Restaurant of the Week: Buckboard BBQ

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CLOSED APRIL 2011

Buckboard BBQ and Grill, 1386 E. Foothill Blvd. (at Grove), Upland

Opened in 1991, Buckboard BBQ occupies a spot in the Red Hill Center largely occupied by automotive shops. I’ve been there a few times over the years, pleasantly, and returned a couple of times recently due to tire repair. Drop off your car at lunchtime, eat at Buckboard, pick up your car. I recommend it.

The restaurant is bright and clean and sports a cowboy motif, going along with its name. You order at the counter and they bring your food to you.

Off the express lunch menu, I had the pork rib special ($7; drink extra). It arrives in a basket with fresh cut fries, slaw and three ribs. They were short, about six inches long, but meaty, trimmed in St. Louis style and with only a squirt of sauce on each. Good meal.

The meats are smoked Santa Maria style over hickory. I’m no devotee of regional barbecuing but you’re free to compare Buckboard to Red Hill BBQ across Grove and report back.

Next visit I had the barbecue chicken sandwich combo with fries and soda ($5). It made for a light, inexpensive lunch.

I hear the tri-tip is especially good and ought to get that next time, hopefully without the side of tire trouble.

Find the menu on Buckboard’s website.

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Images from Mexico City

A few vacation photos. I’ll run more soon.

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One of the eye-popping murals from UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico. This is a tiled fresco on all four sides of the Central Library, done by Juan O’Gorman and depicting 400 years of Mexican history.

Below, the entrance to the Frida Kahlo Museum in Coyoacan, in the very blue house where she and Diego Rivera lived.

Below that, strollers in Park de Mexico, one of the city’s woodsy parks.

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Cyclists come out in droves on the last Sunday of the month.

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The National Palace, the seat of the federal government, is on one side of the expansive plaza known as the Zocalo.

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A colorful scene inside one of the city’s mercados.

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Sob!

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Seen Thursday on Foothill Boulevard west of Hellman and east of Big Lots, a strawberry patch is being plowed under for a minimall. Whew! I’d been worried Rancho Cucamonga didn’t have enough of those.

* The grower tells me that despite the sign and construction fence, the activity relates solely to the Hellman Avenue pipeline project a few yards away. OK, we can stand down.

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Reading log: February 2011

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Books acquired: “The Female Man,” Joanna Russ; “The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum”; “Blade Runner” (movie adaptation), Les Martin; “They Live,” Jonathan Lethem; “Secret Stairs,” Charles Fleming; “Juliet, Naked,” Nick Hornby.

Books read: “Return to the Planet of the Apes Nos. 1, 2 and 3,” William Arrow; “The Return of Tarzan,” Edgar Rice Burroughs; “The Return of Sherlock Holmes,” A. Conan Doyle; “The Return of Fu Manchu,” Sax Rohmer.

There were many happy returns last month, in the sense that all six books I read had the word “return” in the title. Oh, I crack myself up.

On the bright side, I’ve plowed through 12 books in two months. On the down side, this was a particularly lightweight month from a literary standpoint, unless I get points for reading three books from a century ago.

I won’t belabor my choices, most of which were indefensible. The elephant in the room, or really the gorilla in the room, is that I read three novelizations of a “Planet of the Apes” animated series, which I happened to be watching on DVD. (The Apes are one of my guilty pleasures.) Part way through the series I remembered I’d picked up these three books in 2007. If I were ever going to read them, this was the logical time. So I read one per weekend, as quickly as possible.

This might represent the nadir of my serious reading life. I’ll have to get back to Mark Twain soon to recover a few shreds of credibility. Compounding my shame, the show and the books were kind of fun.

As for the century-old stuff, the Fu sequel was okay, the Tarzan sequel quite good (if you’ve read the first one, you should at least read the second, which ties off the loose ends neatly) and the sixth Holmes collection was also great.

For those who care, I’ve carried the Holmes book since boyhood, bought Tarzan and Fu Manchu in 2001 at Book Alley and the LA Comics Show, respectively, and the trio of Apes books in the past decade.

What have you been reading? Other than in quantity, surely I’ve made most of you look good this month. No need to thank me. Just doing my job.

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