Robin Garr's LOUISVILLE Restaurant Reviews

** Brandon's Barbecue
9246 Westport Road
(502) 426-6666
The Brandon family that opened this place in the '80s has long since moved on, taking their Tennessee-style barbecue recipes along. But the name lives on ("We don't want to give up a good thing," the man behind the counter said), and Brandon's Barbecue - now open again under new management - is still a pretty good place to go for a filling meal.

The Westport Road shopping center storefront has been substantially renovated. The new management took out the old, dark booths to open up the space into one large room, decorated in basic knotty pine and plaster walls bedecked with U of L, UK and Nascar posters and pennants, not to mention scores of dollar bills with scrawled messages pinned to the walls in a new tradition that management encourages diners to continue. Widely spaced tables are draped in red, green and checked oilcloth and furnished with sturdy blonde wood chairs.

As with the previous management, service is cafeteria-style with plastic plates and utensile. The menu features hickory-smoked barbecue sandwiches ($3.49 for "pulled" pork or chicken or sliced beef) and dinners (from $6.95 for pulled chicken, pork or beef to $9.95 for a variety of choices including a sampler plate featuring all three plus a pork sparerib). Chicken wings, burgoo and lots of country-style side orders fill out the bill of fare, plus lunch specials ($3.39 for a pork sandwich and chips to $5.95 for a large sandwich and two sides).

Special dinner offers make a visit to Brandon's a special deal several evenings a week: All-you-can-eat ribs on Wednesdays and Thursdays, two pork dinners for $10.95 on Fridays; kids eat free on Saturday evenings, and buy-one-meal-get-the-second-for-half-price on Sundays.

We dropped in for lunch the other day and found the service quick and friendly and the food decent, if not quite memorable enough to break into the top rank of local barbecue joints. The kitchen uses a lot of sugar, it seems; just about everything we tried was slightly sweet to very sweet, from baked beans and cornbread to the barbecue itself.

Pork spareribs ($7.95 for a small order of three ribs) were mild but not too meaty, thickly glazed with a sugary, dark-brown sauce.

A pulled pork sandwich ($4.50 for a lunch special with chili) was probably the best item we tried, with extremely tender and savory pork shreds, lightly smoky with a mild sweet-tangy sauce, served on a forgettable sesame-seed hamburger bun. The accompanying chili was the old Louisville-style version, neither Tex-Mex nor Cincy, familiar to anyone who grew up eating at church dinners or school cafeterias in our town: A thick, bright-red soup with canned tomatoes, chunky ground beef, a few pinto beans and short spaghetti strands in a thick sauce redolent of canned chile powder.

Among the side dishes we tried, potato wedges are available both plain and spicy, the latter being particularly batter-crispy and good. Baked beans were thick, long-cooked and molasses-sweet. Green beans were salty and long-simmered, country-style. A corncob-shaped stick of cornbread was pleasant enough but sweet and just barely done. It needed a few more minutes in the oven to crisp up and dry through.

Overall, the experience was pleasant and the meal filling and affordable. The barbecue competition is mighty tough in this town, though, and I can't honestly rate Brandon's as a finalist in the sweepstakes. Lunch for two was $17.76, plus a $2 tip. $$