We love barbecue. I should qualify that to say the Marys love barbecue, but Tom has been known to dig in from time to time. It used to be that we didn’t have many great barbecue places here, because as Tom says, our regional cuisine is so strong as to dwarf any attempts for other dining genres to crowd the scene.
It has been a long time since he said that, and after Katrina, the influx of new residents from all over opened our culinary world. Not that barbecue is all that exotic, but we did start to get more serious barbecue here.
In the old days, Luther’s was fine for people who didn’t know better, and Corky’s was fine for people who did. And Voodoo was actually pretty darn good, as proven by its proliferation around town. But it started contracting when New Orleans barbecue got serious with the arrival of The Joint, a dump in the Bywater whose original Poland Avenue location was as interesting as its delicious roasted meats. The newer place retains the barbecue vibe with the same great food. Then Central City Barbecue entered the scene, and that was it for us. Meanwhile, a guy with a smoker on the curb on Oak Street moved to a brick-and-mortar on Carrollton called Blue Oak, to challenge the dominance of the first two.
In this house, we consider everything else also-rans. Even the award-winning superbly delicious Gonzo’s Smokehouse remains in that category to us because it is so inaccessible. You have to travel to a sketchy strip mall on the River Road in Luling to stand in line forever to savor these elevated smoked morsels. Worse, they are open only a scant few hours each week.
So when Moe’s Original BBQ opened on Causeway a few years ago in the space vacated by the Italian place, it was immediately off my radar. There was nothing to attract me to it. It is one of those revolving door places where restaurants come and go almost unnoticed by anyone.
I seemed to remember having seen it somewhere, so I knew it was a chain. Hardly a promising start. What I didn’t realize is that it is quite a large chain, with 50 locations in 13 states spread out across the country as far as Maine. It is an impressive story of three friends at the University of Alabama who shared an interest in barbecue and obviously some serious business acumen. They began the chain in Alabama in 1988 and all relocated to Colorado, where they run an empire lauded in publications like USA Today, The Daily Meal, Relish, and Restaurant Business Magazine.
Even though we passed Moe’s Original BBQ all the time, we completely ignored it until a caller to the show raved about it. I still had doubts, but his enthusiasm nagged at me.
So one Saturday on an aimless drive across the lake, we stopped in at Moe’s, and I was very pleasantly surprised. It’s quite nice inside, in that woodsy barbecue joint sort of way. But it is very clean and quite appealing. The affable folks behind the counter are happy to help you navigate what is an unexpected sizeable menu, full of interesting specials.
Franchisees are part of a large “family” culture and are allowed to put a local spin on the menu. These specials change daily, as specials always do, but the more popular ones repeat more than once a week. Here they run the gamut from local fare like gumbo and red, white, or butter beans and rice to things like hashbrown casserole.
Service is fast casual and you pick up from a window where the food is prepared.
Since Moe’s originated in Alabama, it tends toward the North Carolina style, focused on pork. Brisket is not a given and turns up only twice a week as a special on Tuesdays and Saturdays. We were lucky to have picked a Saturday to visit. There were brisket and butter beans that day, but it was the wrong day for jambalaya. We already had our eyes on enough things to get. The regular menu for meats is pulled pork, St. Louis ribs, smoked chicken, and smoked chicken wings, as well as smoked turkey. And here, fried catfish.
Regular sides are mac’n’cheese, baked beans, marinated slaw, housemade potato chips, potato salad, as well as banana pudding. Good cornbread that is sliced and then seared accompanies all platters. There is a daily list of sides at least as big as the regular list of sides.
Each platter comes with two sides and the cornbread. We got a plate of ribs and baked beans and pork chili. And another platter of brisket with butter beans and the hashbrown casserole. And we had to get a side of the potato chips just because.
The best of all of this was the housemade potato chips. They were large and crispy with just salt on them, and I could have eaten a lot more of them. Housemade chips are so hard to come by that I would even stop in and buy them when I have a craving.
The cornbread was quite good, with a lot of “stuff” in it, but it tended to be a little dry, probably from the toasting. The same complaint applies to the meats here. The meat was also less flavorful than I wanted. Maybe you are supposed to compensate for that with the ample barbecue sauces? Since I don’t do this the dryness was pronounced.
I liked the butter beans fine, but they were nothing special. The baked beans were. They were definitely a cut above the usual, made more interesting by spice. The pork chili didn’t make much of a statement either, and the hashbrowns casserole was just a little weird. The hashbrowns, which were of the frozen shreds variety, seemed a little undercooked, though that was the main complaint. Yes, I know that is a big one, but I still like this idea of a cheesy casserole with this as a base. It just needed a little work that day.
After going to Moe’s Original BBQ, I was intrigued enough to have them on the show. What I derived from our chat was that this is a serious chain of restaurants founded by three Southerners who work hard at what they do, and they have achieved tremendous success.
That doesn’t change the fact that the food is pretty ordinary, and it probably works better in the other 12 states where ordinary food is the norm. As I often say on The Food Show, even our bad food is good, so we need more. But even here, Moe’s can fit the bill with people who don’t want to take the trouble or are afraid to travel into the city, especially Central City, and the Bywater to get a barbecue fix. And that definitely has merit.
