Last night, my wife and I went to our local Smokey Bones for the first time in several months. Boy, has the menu changed - and not for the better! It looked as if they took all the dishes I liked there and systematically removed them from the menu - and then raised all the prices on the remaining dishes by about 25%.
The main items I liked there were the bison burger, which is now gone, and the BBQ chicken, which is still “there”, but is ONLY available with the sauce they use on the ribs! I gave it a try. Eeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwww! Sickly sweet sauce and chicken DO NOT MIX! I tried to order it the old way, and could not. The price on that is way up, too.
My wife gave a positive report on the baby back ribs, however. But at $14.49 for a half rack and $20 for a rack, it had better be good.
We also got the cornbread, and she thought the recipe had changed for the worse. And the price is up by a dollar.
We didn’t know it when we went, but today I see that the chain was sold in December. That explains a lot. Now the food costs as much as a decent steakhouse, but isn’t good.
Understood on both counts, but it looks like they’ve made an effort to go UPscale, not cut back. They offer about 4 steak cuts now,while they used to have just one. But, in doing so, they’ve priced themselves into a different restaurant class - charging Carrabba’s prices without Carrabba’s quality food, to name one example. And they haven’t updated the restaurant look, which Darden’s, the former owner, had once planned to do (according to a talkative waiter last year) because they look too much like a sports bar, and thought the look was not a draw to female customers.
They were based here in Orlando when they were part of Darden. Apparently they didn’t do well in most markets because so many parts of the country have their own regional barbecue styles (Texas, Memphis, Kansas City, and North Carolina being the four biggies), so “chain barbecue” was unnecessary and unpopular. The sports bar/hunting lodge style of the restaurants was ultra-macho and wasn’t doing much for female customers, so I believe the goal was to retool them as more of a generic sports bar and grill-style restaurant, eliminating the masculine decor and a lot of the barbecue selections.
I’m not familiar with the restaurant in question, but ~$`4.50 for a half rack and ~$20.00 for a full rack is right in the middle of the menu prices for these items in the restaurants I have been to lately.
We had one here in Charleston but it went kapooey about a year after it opened. The one time I ate there it was pretty decent food, but never got to go back.
Smokey Bones almost went out of business, IIRC. The sale was engineered to allow the operation to continue, else they would have gone bankrupt.
On reviewing the article, my memory isn’t far off. The chain was struggling, and its parent company apparently was deciding between a sale and simply closing the chain. Around here, the restaurant was closed a day or two during the process.
Yeah, and as noted, my wife enjoyed her order of baby backs. But nothing else on the menu seems either to be good or worth the price. Our side dishes (she got some sort of roasted corn, not on the cob; I got mashed potatoes) were mediocre or worse.
The new chain owner had better make some changes if they expect to survive. A pale imitation of Applebee’s isn’t going to cut it.