (east of Interstate 25 on Crossroads Boulevard), Loveland, 970-461-9227;
