The Smokin' Oak Barbeque Restaurant, Bar & Catering

Service is very slow and not that friendly.

I grew up in Texas. Some of the items on the menu are decent, but some are an insult to my upbringing.

The chicken tostada is surprisingly good.

Atmosphere: 4

Food: 3

Service: 1

Having been a BBQ judge in Texas for over a decade, I have some pretty extensive BBQ background. Unfortunately, this place did not hit the mark. In all my years I've never experienced this much lack of S/P.

Visiting Vancouver and figured I'd give it a shot. Put it this way, they are charging more than what you'd pay for Franklin's and you're getting Famous Dave's quality.

The owner seems to complain about hurting local businesses, but they are quite literally ripping you people off with this quality.

They might be several generations old and from Texas but they shouldn't claim Texas if this is the quality they are putting out. You'll find even the lowest quality brisket in Texas will blow this place away.

Edit: Well, I just road tripped and tried Oregon BBQ company down in Albany, OR and they (and 99% of Texas) have figured out how to get more salt on the meat.

Franklin also has daily plates at a much better price. Possibly the raw meat is of the same quality but please never consider your brisket anywhere even remotely close to the same finished product. I promise you, you are further apart than you are similar.

Also consider your price per lb is $4 less than Franklin's and check the awards and accolades they have. We are talking literal World's apart in quality.

Atmosphere: 4

Food: 2

Service: 3

We tried "The Smoke Stack" and "Brisket Birria Tacos" with sides of Coleslaw, "Jalapeno Pinto Beans" and "Mac & Cheese".

The Smoke Stack contains samples of brisket, spare ribs, pulled pork and sausage. The brisket as well as the pulled pork did not have much flavor. The sausage was fairly dry. The short rib was tender and had a decent taste. The brisket birria tacos tasted like they had cinnamon on them which made the taste different than I was expecting, I was not a fan.

The mac & cheese was pretty good.

I thought the coleslaw good. It had a prominent onion taste, which my wife did not care for.

The jalepeno pinto beans were my favorite side.

Atmosphere: 4

Food: 3

Service: 4

After this evening, will never be returning. Arrived at 6pm, clearly management does not staff appropriately. Seemed like our server was serving half the restaurant. She didn't make it to our table until 6:30. Didn't get our food (which is pre cooked) until 7:30. Extremely over priced for what it was. Apparently they were out of sausage but we were not informed until after our food arrived with zero compensation even though we ordered the 4 meat combo. Our bill was almost 150 for 2 dinners and each had 2 drinks. Way over priced for over done and dry meat. I could have made better ribs at home and should have for the amount of time spent here.

Kid-friendliness: No kids menu

Atmosphere: 2

Food: 3

Service: 4

I wish I could tell you about the food, but we waited for 2 hours after getting a table. I get it, It wasn't supposed to be that busy on a Wednesday, but come on. It took 30 min before we ordered after being seated, and then we never had a server even check in with us until we got up to leave AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER. After the first 45 min it had really died down and still no service. I'm sure this was just a bad day, stuff gets crazy, people drop the ball, and there's not much you can do about it. But have a management team, have hospitality, have something to do damage control. It wasn't until we got up from our table and went to the bar to pay for drinks that someone talked to us. Suddenly our food was ready and coming out.... really? Was it? Why wouldn't you offer it to go if it was ready? I wouldn't want to let someone leave my establishment as unhappy as I was with that experience. This whole thing leads me to believe that no one there knows how to run a restaurant

Atmosphere: 2

Food: 1

Service: 1

Brisket was ok. Bbq sauce needs improvement. Very authentic atmosphere and friendly staff.

Atmosphere: 4

Food: 4

Service: 5

Excellent bbq!

Atmosphere: 4

Food: 4

Service: 4

Recommended dishes: The Smoke Stack Plate, Ribs And, Sandwich

The cow died in vain :-(

Driest, blandest brisket and pulled pork we've ever had.

