Smoke AND Pig

Julie has been blogging on our food journey to St. Louis (and back) and asked me to give "my perspective" on BBQ. My perspective on dining is that I don't really care to talk about the food. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE food and I love good food. However, my vocabulary for describing food ranges from "good" to "mmmmphphphgrglgrgl" with an occasional belch. Since Julie already did a great job describing the experience of eating at the "Smok'n Pig", in Valdosta, I'm going to talk about the other stuff.

First, let's talk about spelling and grammar. "Smoking" is a gerund usually indicating (<- another gerund) that something (<- NOT a gerund) is currently in the state of producing (gerund) smoke. This has morphed into the slightly abbreviated colloquialism "smokin'" which usually is applied to American-made sports cars and women's backsides. I can only guess that, "smok'n" is a contraction to overcome the tedious "i" in "smokin'" which requires the type of effort that can only be recovered by sitting for hours slow cooking a pig - which is of course good news for the rest of us. Another alternative, which I am starting to lean towards, is that the original intent was to remove some extra letters from "Smoke AND Pig" and, like the now quoted "R" in Toys "R" Us established some strange grammatical ambiguity and confusion which in the case of said toy store are exacerbated by placing the "R" backwards.

From the outside, Smok'n Pig could be mistaken for a Cracker Barrel if it wasn't for the flames symbolically shooting out of the sign out front. I guess this is in homage to "where there's smoke there's fire" since flames are pretty much the enemy of smoked meat. Once inside, the "Pig" looks like a Sonny's on steroids. The building is made of and full of wood. If we ever exhausted the world's forests, they could probably keep smoking meat for a few years...just with the tables...in the little private room in the back. Most of the tables are picnic tables and all have a roll of paper towels on them as if to say, "you will not have any trouble deciding which fork to use here," and follow that with, "you got a little somethin' right there...on your face...on the other side...no...the other side...Got it!" We sat in the back by the fire place which had a mantel adorned with statues of anthropomorphic pigs and what appeared to be an unpainted paint-it-yourself ceramic bust of Elvis Presley.

If Hooters is "delightfully tacky", the Smoke'n Pig is "delightfully overstated". The waitresses (I didn't see any male waitstaff - maybe like the diner on "Seinfeld" the waitresses are all the owner's daughters) all wore jeans and Smoke'n Pig t-shirts ranging from camouflage to tie-dye and are available on-line with great fresh and current pig puns like "gettin' piggy with it" and - my personal favorite - "The Pigs of Hazzard".

There were also several signs on the walls referencing nearby Moody Air Force Base and the room in the back was mostly occupied with a group of airmen (airpeople?) who, while I question its effectiveness in the Air Force, had a legitimate reason to wear camouflage. Which leads me to the summation of my review - Smoke'n Pig is an "All-American" restaurant. If one ceramic pig is good, a few dozen must be tail-curling awesomeness and it surely makes Christmas shopping much easier for the onwer's family. If, like Julie said, Sonny's is a good example of southern barbecue for beginners, Smoke'n Pig represents a higher-echelon of pig-consuming experience. As an overall dining experience, I give it 3.5 "want more tea hon"s out of 5. It's the kind of place where you get the feeling there are a lot of "regulars" and that their lives are at least a little bit better for it.