Delicious: Lakewood Smokehouse

Lakewood Smokehouse

There’s nothing quite like Lakewood Smokehouse, the newest restaurant to open in Lakewood Shopping Center, in the neighborhood. There’s Pecan Lodge in Deep Ellum, and Oasis Smokehouse once told us they hope to open a smokehouse at Lakeland and Garland, but until Lakewood Smokehouse opened in January, the Lakewood area was painfully devoid of barbecue. That’s the main reason why John Hall, John Pantenburg and Mike Mullen opened it.
“For the love of barbecue and the love of the neighborhood,” Hall explains. “We thought the area needed it.”
It’s not a complicated concept; the trio isn’t trying to reinvent Texas barbecue — but they are trying to do it right. They describe it as “upscale barbecue,” although don’t think that means your kids aren’t welcome. It’s still a barbecue joint, after all, and they have a $5 kids menu. What that means is that everything on the menu has been meticulously prepared, from the popular sliced brisket and ribs right down to the cheesy corn bake and hand-breaded fried okra. “We cook for the day every day,” Hall says. “We don’t serve yesterday’s meats. We cook ribs throughout the day. All our meats are smoked fresh.”
Of course that means they run out of meat by the end of the night, so you might not get ribs if you wander in after 9 p.m. “That’s just part of the business,” Hall explains, and Pantenburg adds: “That’s hard for a lot of people to understand.”