Food review: Smoke Stop BBQ, Shrewsbury – 4.5/5

Behind the till at Smoke Stop BBQ, near Shrewsbury, are two large picture frames. They contain fulsome praise from Shropshire’s most influential restaurant reviews page (that’s us).

Sad to say, the gaffer at Smoke Stop is going to have to spend another £15 on a picture frame because he’s about to receive another sparkling review right now. So get yourself on to to Amazon now, Mr Barbecue man, and make space beneath the Coca Cola wall clock. You’ve dazzled our socks off and it’s time for us to share your ample virtues with the county’s most discerning diners. Smoke Stop is so far ahead of the competition that it feels as though it belongs to someplace else: you know, like Texas, in the good ol’ US of A.

When my partner and I arrived for a Sunday evening feast, we were salivating like hungry dogs at supper time before we’d even entered. For Smoke Stop does things properly and has it’s very own smoker. The comingled aroma of oak smoke and low‘n’slow meat gently drift through the evening sky. It was so appetising I wanted to lick the air vent.

There are numerous independent burger bars in Shropshire. And most of them are rubbish. Smoke Stop isn’t. The team who launched it did their homework – and I bet those trips to eat at lots of barbecue houses in the USA were really, really stressful, man – before investing in the right kit. They decked their restaurant out in authentic memorabilia: there are Texas barbecue T-shirts adorning the walls and Looney Tunes comics on the big TV. Then they employed a bunch of hard-working staff who engage with their customers and are knowledgeable about the menu. Ta-dah! They changed the game for barbecue eating in Shropshire and set the bar so high that no one’s even come close.

OK, there are some things that they could take to an even higher level, if they wanted to get all gourmet and fancy pants with us. Their fries, for instance, are merely fine – they don’t come close to the triple cooked skinny fries with truffle oil and Parmesan that I’d eaten a day before, but then I’m not sure anything ever will. But Smoke Stop’s meat is utterly, utterly sublime. The burgers are good enough to convert a vegan; the ribs so smoky they ought to come with a health warning and the sauces just the right blend of sweet, savoury and piquant. God, I love that place. This side of Birmingham, there’s nowhere even half as good.

I’ve eaten the burgers on previous occasions and they’re stunning: an unapologetic mix of protein and carbs that are B.I.G. on flavour. The bacon‘n’marshmallow (no, really) is popular; the peanut butter and jam (no, no, really) is a perennial favourite but for my money, it’s all about the Notorious P.I.G., featuring a burger topped with twice-smoked BBQ pulled pork and a nine-inch Texas Sausage. Stick that in your Weight Watchers Diary.

Having done burgers previously, it was time to graze around the rest of the money for your delectation, dear reader.

And so my partner and I ate ribs, burnt ends, Southern Fried barbecue prawns with a lemon barbecue sauce, popcorn chicken and sweet potato fries. Man, they were good. The prawns offered a gentle heat, the batter was absurdly crisp and the sauce just the right side of subtle. The ribs made me want to stand on my chair and applaud. Momentarily, I did. Then the waitress told me to stop being stupid: “They’re just ribs and you’re scaring the other customers.”

The ribs had been smoked over a wood pit for longer than it takes to catch an inefficient train from Shrewsbury to Bogota, so all of the sinew and fat had been rendered out, basting the meat as it bade goodbye. The smoke had infused every atom of protein and the baked ribs had then been basted with an intensely delicious marinade. They were served in a metal pan with a cutting knife so that diners could cut off a rib and gnaw the meat off the bone, like a latter-day Henry VIII. Eating in such a primal fashion was thrilling enough, but the flavours were off-the-chart good. The delicate smoke added ballast to every mouthful, the meat was tender and oozingly seductive while the glaze was sent by the Gods.

The popcorn chicken was disgustingly good. Who needs popcorn when you can eat tiny nuggets of chicken that have been coated in a southern fried crumb and fried to within an inch of their life? Hell, it might be a one way ticket to morbid obesity, but with flavours that good I’m buying. The sweet potato fries were decent, though let’s not get carried away with a course that’s available at most self-respecting barbecue joints when there were other courses that set new standards.

Finally, we ate burnt ends. And lot’s of them. Black on the outside and soaking up an astoundingly good dip like dehydrated pigs at a water trough, they were so tender as to break apart beneath the fork. Rich, meaty and more manly than a box of Yorkie Bars served inside a 48-wheel truck, they had deeply rich, intense caramel flavours from long cooking.

We skipped the calorific puds. Oh, and our bill, incidentally, was around £25, which is stunning value for food so good.

We’re celebrating all things barbecue in today’s Weekend and we couldn’t have done that without making a pitstop at our favourite meat’n’smoke joint. It remains ahead of the pack.

In The Spy Who Loved Me, Carly Simon delivered a worldwide hit that endures some 41 years later. Its title fittingly sums up Smoke Stop BBQ in four accurate words: Nobody Does It Better.