What it's all about - /SocialSmoker

T (April '23)

SCORE: Tell 'yo friends. This is good enough to bring people to.

ORDER: Brisket*2 | Cornbread *2 | Burger*2 | Pastrami sandwich

VALUE: Yes

Y (April '23)

SCORE: Tell 'yo friends. This is good enough to bring people to.

ORDER: Burger*2 | Pastrami sandwich |Brisket*2

VALUE: Yes

About a year ago, Y made some brisket. It was awesome. It took him hours. I decided to immediately try and find some brisket I could turn to on a whim, that wouldn't leave me hangry because it was lousy (a brisket experience one of us had at a Keong Saik joint), or resentful because I felt I was getting fleeced (an all too common outcome these days).

This was around the time that SG Brisket Kitchen launched and just look at the droolworthy video on their site to realise why I was absolutely compelled to try them with zero delay. It was good, worth trying, but as I chowed down on my ownsome, I realised a key pleasure ingredient in Texan BBQ was company. It's a social kind of thing. You want to hear people getting drunk on bourbon as you get your fingers sticky. So the hunt began for a social smoker experience. This may not be the hunt people think about though - I'd already heard about the boys from Zen who had opened their passion project. Every time I asked a chef or front of house person where they were loving for BBQ, Social Smoker was the name on everyone's lips. The hunt was for opportunity. I had resolved to try this with Y, and so we ended up with our greatest challenge of finding a date where we could actually both make it. It took S's birthday to make this happen.

First thing to know if you plan to visit Social Smoker (and, spoiler, you should), is that it opens for 5 hours a day, 5 days a week. To save you the work, it's 5-10pm Wed-Sun. No lunchtime visits and, if you get out of work at 7pm, it's also worth knowing that it's on the /YCK side of /Thompson (ie /SembawangHills), so a level of commitment {was] involved getting there. It's also a lightweight operation - when we were there the other day, there were 3 staff, total. That's in the kitchen and in front of house. This means whatsapp responsiveness is pretty much zero. All of these things meant that my overplanner, overwhelmed mother personality just could. Not. Make. It. Work. FFS. Every time I thought I would be able to just head over, a child needed me, or refused to move away from Fortnite/Roblox/Valorant. Then the brown line opened up (and I am SO down with that brown) and it became something within the realms of possibility (in my reality). With that /TEL line, Social Smoker became a mere 50 min away (with 2 20 minute walks for digestive purposes), and ... bingo!

Y and I rode over and enjoyed disembarking from the Mayflower, since we were effectively pilgrims, and there was an admittedly tenuous link to America in that we were headed for Texan /BBQ. First up ... the menu! This was first up because S was chancing a Grab and had already had two cancel on her. We figured we would kick off with a warm up and were democratic enough to give her a chance to steward the order. It was her birthday, after all.

I am a total dim sum style eater - I like trying stuff and minimising the odds of belated food envy, so was glad to persuade Y to go big. We decided to try the Feast for Two for the BBQ staples (brisket, ribs, pulled pork) and to pad this out with the pastrami sandwich S had heard a lot about and the "die die must try" burger recommendation from our waiter. This, of course, made me thirsty, since I like to drink almost as much as I like to eat, and so I went looking for the bourbon list. Ah. But.

On the occasion that we were there, Social Smoker was out of all but two wines (I don't drink beer) and doesn't actually have a spirits list. They do have cocktails though...

and we tried two of these while S negotiated a ..GrabShare. This is not a drinking joint - this is an eating joint. Knowing this is useful because you may want to bring your own liquor, where the corkage is $5 a glass.

It's also useful to know that the food comes quick. So quick that there was a reasinable risk that S would arrive to empty plates on her birthday.

Every one of those side dishes was good, and this was a surprise to me, because some of those are high risk. Cornbread, for example, is often too sweet (Kenny Rogers) or too dry. Here it was almost like a dense castella cake, and the sweetness was more in the icing sugar sprinkle than the cornbread itself. I ordered another pretty much immediately, and two to take home. The spinach had a lovely garlicky touch to it, and managed to avoid being soggy in that kind of tanin tongue-drying way spinach sometimes has. The mac and cheese was good, al dente and with the enough sauce clinging to each elbow to get the balance of flavour right. BUT forget all that. It was about the meat. The brisket was so, so good. Y and I immediately declared it the best we'd found in SG, no question. The pulled pork was dissapointing, something we felt about all the pork dishes in the end - likely a reflection on the strength of the beef dishes. Specific to the pulled pork, it was a little dry to me, and though the BBQ sauce helped, it just felt a little bit like a miss. The ribs were alright. Tender and all, but nothing to make your heart go boom boom. The brisket though. Lets just say BOOM! and I'm taking you home. I ended up adding brisket to the take out order because it was a sure thing crowd pleaser and the man and brother were gauranteed to love it. So did my mother, as it turned out.

We immediately ordered another platter of brisket and this time added the sausage, which had good herbaceousness but ended on a strange note (S reckoned it needed more fat), and the iberico pork belly. The pork belly was fine but Bar-a-Thym's would be the go-to for "ang-moh char siew". We also ordered another burger because oh my God the burger and the pastrami sandwich were excellent. They clearly were not going to travel well and so we prioritised doubling down on them on site. The burger is my new favourite in town since Burger Bar is no longer. We had a small debate about whether it compares to Hammee's. Small because we organised a comparison session in a couple of weeks to determine which is tops.

All in, Social Smoker is a winner, and one worth a pilgrimage to.

/socialsmoker