Bib-Worthy West Coast Barbecue Offers a Juicy Back Story

Warning—repeat, warning. When eating barbecue, do not wear a white shirt. There’s a reason Hawaiian patterned shirts are so common during summer outings, and it’s not because they’re festive. It’s to disguise those tell-tale BBQ splotches as coconuts.

I learned this during a visit to West Coast Barbecue, easily La Mesa’s best option for American-style carnivore attractions. The family that runs the place are lifelong experts at sauce-stain prevention. Seconds after I fretted about my white shirt, co-owner Olga Worm offered me a bib—the front of which declares, “I (heart) RIBS” at roughly the section of one’s torso containing ribs.

From the outside, West Coast Barbecue is unassuming—just a tiny restaurant in a strip-mall storefront at the Village Shopping Center. Or is it?

In carnivorous terms, West Coast Barbecue is an “ambush predator”—luring  customers with the promise of simple nourishment, only to trap them in a larger, tastier web.

In this case, that web is West Coast Barbecue’s enormous catering operation, which Olga Worm says accounts for 75 percent of the company’s business. The physical restaurant serves as a showcase for the food, and even half of that is high-volume takeout.

 My four companions and I—part of the 12.5 percent of customers who are dine-in—watched from inside as a stream of people approached the outer window to pick up to-go orders.

Since West Coast Barbecue is open only from 4 to 8 p.m., the wait staff stays unfatigued: Server Andrea was efficient and slyly good-humored, swiftly supplying   extra plates and warm-dampened hand towels, and watching like a hawk in case my Mr. Pibb drink needed refilling.

The menu has many options, but I wanted to survey several foods, so I shared the “BBQ Feast for 2” ($20) with a friend. (The meal’s official moniker is You Can Have It All, which happens to be my favorite song by the band Yo La Tengo.)

For $10 per person, we got plates full of mouth-watering, succulently prepared BBQ beef, pulled pork, smoked chicken, and baby-back ribs (they’re more tender than spare ribs, which are more substantial). We got a choice of three sides, opting for   classic-style cole slaw, smoky-style baked beans and orange-hued sweet potato fries with a side of viscous ranch dressing for dipping.

Two others in my group selected a full order of Spare Ribs (also $10 per person), which in a fit of irony they ate unsparingly. Side orders included attractive wedge-cut fries and two very well-made Caesar salads. The quality of the side orders is a mark of West Coast Barbecue’s excellence. (I hate when you go to a restaurant and the salads are slapped-together, iceberg-lettuce afterthoughts.)

The fifth member of our group was a youngun’—the sort who probably still remembers wearing a bib for purposes unrelated to barbecue sauce. From the kids’ menu he ordered chicken. It’s served on the bone so parental help was required, but he poured the BBQ sauce all by himself, doing a darned good job keeping the colors within the lines (of his plate).

West Coast Barbecue’s decor is nothing snazzy, and the signs’ slogan “Where the West Meets the Coast” makes my brain hurt: Doesn’t the West meet the coast AT the coast? Isn’t that like saying “Where the edge meets the periphery”?

Of course, I’m being too literal-minded here: The word West means western-style, specifically Texan, and coast means Californian. The restaurant also features Southern-style barbecue, and these three styles are embodied in the three BBQ sauces at each table—traditional Texan (which is served with most of the meat), Raspberry Chipotle (a bit sweeter, with traces of spiciness) and a Southern mustard-and-vinegar concoction.

You can tell them apart by their brown, red and yellow colors—which also is the color scheme of the interior walls.

I asked owner Worm if there were any hotter sauces, and she brought me something called Bite You Back, which has enough kick to leave a hoof mark on your forehead. She also brought samples of the menu’s newest items—two varieties of “sliders,” or tiny sandwiches with a deliciousness quotient that would make Harold and Kumar abandon White Castle and change their knightly crests to “I (heart) RIBS” graphics.

The safe choice is the pork slider, but I found the beef-and-diced-jalapeno option more palatably potent.

So did my friend, whose eyes became red and teary from the jalapeno heat after a couple bites. I asked for his review and, peepers glistening, he submitted the slider was “tasty without being overwhelming.”

I objected to the word “tasty,” as I use it far too often in my restaurant reviews (I need some new adjectives), so he edited to “zesty without being overpowering.” Which sums up the slider superbly.

