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| - City Smoke kinda goes up in flames. We showed up around 7pm on a Friday night, and our first clue should have been that the restaurant was almost empty. However, we were hungry, so we threw caution to the wind, grabbed two bowls of peanuts, and were shown a table. After deciding not to throw our shells on the floor, we perused the menu. As a place that quickly establishes itself as a BBQ joint, the menu seems disjointed; oysters on the half shell and peel & eat shrimp co-mingle with sliders on the appetizer menu, and shrimp & oyster po-boys are listed above the omnivores' pork, chicken, and brisket sandwich options. But the true blasphemy surfaced once the meal arrived.
Y'all, the mac & cheese was NOT GOOD. Grainy, tasteless, and altogether sub-par macaroni and cheese is unacceptable in a BBQ restaurant. And the fried okra was overly salty without packing much flavor. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how great the meat is at a BBQ joint (and keep in mind, City Smoke's meat is nothing to write home about); if your sides aren't stellar, you might as well shut down shop. Between the four of us, we ordered the brisket, rotisserie chicken, and pulled pork, but no one was overly complimentary of the meatsplosion on the table. We had three sauce options: one was vineagar based, and the other two tomato-based ones tasted almost exactly the same.
Our service was okay, but I think that's mostly attributed to the fact that our server only had one or two other tables to attend to. Maybe City Smoke burned brightly at one point, but the flame has died.
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