Smoke 'N' Barrel

Before Smoke 'N' Barrel had a smoker, it had an itinerary. In 2019, founder Tommy Hunter spent nine weeks crossing the seven barbecue regions of the United States — Texas, Kansas, Memphis, Kentucky, and the two Carolinas down through Alabama — and worked through 108 restaurants before carrying the research home. The smokehouse opened in 2020 in Kingston's west end, run with managing partner Neil Highet, and that nine-week survey is still the organizing idea behind the food. The result reads less like a list of smoked dishes than like a tour of where each one comes from. Order here and you are, in a real sense, ordering off a map.

The clearest first order is the Smokehouse Wings: smoked, then flash fried and tossed in a dry rub or sauce, served with Alabama white on the side — a single plate that shows the smoker and the fryer working in tandem. From there the brisket sets the table's direction. It comes Texas-style, cut for a plate that arrives with slaw, cornbread buttons, and a choice of fixin, and the same beef turns up in a Brisket Philly smothered with sautéed onions, peppers, and the house cheese sauce. The Smokehouse Poutine is the local hinge — beer-battered fries buried under Quebec curds, smoked brisket ends, and gravy. Pulled pork is served Carolina-style with creamy slaw, pickles, and MacKinnon Maple, on brioche or in three flour tortillas. The fried chicken thighs are brined a full twenty-four hours in pickle juice, run through buttermilk, then finished with maple dill.

The sauce list is where the regional map stops being a slogan. MacKinnon Maple, Carolina Vinegar, Carolina Mustard, Sweet Habanero, and Alabama White each come out of a different tradition, and the kitchen hands the choice to the diner — pour the South you want over the meat in front of you. The plates carry the same logic: dry-rub ribs as St. Louis-cut sides by the half or full slab, a loaded-mac section that climbs from brisket to pulled pork to smoked chicken to a Frito-pie build, and a banana pudding the menu calls a staple shared across all seven regions. Plate-and-side composition is half the value here, since every barbecue plate lands with slaw, cornbread buttons, and a fixin of choice. None of it leans on a single house smoke. Texas and the Carolinas are meant to taste like different places on the same table.

The long days give the kitchen a second register. Open every day from late morning to midnight, the smokehouse runs barside happy hour in two windows — a weekday afternoon stretch and a nightly late one — pairing low drink pricing, six-dollar draught and house wine by the glass with the bar rail a little lower, against a bites list that pulls the menu down to barbecue nachos, knots and cheese, mozzarella sticks, sausage on a bun, and the jalapeño-cheddar cornbread buttons under honey butter, most of it in the five-to-nine-dollar range. That second life matters. A group can settle in early for ribs and brisket platters, or two people can drift in near midnight for wings and a beer, and a whiskey-and-bar streak runs underneath the food the whole time. The daily schedule lets the dining room and the bar take turns leading the night.

The breadth is deliberate. A smoked tofu club, an Impossible burger, gluten-free buns, and railway-cut sweet potato fries give vegetarian and gluten-free diners a real seat at the table rather than a token line. Set on the Bayridge edge of Kingston's west end instead of the tourist core downtown, the restaurant is built to be several things across one week — the catering platter for a crowd, the family barbecue order, the late wing-and-beer stop — depending on which door of the day a diner walks through. The smoker stays lit for all of them.