Red Dog South

Bad BBQ

14 April 2014 - Clapham North

Hoxton BBQ joint Red Dog Saloon (home to London's hottest wings and a pretty impressive feat of burger engineering in 'The Devastator') has moved to Clapham. The girlfriend scored us a table during the soft launch, so we went to check it out.

We generally love soft launches. What's not to like about chowing down on tasty food at half price? Except here, the 50% off probably only made it about 1% less disappointing.





For starters we went for jalapeño poppers and buffalo wings (not the challenge wings, which are made with Naga Viper chillis, one-time world's hottest. I have tasted one at their Hoxton joint, and instantly regretted it - ouch). These wings were ok - a bit of crunch to the coating, the sauce tasty and a decent amount of heat. I thought the blue cheese dipping sauce would have benefited from more blue cheese (like the amazing dip you get at MEATliquor) but it was fine.

The poppers were rubbish, though. The batter fell off as soon at it was touched, and somehow they'd managed to make a jalapeno stuffed with cream cheese taste bland. Which is actually quite impressive when you think about it. I've had better from LiDL.







For mains we went for beef rib and pork ribs. The pork ribs - four decently meaty belly ribs - were surprisingly tasteless. There was a nice deep red smoke ring on them, but overall they weren't that smokey or barbeque-y. I had the occasional bit that got the full effect of the marinade, but generally I had to keep slathering each bite with the (admittedly very good) Kansas City BBQ sauce to keep flavour and moisture levels up, which says a lot.

The beef rib - one rib - was tastier than the pork. We're guessing given the longer cooking times required, it had more of a chance to soak in the smoke and flavour. It was fairly tender (I've definitely had chewier beef ribs), but again was bordering on the dry. Not terrible, not amazing. But - ONE RIB. And it was in danger of being dwarfed by an onion ring…

Had we been paying full price, that morsel would have cost £18. Jesus wept.


Compare and contrast this with the currently missing-in-action (from London) BBQWhiskyBeer for the same price.

And not only was it four times the size, it was at least four times tastier - if not more.

The service at Red Dog was a bit slapdash too - for example, we had to ask three times for some water which was never refilled and had to pour our own wine. It's not even like the place was half-full. Maybe there is an argument to be made that this was a soft-launch, and so service wasn't tight yet. But that didn't prevent  Hawksmoor, Foxlow or Big Easy being on-point when I went to their soft-launches...

Which is the recurring theme with Red Dog; you get much better everything, elsewhere.

So to sum up - if you find yourself in Clapham and have a hankering to eat wings so hot you think you're about to go blind or a ludicrously large burger, then fine, knock yourself out (And this is exactly why they should do pretty well in Clapham). But if you want good bbq, there's a Bodean's down the road and it's a lot nicer than this.

www.reddogsaloon.co.uk