306 Barbecue

Quest Log No20 – 306 Barbecue  
Athens, Madison County

When a friend of mine told me that there is a new BBQ place on Highway 72, just outside of Athens, I was thrilled. I had noticed some activity lately in the old building, but always thought that was more or less in preparation to tear it down.

Well, now it hosts Madison County’s newest BBQ restaurant, so naturally I had to go there as soon as possible.

The 306 Barbecue is open now for about a month and it all began like so many BBQ businesses around here – a few friends regularly did BBQ at local High School football games for a few years, then they entered their first competition and did well there, next they put the big new smoker they purchased for the competition to good use at a local car show, and ultimately the idea to open a restaurant of their own was kind of stuck in their minds.

Good thing that due to the shaky economic environment empty floor space around here is easy to find and cheap to have. I really do not know exactly what business had been in the building before, but a withered street sign in one corner of the premises could give you the idea that it was some kind of antique mall or novelty shop.

The 306 has its own big and colorful street sign up, and that is also necessary, because the building alone would not reveal its new purpose. As inconspicuous as it is on the outside, it is also very unassuming inside. Everything is spotless clean, but it has no atmosphere whatsoever. The walls are empty, except for a few TV screens in the corners, there are no pictures, license plates, sports banners, or anything which would give the place a “face”.

The furniture is folding chairs and folding tables, and only the counter seems to be custom made and has a little bit originality with its front out of corrugated metal.

But I am willing to overlook many flaws in the interior design department, if the food is special.

Because I was very hungry, I ordered the 2-meat combo, with turkey and pulled pork, and with potato salad and slaw on the side. My wife had the ribs, and because they were out of baked beans, decided for the slaw and the squash instead.

When the meal was served, I was shocked – the turkey came in slices! Are we in Orlando here, or what?! I made a mental note to call the State BBQ police later …

But the pork was pulled, and it was delightful. They obviously know exactly what they are doing when it comes to smoking pork. It had a very rustic smoke flavor, with a hint of sweetness that I had not tasted anywhere else before. Together with the quite tangy and somewhat sour sauce, it was just the perfect combination. For this, I would come back here anytime.

Alas, there was also the turkey. Not only was it sliced, but it tasted predominantly salty and was an utter disappointment. Also, my wife’s ribs were very fatty and the taste was merely average, but at least they were of the so-tender-it-falls-off-the-bone variety.

The sides were also a mixed bag. The slaw was actually tangy and fresh tasting, with a sour note and a very nice crunch. And although the potato salad was not bad, it was also not more than average tasting. However, the squash, which was actually a concoction made with egg and cheese, was wonderful.

So was the red sauce – they have only that one at the table, plus a very good white sauce, as well.

As I stated before, very seldom have I encountered a sauce that complements the pulled pork so perfectly as this one.

Prices are in the normal range for BBQ in this area, we paid twenty-four bucks for everything, including our drinks, which is okay also for the amount of food we got.

The meals are served on those compartmentalized Styrofoam plates, with plastic forks and Styrofoam cups.

We also noticed that the sweet tea was not brewed fresh, but was replenished by those gallon plastic jugs you can buy at your local supermarket.

All that, and the lack of adornment on the walls, makes the eating experience there a somewhat ambivalent affair. This restaurant, through its great location on one of the busiest Highways around here, and their undeniable expertise and mastership of pork smoking, could be a raving success. But the lack of atmosphere and the comparatively lower quality of the rest of the food they serve prevents it to rise to my Top 10 list for now.

But they are doing this only for a month now, and the learning curve is certainly steep. And those flaws are easily fixable, so we will be back some time to check on their progress. Even if nothing changes, at least I know that I will get fantastic pulled pork there.

Fat Boys Bar-B-Q

Non-Quest BBQ No 7 – Fat Boys Bar-B-Q

Kissimmee, Florida

During my occasional travels, I try to sample BBQ at those near and far away places outside the Quest area. I just really, really like that stuff ... 

