Barbecue Sauce

"Sometimes we have to suffer to get the best of life's lessons. " - Kathleen Sullivan, former "CBS This Morning" co-anchor, who lost 18 pounds on Weight Watchers, and will be piloting "After the Headlines" for NBC. FERGIE EYES ROYAL FILM ROLE "Fergie," the red-haired estranged wife of the duke of York, is said to be considering a film role as Boadicea - the first-century queen who resisted the Roman occupation of Britain. The Sunday Times in London reported that the duchess of York, formerly Sarah Ferguson, was looking at a script for film-maker Ken Russell, in which Boadicea is flogged naked and her women warriors marched into battle clad in just paint.

Not all that many years ago, a restaurant specializing in roast chicken might exist, but its location would be a busy highway and the decor pure truck stop. Roasters makes it perfectly clear that it is not that sort of restaurant. The address is an easy stroll north from Rittenhouse Square and its affluent neighbors, and the place itself is as warm and homey - pretty, even - as a country kitchen. Rough-textured white walls, tile floors and banquettes upholstered in cheerful provincial print are the basics.

There's something comforting about gnawing on ribs. Why else the explosion of rib joints in the area? These days it seems as if there are more ribs on plates than on the hoof. Maybe it's because they are so American. Maybe it's the back-to-basics '90s. Or maybe it's that ribs - and Southern barbecue in general - soothe jangled psyches. "Ribs are really hot in the Northeast," said Theresa Harden, executive vice president of the National Barbecue Association in Charlotte, N.C., which represents 450 restaurant owners, caterers and retailers.

Gulf Coast is the new restaurant inhabiting International House in West Philadelphia, and its outdoor dining garden already seems as popular as it was when Eden was there. The new place attempts to focus on the cuisines of the Gulf area, which means the menu runs from touches of Cajun to dishes whose names conjure up visions of Mexico and even Jamaica. Gulf Coast opened in early summer, and it has been spending the tranquil summer months getting ready for fall and the blitzkrieg of students from Penn and Drexel.

The best way to cook in the summer is to do as little of it as possible. But after we've used up our biweekly pizza delivery and our quota of tuna salads, what then? One way out of the kitchen is to use the barbecue to get a head start on a week's worth of meals that need little more than assembly each night on their way to the table. By starting off with a gala cookout, and by preparing enough food to ensure a small amount of leftovers from each course, we can create the foundation for a whole week's worth of menus.

It was hotter than your Uncle Bubba's barbecue sauce, but they were still cool like that. Not even a 101-degree temp could stop the style parade of members of African-American fraternities and sororities from all along the East Coast at Saturday's 19th annual Greek picnic. In case you weren't one of the 300,000 who braved the heat for the all-day affair in Fairmount Park, here's what we'll remember most about the scene besides the water bottles and the sweat rags: HOT SHORTS STYLE, GIRL DIVISION.

To really appreciate Mama Rosa's Southern Dinner Outlet, you should know something about its early years. It began in the mid-1980s, when Rosa and Walter Ritter began cooking up barbecue in a converted gas station at 3838 N. Broad St. The original Mama Rosa's location is still turning out the chicken and ribs, but the Ritters have expanded their sphere, adding a catering business and an eatery at 5531 Germantown Ave. And while the ribs and chicken...

It's been three years since this column checked out the food doings at the Rittenhouse Hotel and Condominiums, where a new executive chef, James E. Coleman, has been in residence since September. Coleman oversees the menus at Restaurant 210, TreeTops and Boathouse Row, plus the afternoon tea served in the lobby. Restaurant 210, which overlooks Rittenhouse Square, is the most formal space; TreeTops, which also overlooks the Square, is informal, but decidedly upscale; the windowless Boathouse Row is a preppy-casual bar where customers can watch football or belt out a karaoke tune on the appropriate night.

Where to dine on the romantic Delaware now that the summer restaurants have sailed off into the sunset for the season? One interesting option is Eli's Pier 34. On a glorious afternoon not long ago, Eli's glass walls were rolled up to allow the gentle breezes of an unseasonably warm day to tease two of us into believing we were lunching on some island terrace. At dinner later in the week, the glass walls were down and through them, three of us at our candelit table could savor the lights of the Ben Franklin Bridge in the distance and river tugs at our feet.

There's a handsome new sunroom tacked to the back of the Whitemarsh Valley Inn. And a border of bright flowers, petunias and marigolds mostly, circling the inn. Neither was there when we first began noticing the inn on Germantown Pike in Lafayette Hill. Both attracted our attention as we whizzed past recently on our commuter route. But the cars were the real reason we stopped. At a time when many restaurant-bar parking lots are showing the recession's effects, the spaces at the inn seem perpetually filled.