LITTLE ROCK — You don’t have to drive to Memphis to sample Memphis-style barbecue. You can find it at Corky’s Ribs and BBQ in west or North Little Rock.
The west Little Rock location, where Bowman Road meets Westhaven Drive, has been around for 12 1/2 years. A second location near North Little Rock’s Lakewood Village has been around for half a dozen years.
The fare at Corky’s has been consistently dependable, if not entirely exciting - good, standard, middle-ofthe-road barbecue - or, as we once described it, “nice, polite, suburban barbecue that takes no risks but also threatens few surprises.”
That’s still true at the consistently dependable, shacklike west Little Rock restaurant, where we got decent food and excellent service on a recent couple of visits.
And it should not have been a surprise, but the prices have certainly gone up since we last stopped by a few years ago. The Pulled Pork Platter with two sides that was $6.99 is $8.59 now. We passed up the Tamales & Chili that we told readers in our last review not to pass up, but they’ve gone up from $4.99 to $6.79.
That pulled pork platter provided a large pile of porklightly covered with Corky’s sweetish, molasses-based sauce. The smoky pork was tender and tasty; the sauce was, well, pleasant (additional sauce is available in a commercially packaged squeeze bottle on the table, along with a similar bottle of hotter sauce and generic squeeze bottles of ketchup and honey). The small side of macaroni andcheese was slathered in a sufficiently cheesy sauce. The full ear of corn on the cob on a stick looked impressive but with the exception of a couple sweeter kernels toward the far end was generally tasteless.
Corky’s “Legendary Ribs” are hickory-smoked and not Memphis-style but St. Louis-style, available “wet” (“hand-basted with our famous Corky’s BBQ sauce”) or “dry” (“hand-rubbed with our Corky’s Dry Rub seasoning”). And, if you can’t choose, you can get ’em half and half.
We giggled a little at ordering a half-slab dinner ($9.99 with two sides) half and half, and when it came out, it wasn’t a quarter-slab wet and a quarter slab dry, it was a half-slab wet to aboutthe middle and dry from there on.
The ribs are meaty, though if falling off the bone is your standard for good ribs, these will disappoint in that they required a bit of gnawing. The meat itself is nicely smoky. Though in the past we’ve favored the “wet” ribs, this time the “dry” ribs were a little less messy and taste-wise gave the “wet” ones a run for their barbecue money.
We eschewed our two sides and instead blew an extra 75 cents for a loaded baked potato. It was a disappointment. The potato was slightly undercooked andchewy; the “load” had a surprisingly dry mouth feel and what we mostly tasted were a few bacon bits and a lot of grated cheese - the butter, sour cream and chives, not so much.
Other menu options, if your family is gorging on ribs but you don’t feel like barbecue, include various sandwiches, wraps and burgers and “other favorites” like fried shrimp, catfish and spaghetti (we once commented that it would be our dream assignment to go to a barbecue restaurant and order pasta).
Just for sitting down, you get a basket of piping hot, square yeast rolls that are delicious just the way they are, or accented with the honey out of the squeeze bottle we mentioned earlier. (Another potential taste treat: Squeeze some of that honey onto your bread plate and add some barbecue sauce to it.) Wait staff is eager to bring you moreif you devour the first few during the very short wait for plates to come out of the kitchen.
And those waits were very and surprisingly short indeed, less than 10 minutes from the time we ordered to food-runner delivery. We got plenty of attention from our assigned member of the wait staff, including rapid drink refills and plenty of extra napkins on request.
Corky’s Ribs & BBQ
Address: 12005 Westhaven
Drive, Little Rock
Hours: 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Sun
day-Thursday, 11 a.m.-10
p.m. Friday-Saturday
Cuisine: Barbecue, etc.
Credit cards: V, MC, D, AE
Alcoholic beverages: Full
bar
Reservations: No
Wheelchair accessible:
Yes
Carryout: Yes
(501) 954-7427 (RIBS)
Corkys4BBQ.com
Weekend, Pages 36 on 01/10/2013