Iron Works Barbecue Ain't No Winner In MY Ballpark!
Written: Jun 03 '01
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Relaxed, downhome dining room and tender smoked meats
Cons: Lifeless side dishes and lame barbecue sauce
The Bottom Line: If I were hankering for good barbecue in Austin, I'd either go to Stubbs or try a new place, but not Iron Works.
|
|
|
| mrkstvns's Full Review: Austin Restaurants |
Ask a dozen Austinites where the best barbecue in town can be found and you'll probably get a handful of recommendations for Stubbs, or Salt Lick, and probably a smattering of recommendations for Iron Works. At least that was my experience. Salt Like seemed kind of far out, so I decided to try Stubbs and Iron Works. Between the two of these, I much preferred Stubbs. Here's why Iron Works didn't quite win the game...
Base Hit! The Place...
When I lived in the Washington D.C. area, I used to like the barbecue at Red Hot and Blue. There was a sign there boasting "Best barbecue you ever ate in a building that wasn't condemned."
That sentiment pretty much reflects the way things are with barbecue. Good barbecue doesn't come from big corporate chain restaurants. It comes from the heart and soul of people who love good smoke and who take the time to slow-cook their meats with smoke, not fire. You can usually tell how good the meat will be by how old and beat up the restaurant looks.
Iron Works Barbecue looks pretty darn promising as a good place to eat barbecue. It's in an old tin workshop building in downtown Austin at the corner of Cesar Chavez and Red River. Faded paint proclaims it to be the Weigl Iron Works. Inside the dimly lit interior the floors are worn wood -- tables too, come to think of it. There are no well-dressed young hostesses, and no young college student with a painted-on smile comes over to say "Hi, my name is Chad and I'll be your server."
Belly up to the counter and place your orders. A cheesy looking white plastic menu like you find in roadside diners lists the offerings. Beer and soda are in bottles in long tin washtubs full of ice. Grab what you want and pay. No fuss no muss.
Grab a table in the main dining area, the side room (try not to sit too close to the swamp cooler -- I think that fan could blow the chrome off a Cadillac!), or outside on the patio overlooking a creek below. The patio is nicest, but the birds are too aggressive. It's not the pigeons that are the real problem, since they mostly seem content to peck around the floor for leftovers, it's those confounded black birds. I bent down to pick up a napkin and one swept in and grabbed my slice of bread. Oh well, the joke's on him -- it was lame limp Wonder bread -- guess that stuff really is for the birds.
Steeeerrr-rike One! The Sauce...
Some people love barbecue sauce on their meat, others prefer to just savor the smoky flavor of the meat. Me? Well, I'm pretty much firmly in the sauce camp. I love a good barbecue sauce. I can take it spooned over the meat, or on the side for dippin' and moppin'. But I love my sauce...
It seems to me that the best barbecue places have their own house sauces. Some maybe a little tangier than others, some a bit more spicy. In Houston, I like the peppery flavor of the warm sauce served at Goode Co. In Austin, I like the tangy light-colored sauce at Stubbs.
Iron Works gets the big strike one because they don't have anything like these. Instead, they have innocuous bland sauces in squeeze bottles on the tables. There was a deep brown mild sauce and a red sauce labeled "spicy" that wasn't. Both tasted like they came out of a jug labeled "Heinz". Nasty, dude! Just nasty!
Steeeerrr-rike Two! The Sides...
Platters seem like good deals here -- for about $6 you get your choice of meat plus potato salad, homemade beans, and onions and pickles. It's a goodly amount of food, but unfortunately, most of it is not worth eating.
The potato salad is ordinary bland supermarket quality salad. I would be shocked if the restaurant doesn't get it in 5-gallon buckets. It's uninspired, flavorless stuff with overcooked mashed-together potatos in some kind of flavorless "creamy mustard" sauce.
The real sin is the beans. I have quite honestly never in my life tasted such horrible beans as those served at Iron Works. They have no flavor. None! It's like the cook just used beans and water. No onions, no salt, no spices -- nothing that would add flavor and character to the food. These lifeless, insipid, brown things are unfit for human consumption. In fact, I wouldn't even serve them to my dog -- and not just because it would probably give Señor Whisker a case of the old peditos.
Another Base Hit! The Meat...
The main star in the lineup at any good barbecue restaurant is the meat. Iron Works does a pretty good job in that regard. The smoked turkey is wonderfully tender and just falls gently apart when sliced. Ditto for the brisket. The flavor was strongly smoky, but it had a little bit of a harsh or chemical-like edge to it, like the flavor you get when grease flares up too high on the backyard grill. I suspect this is an aberration though.
The meat was good, it just wasn't as perfectly smooth tasting as I like in a top-flight barbecue place.
Box Score
Overall, Iron Works strikes me as a pretty good place to go when you've got a hankering for the flavor of smoked meats. Their location is excellent, and their smoked meats are solidly in the "good" category. My humble apologies to Austinites who love Iron Works, but this place will never rank among my favorite barbecue pits though unless they start doing decent side dishes and get some decent barbecue sauce. In my most humble opinion, Austin has better barbecue places...
Recommended:
No
Best Suited For: Friends
Best Time to Travel Here: Anytime
|
|
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.