Smoken Joe’s – you’d better like meat!

Can’t afford to go to Vlado’s? Hey, it gets really variable reviews anyway. But you still want to overload on meat? Then Smoken Joe’s is the place for you.

SJ’s seats a few, but it doesn’t feel like it’s a big space, which is nice. Warehouse conversion-style space, great old brick walls, iron girders, cool.

Also, they have good specials! All of which revolve around meat

To be fair, it’s not entirely about meat, but there seems to have a lot of it. I’d send you to their website to look at the menu, but : a) I don’t want you to poke your eyes out rather than look at it for more than a second (which you would do), because then you wouldn’t be able to read this blog, and b) they don’t have a menu there anyway.

Excellent service from all involved – our voucher gave us a meat platter and a house wine each, but we don’t drink, so they were most happy to give us a couple of LLBs instead, and they were good ones. (You’d be surprised how many places won’t deviate from the voucher as printed.)

So the meat platter arrived, and yeah, a lot of meat Steak, mince patty, sausages, bacon, chicken skewer, marinated chicken wings. All really flavoursome and well cooked. Surprisingly not oily, which was a big plus. Also, the chips were really good, which I was somewhat surprised about, as I generally don’t like shoestring fries. But they were really good.

Even the side salad was big (and really nice as well). Not too many salads have capsicum in them, and so the good ones that do really stand out.

And toast and gravy. I really liked the bread they used, and thought the gravy was good, but Cha thought the gravy was very generic and tasted a lot of stock.

TLDR: Definitely going back on burger night to try the Roo burger.