In the Orlando area, chain restaurants rule. Even most of the BBQ places there have at least two locations in the city – there are virtually no lone riders around.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Why not branch out if you have a good product, and make more profit? Streamlined logistics, rebates on expanded orders for your raw materials and dining room supplies, spill over of the customer base from one location to the other, and all kinds of other benefits can come from that.

Of course, there is always the lingering possibility that in the name of profit maximation you streamline everything too much and end up serving bland mainstream food after a while. Which, quite frankly, is what most of the BBQ places in the Orlando area reverted to. It seems to me that they predominantly cater to the Tourist who has “eating original southern BBQ” on their to-do-list, just after “see all four Disney World parks in one day” and “get a photo with an alligator on one of them farms”.

What a pleasant surprise is was then, when I found this little non-franchise authentic BBQ joint just half an hour south of Orlando in Kissimmee.

Fat Boys Bar-B-Q is there since 1971, it has no satellite station, is not part of any franchise, and it’s just your typical family-owned southern BBQ place.

The inside exudes this friendly family atmosphere that makes you feel welcome and at home. The walls are plastered with photographs of family, friends, and customers, and the medium sized dining room is divided in three rather cozy parts. In the background, you hear a local Country&Western radio station, and everything seems to be just laid back and casual.

The staff is also very friendly and the service is quick. The meals are served on resin plates with actual metal silverware, and the whole place is very clean.

So, I ordered my usual pork plate, with BBQ beans, slaw and potato salad as sides.

Of course, as customary in this region of the world, the pork comes sliced instead of pulled, but it had a very nice pink ring and a very pronounced smoky flavor. It was quite tender, but as is often the case with sliced pork, it was a bit on the dry side. Never mind that is also was less than hot … well, parts of it were actually rather cold. Must have been sitting there on the shelf for a bit before it got served.

As for the sides, I didn’t eat the slaw, which was just too sweet for my taste. The BBQ beans, on the other hand, were quite exquisite, with a very strong bacon taste and just a faint undercurrent of sweetness. The potato salad had a distinct dill flavor, and a tendency towards a mustardy taste, which I really liked.

The sauces were the usual concoctions for that area – one extremely sweet Sweet sauce, one not so sweet and actually a little tangy Mild sauce, and one rather spicy but otherwise tasteless Hot sauce, for which you had to ask separately.

And, as usual, the Mild and the Hot sauces mixed together would then result in an acceptable BBQ sauce.

The plate also came with two slices of toasted white bread, which was very dry and had a rubber-like texture.

For around thirteen bucks, including a drink, it is a fair deal, keeping in mind that prices in this region are a bit elevated anyway. Granted, they could heap a bit more meat on the plate, but that is just a minor detail. The big picture is that you get good BBQ there in an authentic atmosphere. One can only hope that this place stays there for another forty years, as a beacon of true BBQ tradition in a see of middle-of-the-road barbecue chains.

O'Boys Bar-B-Q

Non-Quest BBQ No 6 – O’Boys Bar-B-Q

Orlando, Florida

During my occasional travels, I try to sample BBQ at those near and far away places outside the Quest area. I just really, really like that stuff ... 

We all go through life, deeply troubled by questions of eternal and infinite significance, like “Who am I?”, or “What is my purpose in life?”, or “Is there life after death?”, or even “Is there intelligent life in the universe?”.

When you are in the Orlando area and get the itch for BBQ, an additional question will invariably pop up: Why the heck are they slicing their meat??!

Everybody here in North Alabama knows that only pulled meat can deliver the kind of sublime delight that ultimately and rightfully makes BBQ such a cultural icon in the South.

But in Orlando (and Mississippi – see my Vicksburg post …) they just ignore common wisdom and stubbornly do it the wrong way.

It’s got to be the tourists. No, seriously, could you imagine an Englishman sitting in front of a plate with pulled pork after a long hard day touristing at Disney World and not going: “Good Lord! That’s exploded …!!” ?

So, to make it more agreeable to the mainstream Alien from across the pond, they slice the meat. What a shame. No, it’s downright blasphemic for all us disciples of the North Alabama Smoked Church of All Ribs (NASCAR). And it really, really does not taste that good, either.

