Restaurant Review: Black Dog - Truth in Advertising

Finally, I went to a restaurant where the food matched up with the name of the restaurant. Unfortunately, the name of the place was Black Dog. Technically, it's Black Dog Smoke and Ale House, but whatever. There were a couple reviews from local food writers about the place - the sort who just can't help but rave about everything. After I ate there, I was on the phone with CJ, and I explained that while I was in there, I was trying to keep from channeling my inner Gordon Ramsey.

As you walk toward the place, it seems promising. There's a nice smoke smell coming from the place. But as you walk in, you start to see some cracks in the veneer, particularly in terms of service. Basically, the service sucks, as one of the comments on Yelp suggest. Basically, it goes like this. You have a dive bar, where crusty old servers have worked forever. They didn't have to have a clue because you basically had locals who were low maintenance ordering PBR in cans or Bud Heavy on draft and maybe some fries on occasion. Now, ownership transforms dive bar into restaurant that wants to do modern barbecue and microbrew. But ownership doesn't have the will or the insight to get new staff. You end up with crappy servers who take their time, and basically suck.

But I can live with lousy service, to some extent, if the food makes up for it. The Black Dog didn't. I ordered a large amount of food, and I found that two things were good, and the rest was subpar. Here's the rundown:

Appetizer - a stuffed cornbread sort of thing (forget the label they used). A very generous wedge of cornbread that has chopped jalapenos, cheese, chopped barbecue, and beans mixed in. It was dense, almost like a casserole. Reasonably tasty and a good value ($2.95).

Soup - chili. Not good. Beans, leftover chopped barbecue, and some tomatoes, with some water, and (not enough) seasoning. No depth of flavor. No heat. Needed salt. If this was a dog, it needed to be put down. On the bright side, it was pretty filling. And if you add a little salt, some black pepper, and the chipotle Tabasco they have on the table, it becomes a little more edible. But really, if you have to season the dish yourself, the back of the house is underperforming ($2.50/cup; $4/bowl).

Meal - combo platter w/ brisket and pulled pork ($10.99). The brisket was mushy. It was hard to tell if it was slice brisket or chopped brisket. That's a bad sign. Plus, the trim was terrible. My first slide was like 90% fat. I like a little extra fat left on the brisket, but this was ridiculous. When I have brisket, I look for 2 things. The first is the red smoke ring around the meat (more or less absent). The second is when you pick up and slice of brisket and pull it with minimal force, does it come apart, or does it accordion back? If the brisket just comes apart, then you've killed it. Good brisket should have a little elasticity. I could tell just by looking at the presentation - definitely not clean slices, almost a pile of chopped brisket. This was going to be a loser. Unfortunately, the pork was just as bad. This stuff was dry and stringy. There was a nice smoke flavor there, so at some point (probably about 2 hours before I arrived), this was probably very tasty. Unfortunately, by the time it showed up on my table, it was like jerky. Not good. They also served a little cole slaw with the meat, which was actually reasonable, though I'd argue that it wasn't a cole slaw so much as it was pickled cabbage. The look was a bit off - it's strange having this magenta pile of shredded cabbage on your plate. The taste was a little strong for eating on its own (only one note to the slaw - just vinegar, no sugar, no heat, nothing else). But when you paired it with the pork, it was actually decent. My best guess was that the cabbage makes you salivate, which helps the dry pork go down, while the smoky flavor in the pork keeps you from noticing the lack of complexity in the slaw. Perhaps two wrongs can make for a relative right.

The sides that I got with my meal were the pit beans and the potato salad. The pit beans were actually good. Nice flavor. Some chunks of chopped barbecue. Maybe a little too sweet, but I enjoyed eating them. The potato salad was perhaps the biggest disaster, which is saying something. The flavor of the dressing was bland, but even worse was that the potatoes were really undercooked. Al dente is not how you want your potatoes. And these weren't even al dente. They were crunchy. Terrible effort, overall.

In this town, I've been lamenting the lack of good brisket for years now. Longhorn Smokehouse (which is now Hickory River) had some very good brisket, but that changed a few years ago. Black Dog totally whiffed on this effort. Smoky Bones (now closed) had awful brisket. Right now, the best brisket in town is actually at Famous Dave's. Go figure. Of course, the basic litmus test for me is whether or not the brisket is better than what I could get at a HEB supermarket down in Texas. If a restaurant can't beat what you can get for $5.99/lb at a supermarket deli counter (though Whole Foods may be reshaping that idea), then it's not worth going to.

I may give the Black Dog another visit down the road, to see if they've smoothed things out. But given the lousy service and the lousy food, I may not even bother.

-foodgeek