Motivated by mention of corn bread, Shabadu and I decided to try Southern Ontario Smoked BBQ (S.O.S. BBQ) today.  Neither of us had been there before, and we had some time to spare for a longer lunch today.  http://sosbbq.com/

We decided, as this was a new BBQ place for us, we'd try a variety of meats, so got the 4 + 4 + 4 platter.  Four meats, four sides, and four buns or corn breads.  We chose ribs, pulled chicken, pulled pork, and brisket.  For our sides we had macaroni and cheese, baked beans, fries, and coleslaw.  And since corn bread was what spurred us to go for BBQ, we chose buns.. I mean corn bread.

The coleslaw was nice and creamy with a good tang to the flavour.  The fries were just the right level of crispness, and perfect for salt+vinegar (or malt vinegar which was also at our table).  Unlike other BBQ restaurants, S.O.S. has an array of sauces for you to mix and match on your food as you please.  There was a Texas bold bbq, Sweet bbq, Mustard bbq, "All-in" bbq, Carolina sauce, and hot sauce.  The hot sauce tasted kind of like Sriracha, and the Carolina sauce was a thin vinegar based sauce.  The idea is to let the customer choose how they want the meat to taste.

It's a nice theory, but in practice there's a problem.

Part of the appeal to BBQ is having the meat marinade in the sauces so it stays moist and flavourful throughout.  Because S.O.S. does not sauce their meat, it's dry and pretty tasteless.  Yeah we could slather our choice of bbq sauce all over it, but that doesn't penetrate the surface, and doesn't "bond" with the meat through cooking.

So how about the sauces themselves?  It was nice having a mustard based bbq sauce for the brisket.  It went well together.  I chose to use the "All-in", which was essentially a mix of everything.  That would've been good on the chicken too, I think, although I had already used the Sweet bbq sauce on that.  Overall though, they were largely forgettable.

Shabadu said the beans were maple flavoured, but I've forgotten what he thought of the macaroni and cheese.

Now, what have I neglected to mention...  oh yeah!  The corn bread!  Well, each one was a cupcake actually.  It had corn bread flavour, but was unfortunately dense enough to be more like a scone than corn bread.

The Good: The guy who served us (the owner I think) was very friendly and helpful.  Multiple sauces.  The fries!
The Bad: The corn bread was not your typical corn bread
The Ugly: Dry bland meat.  For a BBQ place, that's blasphemy.

The mac and cheese was alright but nothing special.  The best parts of this lunch, as Diddly noted above, were the fries and the coleslaw.  Both were very yummy!  But unfortunately neither one of those is what I would consider a selling feature at a BBQ place.