Why then, do I even go to these places? It is a service to humanity, really. To warn every self-respecting BBQ connoisseur of the perils that lay hidden in those lands where the dictatorship of mainstream culture let’s only the façade remain, but hollows out the true meaning and purpose behind it.

O’Boys Bar-B-Q (the “O’ ” stands for “Orlando”, and not for “Old”, as I suspected first …) can be found in two locations in Orlando. I was at the place on South Orange Avenue, which has the layout of your usual mainstream sports bar, with flat screen TV’s all over the place, a bar area, posters of local football teams on the walls, between two huge Auburn flags … hey, wait a minute! Isn’t that kind of weird? Can anybody imagine having a Gators flag hanging in, say, any of the BBQ places around Huntsville? Well, maybe it would stay up long enough to call the cops, because surely someone must have broken in at night and place this thing here … damn college students with their silly pranks!

Other than that oddity, the place is friendly and clean, and so is the staff … well, I didn’t really check the cleanliness … you know what I mean.

Since I was very hungry from the flight and hadn’t eaten much the whole day (don’t tell my wife …), I decided to go for the overkill – the 3 meat combo, with Ribs, Pork, and Beef. All sliced. Except for the Ribs, they came still on the bone. But you get the picture.

And, oh boy, for around seventeen bucks with a drink, they bring you a lot of food!

As sides I had fries, because in all of Orlando they don’t seem to know the concept of potato salad, baked beans, and slaw. On top of this, they packed two humongous slabs of Texas toast. A lot of food. Seriously. I am ashamed to concede my inability to eat all of it – I left the fries and some of the beef. Which was sliced. Both of it, the bread and the beef.

So, then I dug into all this, ribs first. Ahem, you know what I mean. First, I ate the ribs, which were not especially tender or in any kind of way of the “fall-off-the-bone” variety. Also, they were a bit too much on the fatty side, but actually very flavorful and I did not need to sauce them up at all.

The pork, however, was in desperate need of a little help from our red sticky liquid friends. It had the texture of card board, the tenderness of wet card board and the taste of … you guessed it, card board!

Alas, the sauces helped a little, but were certainly no revelation by themselves. The sweet sauce was just that – very, very stickingly sweet. The mild sauce was just the sweet sauce with less sweetness, and the hot sauce was just spicy, without any taste of its own. Blending together the mild and the hot sauces, I was able to come up with an almost agreeable mixture.

Which I didn’t really need for the third meat on the plate, the sliced beef. The taste was very savory and smoky, but the whole cut was more fat than meat, and while I like a little fat here and there, it was just too much to stomach. And remember, I already had the fatty ribs in my belly, so I just cut a few choice pieces out of the beef to get an idea of the taste.

By then, I already had no room for the sides anymore, but I tasted them anyways. Funny thing, the taste of the baked beans reminded me strongly of the Chef Boyardee my kids eat occasionally. The slaw was not really bad, not really good, just middle of the road.

The best thing of the whole meal was definitely the Texas toast, which should not be the case in a BBQ joint.

Well, a joint it isn’t per se. They serve the meals on real china plates, with actual metal silverware. It is more of a family restaurant kind of place, certainly geared more towards the Tourists than the local hometown folks.

Oh, wait, no – the best thing of the whole meal was actually the smell of smoked meat that drifted over the parking lot when I arrived. A promise they couldn’t really keep.

Goldie's Trail Bar-B-Que

Non-Quest BBQ No 3 - Goldie’s Trail Bar-B-Que
Vicksburg, MS

During my occasional travels, I try to sample BBQ at those near and far away places outside the Quest area. I just really, really like that stuff ... 

A visiting alien from outer space (or a tourist from Huntsville, Alabama for that matter …) could very easily come to the conclusion that the civil war was fought entirely in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Everything there is somehow, indirectly or directly, related, touched, or inspired by the great conflict.

