Black Smoke — Restaurant in Antwerp

(This section new) Unfortunately after the reply of the owner I've had to lower my rating to 1/5 from 3/5.

Doubting my sister's qualifications is terrible. Insulting her & my integrity is a bridge to far.

My goal w a review is to give people what they need to make an informed decision. The staff being friendly and professional and the venue being nice doesn't make spoiled sides any less spoiled.

If it was a bar it would have been a 4.5. If I was a carnivore and only ate meat a 5.

However given the fact that it is labelled a restaurant and at its pricing point it actually warrants a 1/5 which I decided to make a 3/5 because everyone has a bad day sometimes. Hence me explicitly mentioning the date and the fact that the old chef was gone. Thinking I don't want to punish a restaurant too much for having a bad day. I hope your chef is fine and she ends up making the best side dishes for beautiful meat in the future. And I hope the person writing replies to reviews takes a pause in the future to think what the person's goal is and whether silence is golden might apply.

Kind regards.

(Original review)

We ate here on Wednesday 28th of August and had 9 to 1 Texas Style Brisket (beef brisket - their signature dish) and Perfection Plate Solo (combo of pulled beef and pulled pork).

The meat was very good, (my sister invited me here after an earlier memorable experience) and the setting (rooftop bar) was quite nice on a sunny evening. However, side dishes did not look fresh and appealing. And after tasting them we concluded that they must have been made a whole lot of days ago. Goat cheese accompanying the corn on the cob even seemed rotten. After tasting them, sides were left on the table untouched (except the roast potatoes).

We have never let a restaurant throw away so much food coming from our table.

We informed the staff and they told us that the chef had recently left and that the new chef (formerly the sous chef of Black Smoke) had taken her position 2 weeks earlier. Make your own conclusion...

The head waitress took our drinks off the bill,...

We went to this restaurant yesterday for our 2nd anniversary and had high hopes on the food as I did a very tasty workshop with black smoke a few months ago. We started with the bone marrow (awesome) and steak tartare (good). And went for the Bonanza as main, the pacing of the dishes was eratic with some way to long waits. To be honest, only the chicken lolypops were good. The sausage was salty, bland and too fine-grained, the pulled beef was only two big chunks of very overcooked unchewable crust. The brisket was not juicy at all (and I see you blame the local meat in other posts, although the guy at the workshop said all your meat is imported) also the brisket had all the pepper and one end and almost none at the other. The spareribs were also over, dry and no way near the ones we had at workshop. The other peace of pork that came with that was also so tasteless and over cooked, that we have forgotten what it was, even with the bland white sauce. The eclair with with whiskey was okay, but I will never get this glorification of average brands of whiskey. That combined with the clueless and uninterested crew working there and our sore stomach the day after left us very disappointed. So we threw away our doggy bag this morning, feeling bad about the food waste. The atmosphere wasn't that great, but also maybe because the restaurant wasn't full and the rough decorations felt forced with the kind of music played. I have the feeling we went on a bad evening and I sincerely hope you get your quality issues under control, because for the price it should have been...

Overall not the most pleasant experience. The food was mediocre and doesn't hold up to the American barbecue description. The atmosphere is pleasant and the music perfectly matched. Seating was okay for my partner, however the wood chair on my end had me shifting uncomfortably after 10 minutes. Servers were friendly, although not very attentive. We waited several times to be helped with drinks, and I would like to add that they were not that busy.

Once, when trying to get service from the person that had helped us twice before, we got a quick (slightly annoyed) reply that the server was busy and would get someone else to help us. Leaving us confused as to who was actually serving us..

The food. Undoubtedly the biggest dissapointment of the evening. The pulled beef on the starters and mains were very dry. The beef brisket, although soft and tasty, was immensely salty, leaving us wishing our drinks weren't empty. The Charolais sirloin steak contained a lot of tendons leaving me with the unfortunate situation of having to remove the meat from my mouth, as my teeth had lost the battle. The sides were delicious, but we had hoped for the barbecue meat to be the star of the show.

The positive highlight of the evening was the spectacular cocktails that were delicious.

It is unlikely we will return to Black Smoke and can therefore not...