The Smokehouse

I ate at the relatively new Smokehouse Restaurant at the Route 46 Exchange in Sanford, FL. I had a coupon for a free appetizer or dessert for any of the restaurants in the complex, so I decided to check out my options besides deciding exactly where to eat. I looked at their other restaurants like Monroe's and The Saloon, but they were expensive and completely empty at dinner time. That left the Smokehouse. Everyone that I know that had eaten there didn't like it, but I decided to give them a try anyway.

The Smokehouse follows the same semi-fast food format as Bubbalou's Bodacious Barbecue where you order your food at a counter and it is brought out to you. For the free appetizer, I had a pulled pork quesadilla. It had way too much really dry meat in the tortilla. Barbecue sauce was definitely required to help swallow all of the dry pork.

I also had a Smoked Salmon wrap with sweet potato fries. The wrap had the same smokey flavor as the pork in the quesadilla. I might as well have been eating all of the same menu item because it all tasted the same to me. This leads me to believe that they use artificial smoked flavoring rather than actually smoking the meat. I could be wrong, but that's what I'm assuming based on how the flavor was so overpowering and was in all of the food.

The sweet potato fries were really good though!

The employees here were also kind of strange. There were far too many workers in the dining room and none of them seemed to be assigned to any specific section. This caused them to constantly come over and repeatedly ask the same question that someone else asked only minutes before. You know they need to come up with some sort of system when someone comes and asks if you need to-go boxes about thirty seconds after the food is brought to the table by another employee.

On a side note, what's the proper way to tip in a situation like this? It's basically a fast food restaurant, but then employees bring out the food and constantly offer to do stuff for you?