Without the big siege of the town to gain control over the Mississippi River, the battle that together with Gettysburg sealed the fate of the Confederacy, Vicksburg would just have remained another sleepy little town in the sleepy rural South.

Even with that storied history under the belt, it is not quite the hectic metropolis today, but a nice little town where they make a living of their legendary past.

The hotels have old cannons as gate guards at the entrance, and one of their streets is named “Confederate Avenue”. Of course, they also have this humongous military park at the old battle site; heck, they even have a salvaged civil war Union river ironclad gunship on display there. And the BBQ place I went to, Goldie’s Trail Bar-B-Que on South Frontage Road, has displays on the walls that show old civil war era guns, all kinds of soldier utensils, bugles, knifes, Minnie balls and the like. It does not quite look like in a museum, but it is a nice collection of civil war memorabilia nonetheless.

Goldie’s seems to be quite an institution in Vicksburg – when I was driving by at lunch time, the parking lot was filled up to the brim, so I decided to return later when the rush was over. It is a family owned and run business for fifty or so years now, and it was actually located at a few different locations in Vicksburg during all those years. It is now situated a stone’s throw away from I-20, just a mile or so from the Mississippi River Bridge.

There is also an “Express” location downtown, where you can get their BBQ as take-out.

Their service is very friendly, yet a bit slow. That could have something to do with the fact that I was there right at the time of changing the shifts after the big lunchtime rush, so the outgoing shift was probably exhausted and the incoming shift not yet at full speed.

The dining room is very clean, and so are the restrooms. I liked that they had actual metal silverware, but the plates were those ubiquitous plastic ones.

And the atmosphere is, well, interesting with all those civil war memorabilia hanging at the walls. Let’s just call it a unique place and move on to the food.

First of all, they do not serve pulled pork. I know, it is Mississippi, but even those folks should have heard about that by now. Or maybe it is a cultural thing, something that is required by law, or just plain stubbornness not to follow the world wide accepted best way to serve BBQ pork. I felt like a Roman who had no alternative but to eat raw meat in some strange barbarian country, when I finally mustered the courage and ordered the “sliced” pork plate.

The waitress must have picked up on my disbelief and dismay, because she quickly assured me that they usually would slice the pork so thin and then kind of mash it in a way that you could not tell the difference. Still, I was not amused. And what was that part about “mashing” the pork, anyway? Well, when in Mississippi, do as the Romans do …

When the food came, my bewilderment grew. It was a very generous amount of meat, thank you very much, that was topped by some raw onion rings. Say what? Yes, raw onion rings. Never seen this before, except on Greek Gyros, which is a totally different culinary beast.

And then, after removing the onion rings, I found out what she meant with “mashing” the pork – it was actually sliced very thin and then they had poured a very charitable amount of Goldie’s special BBQ sauce over it and … mashed it together. The structural integrity of the slices would not withstand such a mangling, resulting in a big saucy mess that very remotely resembled pulled pork – or something you may have seen before occasionally, by the side of the road.

There were stripes of fat hanging around, some sinew I believe, and I expected at every moment to find myself starring into the eye of the poor beast.

Oh well. Besides that, I prefer to decide by myself how much of which sauce is put on the pork. But with only one sauce available at the table – the same sauce that was already on my pork – this became a somewhat moot point. At least they had not completely drowned the meat in the sauce; the quantity they used was actually how I would have done it myself.

So I put the onion rings back on, heaped some of the fat-striped, sauce-drenched meat together with a piece of onion onto the fork, closed my eyes and … really not too bad. Surprisingly tender and juicy, although that juiciness might have actually come from the sauce. Unfortunately I could not tell if the meat had a good smoked flavor, because try as I might, there was no single piece to be found on the whole plate that was not covered with sauce.

Nevertheless, the sauce is really tasty, tangy but not too spicy, with some fruity sweetness, and it also goes well not only with smoked meat, but with raw onion, too.

As I dug through the meat, I realized what a big amount of it that was on the plate. When you order the “double the meat” option, it better is on a day you hadn’t had breakfast. Also, they serve a very tasty garlic toast with it, two big slices to be precise.

