If you think the best barbecue is always found in the worst part of town, in a place with bars on the windows and just enough grease on the table to write your initials, then this isn't it.
However, if you think it can be found a few minutes off the highway in Tifton, Georgia, then this really isn't it either. Depending on what you order, here's an outside chance it could be OK.
Remember this is part of a chain.
As someone who has spent a lifetime in pursuit of the perfect barbecue (read more than 125 Yelp reviews covering barbecue joints from New York City to San Diego ), I've come to learn that chains do not, as a rule, do barbecue very well... and, unfortunately, Hog n Bones, at least this one, is a prime example.
The combo plate consisted of two ribs and a serving of colder than room temperature pulled pork. The ribs were St. Louis cut, meaty but not with a lot of flavor.
A quarter of a chicken for $8.99 did have good flavor, but are you ready for this, their barbecue sauce that comes in plastic packets. It takes somewhere between three and five packets to get enough sauce to cover a slice of bread. Good grief, how are you supposed to know what flavor sauce you want when you order. How can you know if you haven' tried them?
The sauces squeezed from the packet are sweet (which it was), original (which it was not) and hot (as labeled). Put your sauces in bottles and put them on the table so folks can taste them and decide which one they'll use in hopes of warming up the meat.
Learning the fries were frozen, we opted for the potato salad which tasted just like almost every other potato salad. Not really good, not really bad. Just potato salad. The one side that was good was their onion peals; thin slices of onion deep fried with a good dipping sauce - but you can't make a meal out o a cup of fried onion petals.
The service was great, the folks friendly. Matt at the cash register answered most all of the questions and was aware that some Yelp reviews had said the pulled pork was dry, and said he would make sure our order was not dry. We forgot to ask him to make sure it was warm.
We asked about a tee-shirt to add to the collection, was met with a chuckle from a staffer who shall not be named and who said, "mister we don't even have enough for our own staff."
There are, apparently, a number of Hog n Bones. You have to hope the others are better than the one in Tifton but the Brown Shoe Gourmet is not going to be the guy who opens his wallet to find out. There are plenty of locally owned and operated (and a few chains, example: City Barbecue) that do it right.
One star. read more