Slow service, too.

We were trying to figure out if it was just us but the table of three next to us was also talking about how underwhelmed they were.

Atmosphere: 3

Food: 2

Service: 2

This was our first time here and of course we chose Valentine’s Day try a new place. We expected it to be pretty busy and for there to be a wait time. While waiting we observed, Mercedes ( sorry if spelled wrong) was running the front like a champ. Answering the phone, to go orders, seating people, busting tables, taking orders, served food/beverages. If she’s not managing or getting a raise she should be. While doing all this she still found time to check on customers we were impressed. Our waitress was sweet and she was only on her 3rd day, it did take a while for our food to come out and they were out of some of the meat by the time we were there so maybe get there earlier. It was pretty decent BBQ meat. Overall not a bad experience. Though the Collard greens weren’t great I am pretty picky about this and Mac N Cheese was good per my partner. Cornbread dense but good.

Atmosphere: 3

Food: 4

Service: 5

Mid af. Don't know what I expected in this part of the country. I guess it smelled good and they suckered me in. Meats tasted steamed rather than smoked. Sauce was essentially ketchup. 1 draft beer and one plate of mid ass bbq - $50 plus tip. Don't waste your time or money.

Atmosphere: 3

Food: 2

Service: 4

Ordered the Texas Trinity. Brisket was average, not really seasoned, nor could you really taste the smoky flavor. Sausage was also fine, nothing wrong with it but some more seasoning would have helped. Spare ribs were the highlight, could taste the smoke in the meat. Nothing that made us say we need to come back.

Atmosphere: 5

Food: 3

Service: 4

The food is really good! We got there about 7:18 and was told that there would be a 45 min wait by the new guy ( his first day) I gave him my name and number and he said I would get a call. We went next door to have a drink while we waited. It is 8:05 and still no call. So we go back to the restaurant and a lady at the front tells us the guy forgot to call us because it is is first day working.... Then she says" all we have is sausage".... I said " ok can we get a table?? " We then go sit down and some girl comes over and repeatedly tells us " we only have sausage over and over" it felt like they wanted us to leave. I said " do you have sides"? When the lady took our order we each wanted to order the sausage plates. She said " you want two plates each" and we said yes. She then proceeded to talk to the cooks from our table asking if they have enough sausage. We wanted to order a appetizer and she had to ask the chef again if they had that. They did not.

Lastly when we left one of the waitress said if we want to get what we want we have to come before 7:00 pm??? I have never heard of a restaurant telling customers that lol then why are you open until 10..... Overall like I said the food is great but I will not be coming back due the strange experience. You should not tell customers to come before a certain time....we should of gotten a discount at least.

Atmosphere: 5

Food: 5

Service: 1

They have horrible customer service and communication within employees. They “don’t take reservations” yet other reviews say they called and were told the restaurant will accommodate large groups and had success with their “reservations.” However that did not happen with my large group of 10+. We did the same… were told we’d have a table ahead of time. Then we get there on our scheduled time, just for them to give our table away to another large group since they “came in right before us.” We were left standing around for 40mins with NO clear communication from staff besides we were S.O.L and had to wait around for open seats. Maybe they need to find out who is lying about reservations vs “we don’t take reservations.”
Our group was not able to sit together for the first half til tables cleared out and we could merge together. This was very annoying as we had people travel to town just for this dinner. And then the waitress took our orders separately at different times because we weren’t seated together, instead of both tables at once… so therefore one tables food came out before the other table and we weren’t able to start eating at same time once we merged together.
TO TOP IT OFF, we weren’t told til we ordered that there was NO MAC N CHEESE. At dinner time on the weekend, how does an established restaurant not be prepared for the most popular side dish for BBQ? This disappointed a lot of us. Guess who got the last of the Mac n cheese? The large group they gave our “reserved table” away to.
They need to work on their customer service and their reservation (but “not reservation”) system and also let people know they are out of certain food ahead of time.