Their homemade potato salad and cole slaw is fine, but nothing I would put on a pedestal, like they do on their facebook-page. 

I am a big guy who does not shy away from piles of food. That day, I was especially hungry, because I actually hadn’t had any breakfast and this lunch took place at about three in the afternoon. But I freely admit that when I was done with my double-meat plate with potato salad, cole slaw and garlic toast, there was a slight feeling of queasiness coming from my tummy. But it was totally worth the $14.99 I paid for all that good food, plus a drink.

Although I still can’t bring myself to consider that sliced pork should be an accepted or even tolerated form of BBQ anywhere in the world, I have to admit that those folks in Vicksburg, Mississippi, apparently know what they are doing. Well, without that phenomenal sauce, which covers that mangled mess, it might be a different story.

Sonny's Real Pit Bar-B-Q

Non-Quest BBQ No 1 - Sonny’s Real Pit Bar-B-Q
Orange Blossom Trail, Orlando, FL

During my occasional travels, I try to sample BBQ at those near and far away places outside the Quest area. I just really, really like that stuff ...

With close to 140 restaurants in nine Southern States, a Sonny’s Real Pit Bar-B-Q restaurant is one of those places where you expect to find the least common denominator in BBQ.

Surprisingly, it is not that bad, well, it is actually quite tolerable.

I visited one of their places in Orlando, FL at South Orange Blossom Trail (there are two more restaurants in Orlando and about half a dozen more in the vicinity of that city).

The atmosphere inside is quite nice, with wooden benches in a light beige color, not too loud music in the background (some Best-of-the-80s mix), and it is clean and bright in there.

One of their specialties is the “All-You-Can-Eat” ribs menu. Additionally to of two flavors of ribs (southern style and dry rub), you can also mix slow smoked chicken, or pulled or sliced pork with it, until you are so filled up that they have to use the jaws of life to pry you out of your booth. For about fourteen bucks, that is a very good deal, I think.

But even if you order a regular meal, the amount of food is not too shabby.

I opted for the 3-Way-Combo, with sliced pork, pulled pork, and ribs, which was about $11, plus drink.

Instead of the usual potato salad, this time I ordered the fries, because the only potato salad on the menu was with sweet potatoes, which I absolutely loathe. Well, it is not really necessary to say anything about the fries, though, other than it was a very healthy portion.

The cole slaw I had as the second side was kind of bland, a bit watery for my taste, but tolerable.

The meal also comes with a choice between cornbread and garlic toast, and I am glad that I chose the latter, because it was really good.

Of the three (pork) meats on my plate, the pulled pork was the best. Although a bit soggy, it had a very nice texture and a good smoky taste. The sliced pork had more of a “porky” taste, which was a bit surprising but I actually liked it. The ribs were a bit disappointing, because they were not very tender and had not much meat on it. However, the taste of the few good pieces I managed to gnaw off the bones was very intense and smoky.

For sauces, they give you a lot of choices – Sweet, Sizzlin’ Sweet, Mild, and Smokin’.

Whereas the hot sauce is just that, without any other quality, the mild one is very fruity and also a bit spicy. Both sweet varieties are not that much different from each other, and are thick and sweet, and actually very good when mixed with the hot sauce.

But my favorite is the mild sauce, which can stand on its own merits.

All in all a very good variety, sauce wise.

One word about the service – slow. Not unfriendly, nor inattentive, but just very, very slow. And the place was not even full, there were only very few other guests in the restaurant with me at that time. Maybe it was one of those days, maybe it has something to do that they serve all those bloody tourists all the time, maybe I was just too hungry and thirsty to could have tolerated that. Whatever it was, it was still slow service.

But all in all, for a restaurant chain, I was pleasantly surprised by this place. You can actually get decent barbeque there, the portions are okay, and the all-you-can-eat option is just a very nice idea to really stuff yourself senseless with BBQ.

It won’t become my favorite place in the world for sure, but when I am back in Orlando, I know where to get my fix now.