Our meal deals came with desserts—homemade fruit cobblers with optional a la mode vanilla ice cream or sherbet (normally the cobbler orders are $1). Options include apple, peach, cherry and boysenberry. We had all but the peach (maybe next time) and found them to be warm, gooey and very, very good.

The pie ending to the meaty meal reminded me of one of my favorite North Park restaurants, the S.D. Chicken Pie Shop. The cobblers at West Coast Barbecue are much better, though.

I asked the co-owner about the back story to West Coast Barbecue, which has followed a path as unpredictable as a summer-picnic game of croquet. Most of the tale involves the Worm family, whose run of good fortune defines the phrase “this is where the Worm turns.”

It all began in 1958, when Dale and Betty Worm opened the Roadside Bar BQ on Mission Gorge Road. The place was a La Mesa favorite for two decades thanks to classic recipes Dale learned from a cook who had worked at Sonny Bryan’s BBQ in Dallas, Texas—one of America’s reigning barbecue giants, which goes back more than a century, to 1910.

In 1978, Dale Worm was ready to retire, and arranged to sell all his barbecue equipment to one of his managers, a man with the last name of Becker who wanted to start his own restaurant.

Shortly before the place opened, Becker pulled out of the deal, so Dale enlisted the help of his son Oscar Worm, who was living in Texas. Oscar returned to San Diego to run the new place. The signs were already made: Bekker’s Bar BQ.

Still with me? Good, because this is where it gets juicy. In 1979, while Oscar Worm was managing his thriving BBQ and catering business, he met Olga, who owned five shoe stores, one of them next door. By 1980 they were married: Oscar and Olga Worm. With names like those—Oscar means “divine spearman” and Olga means “holy”—you might think these two were Scandinavian.

In truth, he’s German and she’s Russian.

A few years and three children later, Olga decided to sell the shoe stores and join the family’s most lucrative endeavor, cooking and selling barbecue. The catering business far outearned the restaurant, so in 1995 Bekker’s closed its doors, much to the chagrin of stain-cleaning dry cleaners throughout La Mesa. Catering was the sole focus.

Then in 2001, after the Worm family had spent more than four decades drenched in the daily scent of barbecue sauce, Olga and Oscar retired. No more beef, no more pork, no more chicken—it was time to travel the world.

Olga also indulged her first love—the theater—and wrote and directed a USO-style musical revue called Sentimental Journey, full of WWII-era songs (such as those sung by The Andrews Sisters) and starring her daughter, Marla Worm.

During their hiatus, the barbecue restaurant had been sold three times. Clearly nobody else had the finesse the Worm family did.

In 2001, Oscar and Olga were getting restless: Retirement isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. So they tired to buy the place back, but the owner initially didn’t want to sell. The Worms started a different restaurant, but soon Bekker’s became available again, so they bought it, too.

By 2010 the Worms bought back the original location on Mission Gorge, where the catering business still has its offices. Oscar and Olga’s son, another California-Texas dual citizen, joined the team, and so did daughter Marla. (Lara, the third member of the clan, works as an attorney in Washington, D.C.)

Now the catering business is “larger than it ever was,” Olga says. It has two barbecue pits—a huge brick pit at the Mission Gorge location, while the Lake Murray Boulevard spot uses a $20,000 modern metal pit called Southern Pride, which can hold 500 pounds of meat at a time.

Olga explains: “All the beef and pork goes in at night. We use oak wood, set a fire at the bottom, and it smokes in there all night long—the slow, Texas style. Chicken, ribs and smaller meats go in there during the day for several hours.”

Worm contrasts this with places such as Phil’s BBQ (now in Point Loma), which “is not really barbecue—they are California grilling.”

Whereas Phil’s BBQ endured neighborhood complaints at its previous Mission Hills location, people in La Mesa “thank us,” Worm says. “When you grill, there’s a ton of grease that goes into the air. With our method, the smoke stays and gets into the meats. It’s filtered several times, so very little gets into the air.”

Olga says the catering business serves an average of 5,000 people a week. One of their July catering operations will serve as many as 10,000 people.

Nonetheless, I have to recommend the restaurant—where West Coast Barbecue will cater sumtuous BBQ meals to your party of five with as much skill and quality as if they were catering a party of 5,000.