Moe’s Original Bar B Que in Matthews, NC
Moe’s is a barbecue chain with more than 40 locations, most of them located in Alabama and Colorado (interesting!). In my neck of the woods, there’s one in Matthews, North Carolina, where the Co-Pilot, Little One, and I went to get lunch one day recently.
Pictured above is the smoked chicken platter, done Alabama-style with white sauce, slaw, and pickle. For the sides, I chose cornbread, collards, and sweet potato casserole, which was topped with some kind of sweet corn flakes. Not pictured, the Co-Pilot ordered fried catfish, mac ‘n cheese, broccoli slaw, and fried green tomatoes.
My chicken was probably the highlight of the meal. Smoked meat makes me happy in ways that other preparations can’t, so I was excited to see how well this place could do, and intrigued by their “Alabama style” presentation, which I don’t recall ever having had before.
One of the things that made this platter stick out was that they didn’t give me too much. Believe me: I can barely help myself when given the opportunity to order up a huge, indulgent, pile of smoked meats and assorted carbs (though I’ve been trying my best to make sure to get greens with every such meal). Just look at my Instagram feed if you don’t believe me. This next pic is from The Smoke Pit, in Concord, North Carolina.
But Moe’s gave me a reasonable portion without skimping on the meat, and with the creamy white sauce it felt more indulgent than it had any right to be. Given that I’m still trying to make good choices, I was grateful for that, on top of how delicious it was. I’m not sure what’s in the white sauce, but Southern Living pointed to a recipe that starts with a mayonnaise base, then adds vinegar, sugar, mustard, horseradish, and some other stuff. That sounds about right.
Otherwise, the fried catfish was pretty solid (but I’m a fried catfish snob who thinks all other catfish is far behind the stuff served at Lil Dizzy’s); I appreciated how vinegar-y the collards were; the sweet potato casserole was sweeter than I expected and bordered on reading like dessert; the mac ‘n cheese was aight; the fried green tomatoes were perfectly good with a well-above-average sauce drizzled on; and the broccoli slaw wasn’t my deal (though the Co-Pilot said she loved it with a dash of hot sauce added).
The cornbread, on the other hand, wasn’t just any mix-n-bake. I’m pretty sure it had bits of jalapeño in it, and instead of just being served in squares straight out of the oven, it appeared they’d been thrown on the griddle for a few seconds before serving. That put an unexpected touch of buttery crust on the bread that made it a lot easier to pick up and a whole lot more fun to bite into.
