Meat & Mo Smokehouse,
81 Springfield Road,
Belfast,
BT12 7AE.
074 4225 8674
meatandmo.com
There’s something gently comedic about the fact Meat & Mo Smokehouse, a brilliant American barbecue takeaway at Blackstaff Mill in west Belfast, include a single can of soft drink with their £35 meat platter.
It suggests that you’ve ordered yourself a lunch or a dinner, all to be washed down with the mineral of your choice.
The reality is that you, and probably at least one friend, will be making much more than a meal out of the selection of everything they have to offer.
What they don’t offer is anywhere to sit. This isn’t a takeaway with a cursory table down the back or a broad window sill you can stand beside.
It’s a shopfront where, unless you’re ordering ahead on their website, you knock on the door, stick your head around it into the kitchen and take your pick. Just over 10 minutes later and you’re walking away with a haul the lads from Ocean’s 11 would be delighted with.
Beef is the focus, with both brisket and short rib on the menu, along with chicken wings and all the accompanying bits and pieces this sort of barbecue invariably provides.
So there’s cornbread, there’s beans, there’s mac and cheese and there’s coleslaw.
Hefty portions of each of the beef options come with some of that very good cornbread and pickles and a choice of side.
There’s also a towering brisket-packed brioche bun, packing a fantastic quality-to-size-to-value ratio at £10.
It comes with fries, which are far from a classic barbecue accompaniment, but likely on the menu because the prospect of having to respond to just about everyone ordering asking ‘do yous not do chips?’ was too tiring to contemplate.
As it happens they’re really good fries. Thin and hot and crisped up in beef dripping, a bit of thought has gone into getting them right. They load them with brisket burnt ends, cheese, jalapenos and sauces if you fancy, while in the platter, if they’re one of your three chosen sides, they cover the base of the box like lengths of shredded crepe paper in a Christmas hamper. And there are quite the presents inside.
The £35 gives you all three meat choices, with the generously meaty chicken wings blistered and smoke-tinged with an edge of heat.
The short rib is cartoonishly Flintstones-esque with a powerful whack of pepper spice crusting the ebony bark under which the soft meat slides off the bone then collapses into strands of savoury loveliness.
The brisket is even better. You could wring it out and come up with more liquid than in that solitary can of coke.
There’s more sticky bark, the tell-tale smoke ring of a long time with itself over smouldering wood – 14 hours for this one – and almost impossibly juicy slices of beef.
The beans aren’t fancy but are exactly what you want sliding round a plate of the rest of this stuff. Sweet but not overly so, with a lick of smoke, scooping up a forkful, along with those fries and a hunk of the brisket makes for a cowboy supper directed by John Ford.
The coleslaw has a sweet edge too but its mostly bright crunch, giving everything a bit of pep along with the fuscia-pink pickled onions and thickly sliced, definitively pickled, gherkins.
Three sides come on the platter but they do four and I’m nothing if not thorough on your behalf, dear reader. Mac and cheese that doesn’t come crunchy-topped and blistered out of an oven will always be less than it could be but, as far as the paler stuff scooped into a plastic pot that barbecue places often serve up go, this is pretty good.
The sauces, a mark of the attention to detail any barbecue place, are better still – a creamy aioli, a sweetly smoky barbecue and a hot sauce that will have you reaching for that fizzy drink – and coming back for more.
The bill
Platter £35
Mac and cheese £2
Total £37
