Southside Market

Elgin sausage is known far and wide as the best in the west. For well over a century, the town of Elgin (say it with a hard G, as in gut) has been famous for all-beef links that are pit-cooked, smoky, and succulent. The Southside Market has been Elgin’s primary meat market since 1882.

It used to be a creaky, sawdust-floored store downtown, but several years ago the Southside Market moved to a huge, spanking clean, barn-size building on the outskirts of town. While the new place lacks the charm of a well-aged and charmingly dilapidated house of barbecue, it still has a working butcher shop on premises, and it still smokes sausage and beef brisket the old-fashioned way, in big iron pits over slow-smoldering post oak wood. Order your meat by the pound at the pit and carry it to a table.

The sausage is spectacular – vividly spiced, taut, and moist beyond description; but don’t ignore the sliced beef; it too is luscious and flavorful, needing no companion other than a few slices of white bread just to mop its juices.