Good choices: Snakebites; baby back ribs; cattlemen's ribs; grilled salmon with citrus rub; sausage plate, garlic smashed potatoes.
Hours: Lunch, Tues.-Sun. 11:30 a.m.- 3 p.m.; dinner, Sun.-Tues. 5-10 p.m., Wed.-Thurs. 5-11 p.m., Fri.-Sat. 5 p.m.-midnight. Open two to three hours before Red Sox games.
Reservations accepted. Smoking in bar area.
Credit cards: Visa, MasterCard, Diners, American Express.
Access: Fully accessible.
B.B. WOLF
109 Brookline Avenue, Boston
(Fenway District)
617-247-2227
Restaurant reviewed 08/13/98 by Alison Arnett
Not every restaurant should yield high-flown dining experiences. Some, by necessity, fill those other occasions for dining out: When the family's going out, when you're on the way to a baseball game, when friends want to get together for a friendly beer and a bite to eat.
An upscale barbecue place barely a block from Fenway Park ought to fit those requirements. B.B. Wolf, subtitled "barbeque with an attitude" on the menu, is a big, dark barn of a place with enormous booths, silverware in glasses for the diners to set the table for themselves, rolls of paper towels at the ready; and a friendly and enthusiastic young wait staff.
Affiliated with Boston Beer Works down the street, B.B. Wolf offers a wide range of barbecued meats cooked over low heat in a smoker built in Texas, several sauces, and plates loaded with "sides," such as mashed potatoes, collard greans, and massive hunks of cornbread. The attitude is displayed mostly in the clever names for sauces - from Little Pig Little Pig to Blow Your House Down - and the tongue-in-cheek defense of the Big, Bad Wolf on the menu. It makes for fun reading. Al though there are good things to eat here, there seems to be more care in selling the concept than in cooking the food.
My advice from the outset would be to stick with the barbecued meats, dabble carefully in grilled fish, enjoy the microbrewed beer, and call it a night. Oh, you might also want to bring your own vegetables.
The barbecued baby back ribs are delicious, lean meat permeated with smokiness and a strong, mustardy barbecue sauce. Cattlemen's ribs, prime beef rib bones with morsels of dark meat saturated with a sweet, molasses-laced sauce, were also good. This was a messy proposition to eat, but the meat was worth the extra amount of paper towels expended, we decided, as we gnawed at the bones.
A plate of sausage, two long links of very spicy sausage with just a glaze of Little Pig (the mustard vinaigrette, and ketchup version) sauce, made for a satisfying meal, especially when paired with garlicky mashed potatoes. These were called smashed, a newly "in" term, but they seemed more mashed, i.e. creamy and of a fluffy texture. Quite good, though.
Other dishes were more hit-and-miss. Salmon won the prize for fish, rubbed with a citrusy blend, "mopped" with beer, and then grilled. The fish was slightly crisp on the outside, but nicely moist inside. However, grilled swordfish, on another visit, was too dry and overcooked for the rubs or mopping or anything else to save it.
Gulf prawns, large shrimp served in the shell, had been heavily rubbed with spices and then grilled. One night, the shrimp were great, the spice mixture and grilling flavor carrying through the shellfish so that each bite was a little explosion of flavor. But another night, the shrimp had overstayed their time on the grill; the result was dry and boring.
Snake bites, grilled poblano chilies stuffed with a creamy cheese sauce and covered with fiery chili sauce, were perfect to eat with beer. But a plate of barbecued roasted garlic featured whole bulbs of garlic that hadn't been baked long enough to soften properly, and chunks of thick toast, called Texas toast, that resembled bricks in taste and texture.
Barbecued chicken was mundane. A seafood gumbo with salmon, large shrimp still in the shell (making them a chore to eat), catfish, okra, and rice was of a gummy, thick consistency and seemed to have sat in the pot a long time. A gaucho steak, very thin and excessively coated with red and black pepper, was dull. And a heaping plate of beef brisket was messy to eat and not worth the effort.
B.B. Wolf has a Southern slant, as the menu explains. The Southern-style vinegary cole slaw was good, and the giant squares of cornbread would appeal to those who like theirs sweet and cakey, definitely in the Southern style.
But some of the vegetable sides tasted very much as if they'd come from a can, such as the pickled beets and the baked beans. The fire-roasted zucchini, yellow squash, and red peppers were limp and pallid one evening and tasted too strongly of oregano at the next visit. And the collard greens were just plain overcooked. Although the point of the restaurant is the barbecue, and although adding in two "sides" with each dish does mean the diner gets quite a lot of food for a reasonable price, those aren't excuses for handling vegetables so badly.
B.B. Wolf's desserts are chocolate, chocolate, and chocolate. Not made on the premises, these are in the more-for-your-money category, too. A giant triangle of black and white mousse cake, gooey and sweet, could have fed three. I preferred a deep, dark chocolate cake that was dense, sweet and moist and good.
B.B. Wolf, which accommodates Fenway crowds by opening two hours before afternoon games for lunch and three hours before evening games, has an appealing feeling to it. The decor is basic, but the staff is friendly and the concept fun - a good place to know about on game day. Would that the food more uniformly matched its other assets.
Tips & hits
