I was up in Milwaukee last fall and I was staying at a new-ish hotel on the west side of the city. It turned out that it was part of the Mayfair Collection, a mixed-use development that featured residential, retail shops, and restaurants. There was a barbecue joint just across the parking lot from the hotel and I decided to give the place a try. This is my experience at Smoke Shack.
Smoke Shack is one of the restaurants under the umbrella of the Hospitality Democracy company originally founded by Joe and Angie Sorge. In addition to Smoke Shack, other Milwaukee area restaurants they oversee include Onesto, Holey Moley doughnut and coffee shop, Blue Bat Kitchen and the popular burger joint A.J. Bombers. (Click here to see the Road Tips entry on A.J. Bombers.) Joe Sorge is a New York native whose family had deep ties to the restaurant business. Sorge went to Cornell University to study hospitality management before working at a handful of restaurants, then moving to Milwaukee with his wife in 2000. Sorge started Hospitality Democracy with help from Marcus Investments, a Milwaukee-based capital investment firm with roots in movie theaters, hotels and restaurants.
The original Smoke Shack opened in 2010 in Milwaukee's Historic Third Ward as a collaborative effort between Sorge, Street-za Pizza owner Scott Baitinger, and developer Robert Joseph. Smoke Shack's downtown Milwaukee location wasn't large - it could only hold less than 50 patrons - but business exceeded Sorge's wildest dreams after it opened.
A little over 6 years ago, ground was broke in suburban Wauwatosa for a multi-use shopping, entertainment, and residential district called The Mayfair Connection. Sorge was approached about putting some of his restaurants in the complex and in late 2016, Smoke Shack, A.J. Bombers, and the coffee/donut shop Holey Moley opened in a shared building.
In the summer of 2018, it was announced that Joe and Angie Sorge were leaving the Hospitality Democracy group after being bought out by Marcus Investments. The Sorge's founded their own restaurant consulting firm - SideWork Hospitality Consulting - later that year and continue to work with restaurants in the greater Milwaukee area.
The Wauwatosa location of Smoke Shack is just north of Burleigh St. next to Interstate 41. (see map) There's a parking garage very near the restaurant with lot parking across a four-lane road that feeds cars in and out of The Mayfair Collection. I walked across the parking lot in front of the hotel and passed by the outdoor seating area at Smoke Shack. It featured a fire pit and a bar area under a canopy that was fronted by corrugated metal sheets. It looked like it would be a nice area to hang if the weather was warm - which it really wasn't that fall evening.
Inside Smoke Shack, the decor was sort of a contemporary rustic theme. There appeared to be a lot of reclaimed barn board used in the bar and along the walls of the place with corrugated metal panels mixed in. Opposite the bar was a number of tables in a small narrow nook-type area. On a wall above a couple tables in an alcove were a number of bicycle handlebars - ram-horn, butterfly, and regular handlebars - that were on wood mounts to sort of parody big-game horns or racks. I got a chuckle out of it.
I sat at the bar and was greeted by Erika who was working behind the bar that evening. She gave me a menu to look over and I took a look at the beer selection they had to offer in the glass-doored refrigerator behind the bar. I saw that they had Surly Furious IPA in 16 oz. cans and I ordered up one of those.
It's pretty basic barbecue offerings at Smoke Shack - baby back ribs, pulled pork, brisket, smoked chicken and smoked sausage. Sides included sweet and spicy baked beans, cole slaw, sweet potato fries, and chipotle creamed corn. Sandwiches included a brisket Sloppy Joe, a pulled pork sandwich topped with pimento mac & cheese (which was also a side choice), and a sandwich called the "Shack Daddy" that featured ham, brisket and sausage. They had appetizers on the menu including burnt ends (of which they were out of that evening), smoked chicken wings, and something they called "Kansas City Eggrolls" which featured Iowa pulled pork and Monterey jack cheese with honey mustard and served with Smoke Shack's Kansas City-style sweet and smokey sauce.
For my dinner that evening, I got the pulled pork and brisket combination. For my side, I got the baked beans. They had four different types of sauces to choose from - the aforementioned sweet and smokey Kansas City-style sauce, a Carolina-style mustard and vinegar sauce (of which I don't care for), a Texas-style sauce that was basically the Kansas City-style sauce with a bit of a kick, a house barbecue sauce that - well, I'll get into that later, and a habanero sauce that I figured I'd give a try.
Now, do you ever look at something that is served to you and it doesn't take much to tell you that this may not be very good? That's sort of how I felt when the barbecue plate was set down in front of me. I could tell that this would not be a very good meal from the first glance at the meat.
And my eyes certainly didn't lie - it was pretty bad. The pulled pork was lifeless and bland. The brisket was dry and tasted like it had been left in a crock pot a little too long. Neither had any smoke flavor to them. And the baked beans seemed like they had opened a can of Van Camp's pork and beans, poured them in a bowl and heated them up. They were neither sweet or spicy.
Even the sauces couldn't help this meal. The Kansas City-style sweet sauce was not very good. And since the Texas-style sauce was based off the Kansas City-style sauce, even with a bit of a spicy kick on the back side, it couldn't have been saved. The house sauce - which is supposed to be a little bit of everything - was completely blah in taste. And I had to try the habanero sauce just to see how spicy it was. It wasn't spicy at all and it was very flat in flavor. The meal was highly disappointing.
I understand that Smoke Shack has won numerous "people's choice" awards for having the best barbecue in Milwaukee since they opened in 2010, but I have to say the meal I had at the Wauwatosa location was some of the most disappointing barbecue I've encountered in my years of travel. The meat was lifeless and bland with nary a hint of a smokey barbecue taste, the baked beans were akin to the canned variety, and I found their sauces to be pretty flat and underwhelming in their flavor. While Smoke Shack is a nice place with their rustic decor, their barbecue was pretty mediocre - if that. And that's too bad as I had high hopes for the place.