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No Country for Vegetarians

It's all about the meat at P&B's Smokehouse

At some point in the Deep South's illustrious - and sometimes frighteningly nefarious - history, an enterprising bloke decided to smoke huge cuts of meat with wood chips from trees like hickory, maple, apple and mesquite. To that person, American barbecuing owes a lot.
The restaurant we're reviewing this week owes its repertoire - and its name - to Henry Perry and John Blackwelder, who honed this craft of smoking and barbecuing meats some 150 years ago. Located at Madinat Jumeirah, Perry & Blackwelder's Original Smokehouse is Dubai's first smokehouse - an all-American, good ol' fashioned cowboy dive with some pretty phenomenal, meat coma-inducing, falling-off-the-bone food that's oh-so-satisfyingly good.

Now, we're not really fans of casual American diner exports. The portions are usually grotesquely huge, don't taste like much - artificial and fatty - and somehow, there's always some cheap processed cheese never far from what you ordered. Some of the other more popular 'diner' brands just infuriate me. P&B's, however, is a stark departure from those norms. The place, on a Friday night, is buzzing and nearly packed at 8pm. The manager, who's almost instantly apologetic for being an Irishman in an American dive, tells my dinner date and I tales of crowds randomly breaking out in song and line dancing. There's a jukebox in the corner, a Texan flag draped over a barrister, a playlist of Country/Western in the background and a giant neon sign of a cow with the word 'EAT' below (don't have to tell us twice). You're not going to struggle to figure out where you are.
The staff is very courteous and attentive and had us sitting down to our drinks in no time. We ordered the Mesquite BBQ Sliders, served with a side of potato and sweet potato matchstick fries, and the P&B Smokehouse Chicken Wings in Sriracha sauce. Both are exceptionally good, especially the wings, which disappeared from the wire tray almost as quickly as they arrived. Juicy and full of flavour, the Sriracha sauce is not just on the outside, but all the way through the meat of the wings. Definitely a must try, and the wings come in trays of 20 and 30, although, we just got 10. They're served, as wings are supposed to be, with celery and carrot sticks and a blue cheese dip. The celery was a bit old and wilted (read: not crunchy like it's supposed to be), which, I hope, isn't always the case. The sliders were bursting with smoky pulled beef brisket, with a good measure of made-in-house tangy barbecue sauce slathered on. Another must try.
In obedience to that giant neon sign, we ordered the Brontosaurus Prime Smoked Mesquite Beef Short Ribs and the Slow Smoked Mesquite Brisket with potato salad and green beans on the side. There was nothing short about the rib that arrived at our table. It was enormous - a very grand and noble cow gave its life to be at this table - and by the time we were through with it, we were in a stage 3 meat coma. We'd barely made a dent in the brisket, which, thankfully, was a much more manageable portion. Both were just melt-in-the-mouth delicious, with a smoky flavour that you just have to try to believe. I guess having a state-of-the-art smoker in the kitchen pays rich dividends. We polished off the meat in both trays, but we can't say the sides were any good. The potato salad was just average and the beans tasted like they were boiled in drain water - bland and unappetising. Basically, none of the sides - and they're all vegetarian - are worth coming back for, except maybe the matchstick fries and the house coleslaw.
For dessert, we dared to try the S'mores, but it was terribly impractical to eat out of the mason jar it was served in. It was also dizzyingly sweet and, being in an advanced stage of food coma, we just couldn't carry on attempting to eat it. The pec-an pie or the peach cobbler might have fared better, but we were too far gone by then. visions of cows and what not.

P&B's has a great vibe about it, although we're not quite sure about the 'family restaurant' persona of the place - there is a kid's menu, though. But the adult menu is concise and simple. It's all about meat and they might as well have a neon sign of a carrot with the word 'yuck' below it for the vegetarians who make the mistake of coming here. That said, for the rest of us, P&B's is definitely the place to come to when you're craving meat.
rohit@khaleejtimes.com