Roadhouse Craft Beer & BBQ

ON THE FRY: The deep-fry baby-back ribs are a highlight at Roadhouse.

But in the end, I’m pretty certain they don’t actually slow-smoke the barbecue. I’m quite sure about this with the half-chicken ($14), which is a boned breast with blackened skin but powdery, overcooked white meat; the dark-meat quarter is only a little better. The loss is flavor, both of the meat and of the flame. The gain, more evident on other meats, is tenderness. A brisket sandwich ($11) is wonderfully tender and juicy, with satisfactory hickory smokishness in the sauce. The least smoky meat I sampled on two visits was the mixed sausage platter ($12), which looked and tasted like supermarket kielbasa sliced two ways. Though it’s listed as an entrée, this platter is actually more like an appetizer. It comes with some white toasts, deli mustard, pickles, and an excellent mesclun salad.

An actual appetizer, Roadhouse chili ($4/cup; $8/bowl), is decent, despite cooked-in tomatoes and onions (which tend to make it too sweet) and decorative tortilla chips (which are okay in my book as long as they’re just decorations). I’d like a bottle of hot sauce handy with this chili, but that’s an easy fix.

In fact, the smoking problem isn’t an impossible fix either — you just need someone to commit hours and hours to keeping briskets and chickens and ribs going at low temperatures so they stay juicy, concentrate more flavor, and develop that telltale red ring. Then again, you could drop the smoke-cooking entirely if you also drop the pre- or post-cooking; there’s a perfectly legitimate North Carolina/Boston black tradition of oven-baked or slow-grilled ribs. Until the restaurant makes a decision, my helpful but unhealthful suggestion is to order the fried baby-back ribs. If it’s not about cheap meat and live fire, it should at least be about crunch and grease and salt. The barbecue sauce with these ribs has a little smokage, a bit too much sweetness, and a nice layer of hotness.

All dinners, except for the sausage platter, come with cornbread and one side dish. The cornbread is white and sweet as birthday cake; save it for dessert, of which Roadhouse doesn’t have any. The most interesting of the sides was sweet-potato salad ($3), which had enough onions, celery, and fresh herbs to satisfy a cole-slaw jones while simultaneously subbing for potato salad. The French fries ($3), judging by the ones that come with the brisket sandwich, are good but not crisp. That may be because the fried baby-back ribs are wonderfully crisp and breaded, which requires a lower frying temperature than what you need to crisp fried potatoes. It’s the old fish-house problem — either the fried fish is great or the French fries are, but seldom both — transposed into the key of pork. So you’d probably be fine with fried chicken ($14).