LITTLE ROCK — A little more than a year ago, Sims Bar-B-Que moved from a little barbecue shack at 716 W. 33rd St., to a big, new, almost-downtown Little Rock location in a shopping center at Broadway and Roosevelt Road.
The Sims folks brought along very little of the original decor to the new spot - a framed photo of owner Ronald “Ronnie” Settlers shaking hands with Bill Clinton, a framed front cover of a tabloid publication. They left behind the signs warning against guns and gang activity.
The new spot gleams with promotional beer neon and still nearly new wood paneling on the walls and dividers. A couple of new flat-screen TVs show the same sports programming, sans sound, even during the early evening local news hour. The sound system offers contemporary and classic soul.
They did bring along the barbecue, which if there were an actual Arkansas barbecue style, we guess this would probably represent.
Sims’ sauce is not our favorite; what we got on our sliced beef and rib plates was thin, mustardy and vinegary. But we got plenty of barbecue for our buck, and there’s a lot to be said for that.
Order at the counter if you’re getting your barbecue to go. Sit down if you’re dining in and you get table service; our waitress was friendly buteven at an early dinner hour, when most of the business was carry-out, she was a little overextended.
Barbecue - chopped or sliced beef, chopped pork, smoked sausage, pork ribs and chicken - comes either in sandwiches, $5-$6 (including also smoked bologna),served on white bread, or in dinners, $7-$8, complete with two sides and several white bread slices. (You can opt for a fairly tasty corn bread if there is any in the kitchen and if you ask for it by name.)
The half dozen ribs in our $8 dinner were certainly the meatiest of our experience;two of them, in fact, had no bones in them at all. The rest weren’t fall-off-the-bone tender, but we didn’t have to work hard to gnaw them down to the nub. They’re well smoked and tasty and come in a small lake of the sauce, which is so thin that we couldn’t really make it cling.
Some sort of thicker barbecue sauce is available in squeeze bottles - we saw one taken to another table. But when we asked for barbecue sauce with our ribs, what we got was a little bowl of more of the stuff we already had.
We got plenty of sliced beef, too, for our $8, lean and also well-smoked and also in the same thin sauce, although in this context what we mostly tasted was the vinegar.
On the side, we got a good quantity of delicious, yellowish, apparently mustard-based potato salad and barbecue beans in a somewhat thicker, somewhat sweeter, sauce. Green beans were a little overcooked. Corn bread instead of white bread was definitely the way to go.
Weekend, Pages 38 on 02/11/2010