Our last day in town we did some shopping (mostly just walking) along Market St. The plan was, we'll do some shopping and once we get hungry, we'll just step over to Pizzeria Di Giovanni and grab lunch. The night before, we met some friends out at Mad River for drinks and noticed Queology next door. As many times as we've been to Charleston we've never noticed it. We turned up the street on our way to Pizzeria Di Giovanni, and passed Queology again, but this time they were open with smoke and delicious smells pouring into the not so delicious smelling Market St air (if you've ever been to Market St you know the smell I'm talking about). At that moment we had a decision. Do we go have some of the greatest pizza on Earth, or do we try out this BBQ restaurant that is advertising a half rack of Ribs as their Special of The Day?
We decided to give it a shot. They advertise their success in the BBQ Competition circuit, so it couldn't be bad.
One of my biggest complaints with a BBQ restaurant is waiting. The food takes hours and hours to cook, so all of that is done before I walk in. We, and at least 4 other tables, waited 20 minutes for our food. Now, that's not a long time to wait in a restaurant usually, but again, this is lunch and the food is already cooked, there shouldn't be much to do other than throwing it on a plate. We noticed that there was apparently just ONE person working (in slow motion) in the "kitchen". At no point did our waiter even come by to say "your food will be out shortly." Actually, our waiter never came over to our table until the food finally did come out.
Dawn went for the pulled pork plate and potato salad, while I did the half rack special with baked beans and chips.
The pulled pork had a good traditional smoke flavor (I think it was hickory), but tasted as if that was it. I'm ok with that, but you expect all kinds of flavor to hit you in the mouth from a competition team BBQ joint. Once she added the sauce, she really like it. The potato salad was good too, she said.
Dawn told me while we were eating that she's banning me from ordering ribs at the next BBQ restaurant we try out. These were very tough to eat. I don't know if they were under cooked or had been sitting out a while (not removing the membrane didn't help either). The rub that they use was amazing. It had some spices and flavors I don't think I've ever had on ribs before. The flavor between the rub and the sauce, was really good on these ribs, but they were so tough, I threw BBQ sauce all over the table every time I had to pull a bone apart. The baked beans, I think, are self explanatory from the picture. They tasted like your basic run of the mill canned baked beans, and were extremely watered down. The flavor on the ribs were good, but the best part of my lunch was the bag of chips.
Once we finished, we were both ready to finish the day of shopping and had actually decided to head home after dinner, so we could get home and not have to waste Sunday by having to drive home. Well, that was stalled because we had to wait close to 10 minutes (during proof reading, Dawn said it was "at least 15 minutes) for the waiter to come back and even bring us our check.
Dawn liked her food, but all the waiting ruined it for her ... and my food surely didn't bring it back up. Once we left, we passed Pizzeria Di Giovanni and all I could do was think how delicious it could have been.
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