Smokin' Guns BBQ Wins...Another Participation Prize

Josh making the dad vacation photo pose

After a week consumed in blackletter law my compatriot Josh Wiseman and I needed a long lunch break before we got back to Barbri’s books. I’ve been meaning to head North across the river to Smokin’ Guns. I’ve been there a few times, over a year ago, and I remember liking it a lot, but I’ve never reviewed it. Well, it turns out that I didn’t know anything then because the meal I had today was average at best.

We walked in the small building on Swift Street, which is currently being expanded, the remodeling occurring next door. To our left, rows of columns of various-sized trophies, some over waste-high. To our right, a wood-wall adorned with multi-colored ribbons. A good sign? You’d think so wouldn’t you?

I ordered the large pulled pork on bun, with steak fries, beans, corn and a soda. Josh ordered the beef sandwich on white bread with beans, steak fries and a soda.

I had forgotten my notebook in the car and walked outside to street parking. When I returned, my meal was waiting. What expedient service. Well there’s a reason.

Pulled pork overflowed from inside my sizable white bun. If I ever went back (I have no plans to) I’d get the bread, the thick, stiff bun being just too much.

The meal was substantial and the portions were plentiful, but the quality was questionable. The meat was dry, barren, a desert, a tundra that had been sitting, waiting to be served. I can’t imagine any set of circumstances where that lukewarm-at-best meat was smoked or cooked today, only heated up. I was seriously disappointed.

I squirted sauce from the bottle that sat on the table, bit in again, put my sandwich down and added sauce to the bottom. I would have had to add more sauce anyway because the meat was in abundance, but the meat required watering every few bites. I think I tasted some vague, lingering smoke left on the pork, but I cannot really be sure, and other than that the pork had no additional flavor. I dropped a chunk of meat on the table and felt no temptation to ignore the health risks involved in eating it. Normally, I’d at least have to talk myself out of making such a mistake. Sometimes, I’d go ahead and do it anyway.

Josh gave me a bit of his sandwich and the beef suffered from the same affliction. Dry, a little fatty, and plain with not even a potential lingering of smoke.

“I don’t think I could have eaten that without sauce,” Wiseman explained. That’s really all he had to say about the beef.

The abrasive sauce tasted overwhelmingly of vinegar, and was followed by a sweet scent, which stopped by for only a second. After the split second of sweet, the sauce left me with a warm taste of chili powder in my mouth. Josh described the exact same sensation in the exact same order. The sauce wasn’t bad, but it certainly wasn’t anything special. I didn’t think it held enough balance and thought it tasted like a soft, lazy Arthur Bryant’s Original knock-off.  

Dry beef up close

In general, when a restaurant has only one sauce they display confidence and pride in their work and I have respect for that. At Smokin’ Guns I witnessed either laziness or sinful pridefulness and I think it was both.

In my opinion when a restaurant creates multiple sauces they show care to their customers varying tastes, they display creativity, a willingness and an openness to new ideas and adaptation. At Smokin’ Guns I saw flavor stagnation.

The plain steak fries clearly arrived in a frozen bag, but they were crisp, prepared as skillfully as possible. I couldn’t taste the frozen or anything, but I’ve had them before at countless restaurants. Hell, I’ve had them in my own home, baked in an oven and salted. They had no salt, no pepper, just potato, an indifferent presentation.

Bland steak fries

The beans were the best part of the meal but were not anything special. Some shredded beef sat in the mixture that held a systemic heat, which warmed my mouth without burning it. They beans were solid, serviceable, no better.

The corn, boiled, specked every so lightly with pepper and slopped in a cup, displayed an utter lack of concern for detail. I could barely taste the corn it was so plain.

While we ate, Josh pointed out that he did not see any ribbons won after 2002. After searching, I found one from 2007. We examined the ribbons, plagues and trophies, and we found many from out-of-state competitions such as those from Oklahoma, Tennessee, Nebraska and Iowa. Have you ever heard of any great BBQ from Nebraska or Iowa? This glutton hasn’t. Josh surmised, and it seems he may very well be right, that Smokin’ Guns enters as many competitions as possible and hangs up every single award they win. I mean, one of the awards hung was for best label. Who gives a crap about their label?

Overall, I thought the food tasted plain and simply lazy. The proprietors at Smokin’ Guns seem to have found a formula and have stuck with it. I saw no creativity, no spark, no special care, but for some reason I did see plenty of customers, a steady stream.

I think these people suffer from what I will for now on refer to as “Gate’s Syndrome,” a sickness that occurs when you have the same meal since birth, usually a local favorite. You grow accustomed to it. You grow to love and believe in it whether that devotion is merited or not. Your acquired-familiarity creates unfounded loyalty that clouds your judgment.

The new addition.

Nothing at Smokin’ Guns really sticks out. It’s definitely not worth going out of the way. If you’re over in North Kansas City and you must have BBQ it might be one of the only places available so in that case stopping by would be worthwhile.

It’s not terrible by any means, but like I’ve explained before, I hold KC BBQ to a higher standard, and Smokin’ Guns just doesn’t compete with the quality or care, in any department, I’ve had elsewhere.

“I wish they didn’t have all the awards up because it was like when you go to a movie that everyone tells you is so good and you leave like, ‘ehh,’” Josh described his distaste. “It was specifically like when I saw Thor.”

And I’m really not kidding about the meat’s dryness. You remember in “The Grapes of Wrath” where Steinbeck talks about dust for page after page after page?