The garden bar promises leafy calm; the smokehouse promises fire and slow-cooked meat – two of the oldest human pleasures combined
The Garden Bar and Smokehouse and Grill holds a thousand and four reviews and a 4.3 – a large, fair sample – and its name combines two deeply appealing and very old human pleasures: the garden, a green and leafy retreat, and the smokehouse, the ancient art of cooking meat slowly over fire and smoke.
The garden bar
The “garden bar” promises one of the great pleasures of drinking: doing it outdoors, in green and pleasant surroundings. The garden – whether a proper walled garden, a leafy terrace, or a planted courtyard – transforms the experience of a drink. To sit with a glass in the open air, surrounded by greenery, under the sky, is one of the simplest and best pleasures the warmer months offer.
The pub garden and beer garden are cherished British institutions, and this survey has noted throughout how the garden or terrace is a great summer draw – though always, as we observed at the rooftop bars, a bet on the notoriously unreliable British weather. On the forty or so good evenings a year that the British climate grants, the garden bar is paradise; the rest of the time, it is an act of optimism. But the promise of the garden – green, open, leafy, calm – is a powerful and lovely one.
The smokehouse
Paired with the leafy calm of the garden is something far more primal: the smokehouse, the art of cooking meat slowly over wood smoke. This is one of the oldest cooking techniques known to humanity – smoking meat over fire both cooks it and preserves it, and the practice reaches back into deep prehistory, to the first times our ancestors hung meat over a smouldering fire.
The modern smokehouse and barbecue tradition – especially the American style of “low and slow” smoking, where tough cuts of meat are cooked for many hours over wood smoke until meltingly tender – has become enormously popular. Brisket, ribs, pulled pork, smoked sausage: the smokehouse produces some of the most deeply satisfying food there is, rich with the primal flavours of fire, smoke and slow-rendered meat. It is cooking at its most ancient and elemental, and its appeal is correspondingly deep.
Fire and smoke
There is something profound in the combination this bar offers. The mastery of fire is perhaps the single most important thing that made us human – the control of flame that let our ancestors cook, warm themselves, and gather in the dark. Cooking meat over fire is, in a real sense, the original human act of civilisation, the thing around which the first communities gathered. The smokehouse and grill tap directly into this deep, primal pleasure – the gathering around the fire, the shared roasted meat, the oldest feast there is.
To combine this ancient fire-feast with the green calm of the garden and the pleasures of the bar is to offer a genuinely appealing whole: the primal satisfaction of smoke and meat, the green ease of the garden, and the conviviality of the drink, all together. It is a combination that speaks to something very old in us.
The bar
A large, popular bar doing a fair 4.3 across a large and real sample, combining the green retreat of the garden bar with the ancient, primal pleasures of the smokehouse and grill.
Verdict
Large, popular, fairly rated, and named for two deep human pleasures – the green calm of the garden and the ancient fire of the smokehouse.
Sit in the garden on one of the good evenings, order something slow-smoked over wood, and enjoy a combination as old as civilisation itself: fire, meat, greenery and good company.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
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