Friday, August 15, 2008

Our first review: Wallace's BBQ in Austell


Wallace's Barbecue

Pulling into the parking lot, Grant and I see a couple of hopeful signs: a healthy amount of pickup trucks in the lot, and a few large white guys milling about outside. When your clientle looks well fed, that's a good sign. It's an even better sign when some of the white guys standing around outside are in suits. That means the food inside is good enough to impress potential business partners, or is good enough to make important decisions easier.
Wallace's appears to be in it's second or third incarnation, because the place is pretty large and somewhat new looking for a barbecue joint. To me this dulls the experience a bit. The decorations on the wall (flair?), while not out of place at a barbecue establishment, somehow look like they were purchased out of the same catalog Zaxby's gets their stuff from. A picture of Elvis here, the front grill of a 57 Chevy hanging there, you get the idea. While there are a few pig figurines strategically placed about the restaurant, I don't think there are quite enough. A proper barbecue shrine has more idols of worship. I give the decor a B.
It takes a little while to get noticed by a waitress, and it takes just enough time to get our food that it's noticeable, but not overly tardy. Perhaps we're sweating the fact we're so far away from work on our lunch break. These are the lengths we have to go to find good barbecue here in NW Atlanta. The food arrives, and we dig in. Finally, some good barbecue in reach of our workplace! My meters for a good barbecue place are the pork sandwich, and the Brunswick stew. My sandwich gets good marks for being, first of all, chopped pork, moist (but not runny), having good kick with it's vinegar based sauce, and being small enough to hold in one hand (there is such a thing as a sandwich that's too big). However...there's a problem. No pickles! Ya gotta have pickles on a pork sandwich! Anyone who's ever eaten a Chik-Fil-A knows that ya gotta have that little extra something that pickle juice brings to the table! I give the sandwich an A-, which is easily upgradeable to a solid A by just asking for pickles to be added.
On to the stew. Overall, it was excellent! a couple of very small nitpicks: It was blended a little too much. In other words it was souplike in the fact that there weren't discernable pieces of the ingredients visible. I like to see little bits of corn, meat, or whatever in the stew. Just a visual thing. On the taste side, it was a bit "peppery", but delicious nonetheless. I give it an A!

Overall, I give Wallace's Barbecue a B+.
They are located at 3035 Veteran's Memorial Highway in Austell
http://www.wallacebarbecue.com/

5 comments:

Buddhabass said...

Good first BBQ post. Let's hope that this is different than the thousands of BBQ blogs out there.

It's good to see two gay guys enjoying BBQ. I guess Wallace's didn't have sausage on the menu.

Hiwatt Scott said...

Ahhh, with success comes the jealousy. Can bomb threats be far behind?

Stephanie Zofia said...

Now that I've been to the famous Wallace BBQ - I'll post, even though I'm over a month out of this thread. Pulled Pork = Good
Cole Slaw = Good
1/2 and 1/2 tea for the Yankee Southerner = Good
Baked Potato = Good

So - for me this was a really, Good, experience. I don't even like BBQ. Maybe that's because I'm from pig country. Where any event, High School Graduation, Wedding, Anniversary, Homecoming, Retirement is accompanied by a suckling on a spit. (That suckling was alive that morning.) PETA sucks.

Anyway, being a girl and all, my very favorite thing about Wallace BBQ was the old-timey Southern, cheap-ass, I ain't paying for nothing, waiting room, parlor. With its dumpster dived, doctor's waiting room chairs and the curio cabinets busting with ceramic pigs, and miniature vintage cars and no windows, it feels just like Aunt Jessie's house - but with a little less artful flair. Kudo's to Aunt Jessie.

And Kudo's to Wallace BBQ. I'll give it a 4 piggy out of 5.

Mrs Hairy Legs said...

We used to name our pigs, chickens, cows! But not the turkeys, coz turkeys are MEAN!
But they all tasted dee-li-cious!

Too bad y'all never got to see Mama Wallace holding court at the table closest to the cash register. Regal, she was!

Scott said...

In my review, I noted a lack of pig decor. On subsequent visits I have discovered they have a waiting room elsewhere in the building that has a curio cabinet FULL of little pig figurines. So they do in fact have a proper, nay, splendid pork shrine!