RESTAURANT REVIEW
Western Smoke House
ADDRESS: 10650 Woodbine Street
Los Angeles, CA 90034
HOURS: Mon.-Thurs. 11:30a.m. to 9p.m.
Fri.-Sat. 11:30a.m. to 10p.m.
Closed Mon.-Fri 3-4p.m.
Closed Sundays
PHONE NUMBERS:(310) 837-3544
PRICE RANGE: $8-$40
By Sharon Hori
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
You don’t need a menu to see that meals at Western Smoke
House can be summed up in three letters: BBQ.
It is easy to overlook the restaurant, settled on the corner of
Overland Boulevard and Woodbine Street in Palms. Nevertheless, with
the scent of barbecue sauce wafting out the doors, you’ll
think you’ve wandered into Texas.
Western Smoke House keeps their menu limited to the basics
““ meat, barbecue and the occasional veggie. Although the
choice of ingredients makes the meal, the recipe itself is simple.
Hunt for any defenseless animal ““ be it a cow, chicken,
turkey or catfish. Smoke it, fry it, grill it, or roast it, just
for the sake of cooking it. Now apply a glob of the secret barbecue
sauce, and it’s ready to be eaten.
Maybe the process is less crude than it seems, but the actual
secret is in the sauce. Western Smoke House’s barbecue sauce
is a bad-boy version of Shakey’s buffalo wings, with enough
tang to be finger-lickin’ good and then knock the socks off
the Colonel himself. Painting the sauce onto any roasted tender
meat makes it mouth-watering and irresistible, guaranteed to clear
your sinuses and keep you coming back for more.
Any dinner at the restaurant follows the same ritual. Every meal
starts off with a handful of peanuts on the table. It’s not
an impolite gesture to shell the peanuts and sweep their remains
onto the floor ““ in fact, at busier times of the day, the
floor is blanketed with shells. It’s not an uncommon practice
to drink out of jars ““ all beverages are served in different
sized mason jars that could easily store strawberry jam.
Nearly all of Western Smoke House’s plates include
barbecue meat, at the risk of making vegetarians queasy. Most
entrees are offered with a selection of Southern side orders. The
mashed potatoes are creamy and the Texas fries arrive hot. Even an
order of coleslaw or carrots and spinach can seem appetizing to the
traditional carnivore. The Smoke House’s corn bread is a
specialty with a buttery flavor that melts in your mouth.
The walls, filled with cattle skulls and framed pictures of the
Old West, add the final touch to a casual atmosphere that
encourages patrons to gorge on meat and potatoes and loosen their
belts afterward.
The ritual becomes fun for the whole family with Western Smoke
House’s daily specials, which allow diners to to mix and
match their meat dishes. For under $20, you can have your choice of
barbecued meat or fried chicken with a choice of two side dishes.
For their starving customers, the Big Texan Special offers a four
meat sampler plate, including a slab of beef, pork ribs or smoked
pork rib tips, two beef or turkey sausages, one five ounce brisket,
half a chicken and two side dishes for $33.99.
Meat and potatoes may seem a little heavy, so for the
weak-stomached, the restaurant offers a few different salads. Want
a buffet of romaine, bell peppers and banana squash, topped with a
light honey mustard dressing? Go to Souplantation. Western Smoke
House reduces a salad down to the essential tossed greens, carrots
and tomatoes. Add a bowl of smoked chicken breast swimming in Smoke
House’s barbecue sauce, call it a Santa Fe Chicken Salad and
the meal becomes complete.
Slap the barbecued meat between two slices of bread and
you’ll have a Western Smoke House sandwich. For under $8, the
Outlaw sandwich is a seven ounce barbecue beef brisket and the
Tornado combines beef brisket and beef sausage. All sandwiches
include barbecued beans and one choice of a veggie side dish.
Western Smoke House establishes their BBQ sauce as the fifth
food group of the nutrition pyramid. Their idea of pouring barbecue
sauce on almost anything makes you wonder why they can’t add
barbecue sauce to broccoli or asparagus to make foods with higher
nutritional values taste better. Who knows, if a head of
cauliflower ever moseys down Overland, the Smoke House may lasso it
and add a new dish to their menu.