horrible hogg more like it. subject: visit impressions
wrote the following letter to the restaurant. never received a response. the place is ill managed in our view.
dear owner and/or kitchen manager:
my wife and i visited your restaurant for dinner 21 february around 6 pm. i am not in the habit of writing letters to restaurants, nor making reviews online, however this time there seems to be a real need. we and our families are longtime residents of the area where your restaurant is located and like to see local non-franchised businesses flourish. we think it’s good for our community, and patronize these types of restaurants nearly exclusively.
the wait staff / server was seemingly fresh to the job, however very pleasant and reasonably attentive and desiring to provide a good experience for us.
the menus provided were stained and not clean, and also very hard to read. beers were ordered and brought quickly, and were nice and cold as well as attractively priced. i ordered a hammered hog sandwich with coleslaw and corn, my wife a barbeque platter with cowboy beans. the meals appeared simultaneously.
the meat in my sandwich was very flavorful and obviously prepared with care. the bun was non-descript – it could have or may have been from a grocery store. the coleslaw cabbage was very plain with a dollop of flavored mayo on top. i’m glad i ordered it on the side instead of on my sandwich as the server suggested – perhaps the inclusion in the sandwich is “carolina style”, however this would have really this would have decimated the quality of the meat. as it was, i tried the coleslaw and could not get past the dollop of mayo, so i declined eating that. the mini corn cob was evidently boiled to death, waterlogged, flavorless.
my wife’s platter included “cowboy beans”. she and i tried what apparently was pinto beans with some shredded barbeque meat. not very flavorful. boring, perhaps. my wife asked for some small buns so that she could make some little barbeque sandwiches. the buns appeared, as cold parkerhouse rolls straight from the refrigerator. my wife asked if the rolls could be toasted, and they were taken away and blackened on one side, still cool on the other.
lastly, a barbeque restaurant two choices of bbq sauce: kansas city style and habanero. really?
in closing, the meat stood on its own merits – this is the heart and soul of a bbq joint and it performed well here. everything around it either failed miserably or did little to improve the dining experience.
we hope that you take our review in a positive manner – hopefully your restaurant will succeed in getting better reviews in the future.