Spring Street Smokehouse

As I wrote last August about the Smokehouse, I have been eating here for years, through varying degrees of quality. In those early days, the place was somewhat of a mess: boxes of napkins and plastic silverware piled in the dining area, a dilapidated stand at which you ordered your food, a counter full of meat that did not look appetizing. Of course, when the food was good (which it usually was) you didn't give a damn what the place looked like. Sometimes the food was lousy, however, and you felt like you were eating in a high school cafeteria.

Over the years, though, the place has definitely been spruced up (it helped a lot when they finally got a license to sell beer.) They have servers who wait on you now (all very nice) and the walls are no longer bare, they are decorated with Dodgers signs and other various barbecue-related paraphernalia. A couple years ago my friend Tracie and I stopped in for lunch and found that they had built a very attractive bar. These days they have one of the better beer lists in town: several Belgian beers in the bottle, and even Bear Republic's Racer 5 IPA, one of the best IPAs in America. (I went to the Great American Beer Festival one year and this won the Gold Medal in the IPA category.)

A few times over the years I have eaten at the Smokehouse and picked up some of their burnt ends for my mom, who loves them. Her birthday is in a few days (I won't say which birthday, however I will say there is a song on side 2 of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band that is appropriate for the occasion.) My brother and I told her we would go out to lunch with her, but we did not say where. Saturday we drove down to Spring Street with her, my dad, and Elizabeth. She thought perhaps we were going to Philippe's; it wasn't until we'd parked and I pointed at the Smokehouse that she figured it out.

We all ordered different things. Here is the rundown:

My brother ordered a half pound of the trip tip. It was smoked perfectly and melted in your mouth. It was drowned in sauce, which, in my opinion, was not necessary, but my brother ate it all up and loved it.

My mom ordered her beloved burnt ends. These were definitely not the best ones I have tried here. (I once had an order that were the best burnt ends I have ever tasted, better than any I have even had in Kansas City.) I had three of her pieces, and two of them had a disgusting layer of fat underneath the charred crust. When I picked off the fat, the meat was delicious. But it was still an effort.

Elizabeth ordered the smoked Cajun shrimp, served over a bed of rice with some roasted vegetables (peppers, onions, and zucchini. I have always loved shrimp and I have eaten it thousands of times in my life, so I do not write these words glibly: these were in the top 5 of any shrimp I have ever eaten. The were spiced and cooked perfectly. Perfect is a word that is thrown around a lot (including by me,) but the definition is appropriate here. I cannot think of a single way these could have been improved.

Elizabeth also got a side of cole slaw. This was better than I remembered it being - easy on the dressing, with just the right amount of bite.

I had the smoked chicken sandwich. I'd never had this before, I pretty much always order the pulled pork, but I was the last of us to order and I wanted to finish off the trend of all of us ordering different dishes. I was also the only one of us to request the spicy sauce instead of the mild. The chicken was very good. The sandwich was sitting in a pool of sauce and the bread disintegrated, so I after cutting the sandwich in half and trying to eat it that way, I eventually gave up and ate the chicken by itself. My fries were fantastic. Elizabeth and my mom liked them so much that they ordered some to split. My dad had the pulled pork sandwich, with slaw on top. He liked it very much.
It had been quite a while since I had been to the Smokehouse, but I am already planning my next trip.