Quest Log No 61 – Smokey C’s BBQ & Wings
Decatur, Morgan County
Do you judge a book by its cover? I
must admit, I’ve been doing this once or twice. So what do you expect how a
real BBQ place with Killer-Q has to look like? A raggedy old shack with no
windows on a lonely country road, a sleek brick house with neon signs in
Downtown, a nondescript store with a hand-written menu on a black board in a
strip mall, a wooden palace with hunting trophies on the walls on a busy
highway, or a burger-chain look-alike in an industrial area? The correct answer
is, of course, all of the above. Been there, ate in that. There just is no
telling what kind of BBQ you might encounter when you stand before a restaurant
– the only way to find out is to go in and try it. I’ve been surprised more
than a couple of times, negatively as well as positively, during this quest.
So, what’s so special about Smokey
C’s BBQ & Wings in Decatur? The building looks like any given
fast-food-chain restaurant in the country. The patrons are mostly recruited
from the workers of all those industrial plants on the west side of the town.
It is situated next to a gas station at the Alabama Highway 20, which is quite
a busy road in this area. Inside the
building, there is not much decoration on the walls, and the reddish-pinkish
plastic furniture does not exactly qualify it for a title story in Southern
Living.
You order at the counter right next
to the entrance, where you have the choice between the usual selection of meats
- pork, turkey, ribs, chicken, you know the drill. You can have the meat either
on a sandwich, which comes in two sizes, or on a plate with two sides.
Guess what – I chose the large plate
with 6 ounces of pulled pork (4 ounces would be the regular size), potato salad
and spicy mustard slaw. The plate also came with a piece of cornbread, and
together with a fountain drink I forked over just slightly over eight and a
half dollars. Very nice price, but what kind of food can you expect for the
price of a fast-food-chain burger meal?
As said before, never judge a book
by its cover, always sit down and smell the roses. What can I say? I am a fan
now.
The meat looked like Killer-Q, with
a wonderful pink ring and some serious bark. And the looks did not lie - its
flavor was perfectly smoky, with just the right amount of burnt wood flavor to
make it special. I rarely had pork that was as juicy and tender and lean all
together like this one. Real exquisite stuff.
I was really reluctant to pour any
sauce over it, but eventually I did – starting with the hot and spicy one. Big
mistake. One bite and my mouth was numb for a minute or so. Definitely too hot
for my taste, so I switched to the one labeled BBQ sauce. Oh, well, that was
your garden variety sweet’n’sour concoction, thick and red and, ahem, a little
sweet and mostly sour. Not bad, but I would have wished for a simple vinegar-pepper
sauce to just support the smoky meat flavor without giving it a totally
different direction.
The potato salad on the other hand
could have used a slight re-direction into a more distinctive aroma. It was not
exactly bland, but also not very flavorful. Which cannot be said of the spicy
mustard slaw – that thing gave me a kick in the pants, yessir! The mustard
aroma was very prominent, and by gosh, spicy it was. But unlike the spicy BBQ
sauce, it did not numb my taste buds, but left a very pleasant tingling
sensation in my mouth. At the end, I used the excess sauce from the slaw for
the pork, instead of the BBQ sauce. And the tiny rest, I scooped up with the
cornbread, which had a very bread-like flavor with just a slight hint of
sweetness. I’ve had cornbread before that was more like a sweet pound cake than
real bread, but not this specimen, and actually that is how I like my cornbread.
All in all, although from the
outside and also on the inside, Smokey C’s BBQ & Wings is nothing special, their food is
top notch. And next time I’ll bring my wife – she is the wings expert in our
family.
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