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| - My wife's birthday was over the weekend, and it seemed like having a good lunch was in the cards. Being a big barbeque fan, she selected the Black Dog Smoke & Ale House. We had heard so many good things about it that we finally decided to give it a try. We were not disappointed.
We were aware that the biggest drawback would be the wait for a table, so we left home early to get there right before it opened. Several other people had the same idea. We were given a nice greeting upon entering and were seated immediately. We were told that we might have a bit of a wait for service since we were seated before the place opened, but our waitress came by right away. We decided to start the meal with the appetizer we were most curious about: the burnt ends. Although a tad pricy, the meat lived up to everything we had read -- flavorful, wonderfully chewy around the edges, with melt-in-your mouth smoky goodness.
For our lunch, we both had pulled pork sandwiches, sweet potato fries, and an additional side of twice baked potato casserole. The sandwiches were excellent -- wonderfull smokey meat, slaw, and excellent Carolina Red barbeque sauce. The sweet potato french fries actually tasted like sweet potatoes, but I am not sure why others have raved about them. They were just okay, as was the casserole. But ... we came to this place looking for excellent barbecue, and it delivered!
We were happy we decided to eat right when the place opened because a line formed as we were eating our lunch. We decided to make a quick exit so that someone else could get our table. We were in and out in about 35 minutes.
Would we come here again? Definitely! Next time I would like to try the Georgia Peach barbeque sauce and sample the chicken and catfish. I decided to only go with four stars because the sides were only average in our estimation. Next time we will try some others.
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