37 Hoxton Square, London N1 (020 7739 8316). Meal for two, including wine and service, £75
I went to the Red Dog Saloon in London's Hoxton, sodden with a hope that I would be served meats properly barbecued in the Southern US style. In the end the only thing that was scorched was the reputation of the people running it. I am no stranger to this experience. Adam Perry Lang and Jamie Oliver's Barbecoa was a lot of the same promises cruelly broken. Likewise there has been a lot of talk recently about the Pitt Cue Company, a mobile food truck currently parked under Hungerford Bridge on the South Bank of the Thames which is also claiming to do US barbecue. Except on the day I visited all they had was pulled pork and smoked brisket – very good in themselves, but not the carnivorous pull and tug of a solid rib. Their ribs weren't ready and wouldn't be for hours. They had capacity problems, they said. This would, eventually, all start to sound weirdly familiar.
Certainly it should have been proof, if proof were needed, that there are certain things – the Swiss sense of humour, Bangkok bar acts, Southern US barbecue – that do not travel. Ah, but greed springs eternal. The Red Dog Saloon sounded right and they had been working very hard to reassure the Twittersphere that they meant business. The dining room, previously a Japanese restaurant which I'm sure I once reviewed but cannot for the life of me now remember, is not unattractive: a lot of wood, and booths with leather banquettes. There is French's mustard on the tables and ketchup and napkins. No sticky-labelled bottles of barbecue sauce, but we decide to let that pass. What we can't let pass is the menu. They have Buffalo chicken wings. They have a few sandwiches and lots of burgers. They have no ribs.
We call over a waiter. Don't you have any ribs? Sadly not, he says. We don't have them until later in the afternoon. I stare at him. Let me get this straight: you're a barbecue restaurant with no barbecue? He gives me the sad, would-that-it-were-other face again. There isn't space in their smoker to produce enough for both lunch and dinner. We had phoned ahead and they had never mentioned this. A quick huddle and the staff announce they can rustle up some ribs in 20 minutes if we get going on the starters. That's fine by us. We order Buffalo chicken wings. They are raw at the middle. We send them back.
The second lot are cooked through and are better than any Buffalo wings I've had in London. The skin is crisp in the Southern fried style. The hot sauce glaze is balanced and salty and forces you to lick your lips. Other dishes are great, too. Mac and cheese could do with being a little more burnished on top but has crisp bits of bacon buried in the properly cheesy Béchamel, and I'm not about to kick something like that out of bed. We like the beans, into which have been dropped fragments of leftover pig. Coney Island fries hide under an outrageous landslide of cheese and chilli.
There is even promise in the ribs. We like the sweet dark-caramel crunch on the outside of the beef short ribs, and the pork options aren't bad either. They're not the baby backs that their online menu promised; they weren't happy with the suppliers, apparently. They are the bigger spares, and better for being a little chunkier, although £12.50 for just two is not what anybody would call a bargain. More importantly, though, both are dry and tired. Then it dawns on me. The only way they could have gone from not having ribs to having ribs served at this tepid temperature is if these were yesterday's. The owner confirms, apologetically, that this is the case.
But, he says, he is committed to getting it right, tells us that he loves Southern barbecue and that he was taught everything he knows by a famous British barbecue champion. Great, says my companion, who knows a bit about the subject' too. And where in the US did you do your research? Kansas? Texas? The Carolinas? Oh, I've never been to the US, he says.
Up to that point I had a bit of sympathy for them. It might have been a disastrous meal, but they had been trying to sort things and it was early days. Some of the food is good. The operation has heart. Now all that fellow feeling drained away. They've spent significant sums setting the place up. They've refitted the restaurant, brought in smokers, hired staff. And at no point did they think a couple of grand spent on a road trip to the Southern US, during which they might have rumbled the smoker capacity problem, was a good idea? That would have been a very good use of their time. Instead a visit to the Red Dog Saloon turned out to be a total waste of mine.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