Atmosphere: 1

Food: 3

Service: 1

I normally don't leave reviews unless the service is exemplary or one of my worst, this unfortunately is the latter. My girlfriend and I were craving BBQ because we ordered some yesterday to celebrate new years eve, unfortunately it was dropped on the way back to our place because the food cart we ordered from literally just plated it on a paper plate and covered it in foil.

So come new years day my girlfriend and I decided that we'll go try another place after she donates plasma, unfortunately she couldn't donate that day so we were able to go eat early, and we chose this place, it happened to be happy hour, so my girlfriend and I decided to order from that menu to try a few of there dishes and depending on the portions order more to go.

Well unfortunately after our orders were taken we proceeded to wait 20+ min for our happy hour food, for context, after we ordered the guests next to us got their food, and judging by the size of the bowls I could surmise it was from the HH menu so after ordering our food I already knew we were going to order more.

During our wait we started being checked on by a completely different server, which still had long stretches before we got checked on again, I was half way finished with my beer when they checked in the first time and I finished it shortly after we got our food, none of the various servers noticed and asked if I wanted another, even after we finished our food and my girlfriend deciding to order more as she was curious if the rest of the food tasted as bland as the brisket sliders she got, we were still not offered if we wanted any refills.

Unfortunately I knew we were going to have to wait another 20+ min for our to go food, so being offered another beer would have helped with the wait, but it took another server who was cleaning another table to notice we were sitting there, again as predicted another 20+ mins twiddling our thumbs to finally ask "would you like another beer?" We decided to order some since we didn't know how long it was going to take, since our HH food took so long, but then we got our food shortly after making the drink order which made the experience even worse, since now I had to sit there and finish the beer.

I don't recommend this place for Happy hour unless you want to be treated with terrible service, it's crazy because we weren't going there for their HH it just happened to be during, I don't like it when establishments immediately judge you because your ordering off a discounted menu, why even have HH if you're going to treat your guests this way? We even informed our original server that we may want to order more, so why was our service so bad? I can only assume it's because we'd order from the happy hour menu, we weren't even given the courtesy of being informed that it was going to end and if we'd like to order more from that menu before they'd charge us full price,

There are better places for BBQ, the service was terrible and the food was bland unless you had sauce which they did not provide, my Mac n cheese had some so it tasted fine, so go someplace else and actually be appreciated for being there.

Atmosphere: 2

Food: 3

Service: 1

Came here on a date with my partner, we made it in time for happy hour with intentions of trying the menu, getting a few drinks, and taking a bigger platter choice home for movie night.
Things started off okay, although we wondered why the food seemed to take longer than normal at any barbecue place we've been to. I got the brisket sliders and my partner got the brisket mac and cheese. While the brisket was very well cooked, tender and juicy, it had zero flavor whatsoever. Somehow it seemed as though it doesn't even have salt and pepper. My partner felt the only reason his mac and cheese was any good was because it had some sauce on it.
After we ordered we experienced a severe lag of service. It wasn't very busy in the shop tonight and we only saw who we thought was our server once, we had another guy race around asking if this where okay but with no follow up or offer to order more drinks. Finally we got The attention of one of the other servers who appear to be bussing a table and she put in an order for drinks, but we were well past happy hour at that point. By this time we had placed an order for our bigger platter to take home, and drinks were approaching empty but it took maybe another 20 or so minutes to get anybody's attention for another drink order while we waited.
By the time we got our bill and the food, we had been there for just short of 2 hours. Anywhere I've been, barbecue moves much quicker than that, and if it's taking its time I usually have communicative and decent service to make up for it. We really felt like we were treated poorly coming in because we were initially ordering from happy hour and they thought we were going to Be cheap guests And were deliberately ignored until happy hour ended to get a higher ticket value out of us.
It's not my style to leave long negative reviews like this, we felt very strongly about today.... Unfortunately We won't be coming back to this spot.