PAX East 2023 #2: The Longest BBQ Dinner

After a long day at PAX, I had plans to meet up with a couple friends who live in MA for dinner. After much debate and a lot of shuffling around, we settled on The Smoke Shop BBQ in the Seaport. My companion and I arrived first and the place was fairly empty, but definitely filled up pretty quickly after that. Unexpectedly, it was restaurant week and so most of us took advantage of that menu.

I started with the Sticky Fried Pork Ribs.

They were… okay. I thought they’d be sweeter, but instead they were quite tangy. They also randomly came with some rice and tomatoes - could have definitely done without those. It was a very healthy portion though, I was surprised at how many ribs they gave and the size of them for an appetizer portion.

For entree I went with the Texas-style Brisket and for sides, I tried to go mildly healthier and had the Cucumber salad and a piece of cornbread.

I like to try the brisket out at a new BBQ place, I feel lik it’s a good benchmark on the quality of the BBQ. As typical, it was served on a piece of toast to soak up all the juices and fast. The cucumber salad helped cut through the heavy BBQ and fat and the cornbread came in a huge brick, with butter melting into it. Since I got a platter, it came with a slice of watermelon for dessert.

Overall the food was pretty good and especially since we ordered from the restaurant week menu, it was a great value; I went home with a basically another meal with leftovers. The biggest drawback of the meal however, is that the service we received really wasn’t great. While the food came out fairly quickly, after that we asked our server for many things which they either forgot or took quite a bit of time to get to us. We had to ask multiple times. In addition, the restaurant week menu was supposed to come with Ooey Gooey Butter Cakes for dessert. When we mentioned it, they looked incredibly confused and thought we just wanted to order dessert. Finally they understood what we were talking about and we proceeded to wait an incredibly long time plus we asked maybe 3-5 times for containers to take leftovers in.

Completely forgot to take a picture of the cake, but honestly, it was very good. Took most of that home as well and was able to enjoy it for another meal.

All in all, it was good food, we just got bad luck with the service and had the longest BBQ dinner. They do have multiple locations though, so it might be worth checking out.