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| - Two words for you Toronto: CALM DOWN.
Jesus. It's like none of you have ever had barbecue before.
The interior is all plywood and Schlitz posters from the 80s. There are a million staffers for a place that seats like, 30 people. 3 Servers and about 4 people working the kitchen/bar - all of them standing around with toques. To me, this is the kind of place where the cooks could easily staff the front of the house. The environment left me feeling blah. It just felt really smug and contrived to me. I get it. It's so funny to pretend to be a rough-and-tumble dive! I just want a bit more authenticity (which I know is loaded). I guess what I'm looking for is something that isn't so engineered and textbook.
Overall, the food was good, but not great. Definitely not deserving of the hype. Not worth lining up for either. The price is fair for what you get.
From the shareable sides ($3.50 each) we got the "crack rolls," which are a standout. Soft, buttery, sesame-flecked rolls are served with a side of whipped, sweetened rendered smoker fat mixed with butter. The spread is topped with sea salt and has that killer combination of sweet, salty, fatty deliciousness going for it. The rolls are warm and are the perfect empty-calorie consistency. This dish was great. We also got their pickles, which were ho-hum at best.
Also from their sides, we got their smoked nuts, which turned out to be peanuts given the baked beans treatment, which wasn't what any of us were expecting. I think we all thought they would be seasoned, dry smoked nuts. We also got the duck ham, which is duck that is cured and smoked like a ham. Nice texture. This was my dining companions' favourite dish, but not mine. I got tired of the ham taste and you really lost the duck. I liked the lightly pickled cucumber it was served with. The main dishes were in the $13 range, overall.
The ribs were tasty. They were smoked but not overly so - I didn't get an overpowering smoky flavour from them. They were cooked to the point where they still had a decent bit of chew and served with a kind of Asian/hoisin kind of a glaze and topped with crushed peanuts. This was probably my favorite dish.
We also got the fried chicken, which was 2 weirdly shaped thighs (so weird that even though I'm a thigh woman, I thought they might be white meat and passed them up in favour of a drum), and 2 drumsticks served with honey and special reserve Tabasco. This was also good but not transcendent. The crust on the chicken was thin and slid right off the chicken skin, which was still flabby underneath. The meat had been brined, but possibly almost too much so? I think there's a difference between a juicy fried chicken and a fried chicken where you have crust and then it tastes like the meat is poached underneath. This was good, but nowhere near come fi testing other better fried chicken I've had (I am a fried chicken connoisseur).
Dessert was an aggravatingly overpriced ($5!) "banana cream pie" which was such a throwaway. Basically graham crumbs, a dollop of banana pudding and whipped cream. Whither my 'Nilla wafers (the way they do it in the South). It was amateurish at best. I came home and yammed about 10 Oreos with a cold glass of 2% and that was much more satisfying, to give you some indication.
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