Chef's Southern Cooking and BBQ, Buford GA

[Poppa's PTL Club]

FULL DISCLOSURE
I have been looking into opening up a BBQ joint that would compete with this place; I promise I'm being fair (at least as much as I am conscious of it).

I had eaten here for takeout once before; just grabbing a sandwich to go. It was OK, but nothing worth writing home about. The original had little to no smokiness and was pretty much some roast pork (not really terrible, but nothing that would make you want to come back either)

Met up here with a fellow Ringer for lunch yesterday; it becomes obvious that Chef's BBQ is really a meat and three place (but they feature BBQ prominently and have a large smokehouse out back; I didn't look into the kind of smoker they use) They had some rough looking (sopping wet) ribs on the cafeteria line, so I decided to order from the menu instead.

Got a chopped pork sandwich and Brunswick stew on the side. The sandwich was way too big for me; there was easily 8-10 oz of BBQ on there. The bun was pretty good (big, toasted sesame kaiser roll). The pork was not cooked that badly, tender enough but with some tooth left to it. As before, there was scant smoke flavor and no noticeable visual evidence that it had ever been in the smoker. Most unfortunately, it was almost inedibly salty. My wife always tells me that my salt meter is broken (I like things heavy on the NACL), but this was painfully salty. While my first time here was OK but not memorable, this was memorable in a bad way. My wife would never have gotten past the first bite.

Sauce, thick and sweet. Not to my taste at all. It needed acidity and thinning badly.

The Brunswick stew was an absolute disaster. As far as I can tell, it was pulled pork, mixed in their thick sauce with some corn thrown in. It was thicker than the sauce (my dining companion nailed it: "sloppy joe meat"), making me think that this may have been left over from a previous day and wasn't heated and thinned out properly (we were there before noon, so it shouldn't have been sitting long that day).

I only ate half of my sandwich and stew, taking the rest home (hey, I grew up poor and am currently out of work, so bad or not, no food gets wasted on purpose). I dumped the rest of the meat in the leftover stew and mixed it with almost a cup of water to heat it up. It was much better.

My guess is that they are not really working that hard at being a BBQ joint, but they really need to work on the quality control. This location has been a restaurant killer (2 or 3 restaurants in the past 5 years or so); they need to put out a consistently better product if they want to make it long term.
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I likes to eat 'da pig!
Acts 11:5-9

[BBQMAN]