BRISKET — Restaurant in Municipality of Al Shamal

Full disclosure - while I'm not from Texas, my family is. So I may not be as fanatical about my brisket as some of my family are, its still a pretty significantly import dish for me. This provides some context for the review.

Seeing a place called brisket, I also did come with some rather high expectations.

Go start, service is friendly and snappy, they had a good team on the floor when I was there. Present but not in your face, and attentive for when you need something.

Menus are tablets, which I'm still on the fence about but it was fine, pretty decent selection of options, including breakfast that I may be back to try sometime, as well as steaks and other items. But sod that, I'm here for the brisket.

At initial glance, was a bit underwhelmed by the suggestion the portion size was 250 grams, not typical of proper brisket portions but what arrived probably clocked closer to 400 so all good there, very generous portion size.

It came with pickled peppers, which were good, some veggies that were unremarkable and fries.

On to the main show - the brisket. First off and most alarmingly, it showed no tell tale signs of being anywhere near smoke. There was no bark formation or smoke ring, and there was certainly no smoke present in the flavor. By what I could tell, the brisket was braised or at the very least, wrapped for its whole cook process.

This meant that it just ate soft. And that's the good news, it wasn't anywhere near dry and had great beef flavor, but did rely heavily on the very good BBQ sauce to provide any real liveliness on the palate. And any self respecting texan or fan of smoked brisket will tell you, having to rely on bbq sauce isn't a good sign!

Overall, it scratched an itch, in that, 'its very hard to reach itch, and you got part of it, but not quite fully' way.

I will certainly come here again to try the other dishes as, well, Riyadh isn't really chock full of options, but as for brisket in the Middle East, need to go to Dubai or get me to invite you over for a...

It was an amazing experience. We were so hungry we forgot to take pictures of the food before eating.

I will definitely come back to this place!

They greeted us at the door, we were coming back from a dreadful restaurant experience nearby and we were very very hungry. The waiter was quick to take our order and recommend the best options.

We ordered the fried onion rings (just the right amount of crispness), the chicken lolipops (juicy and very yummy), dynamite shrimp (not too spicy and just right), the brisket appetizer (soft and yummy, plus the veggies on the side are AMAZING), brisket burger (wasn’t my favorite, a bit dry for my taste) , and smoked chicken burger (pretty good but needed more sauce).

Oh also the berry mojito was really good! And we topped it off with the yummy date pudding...

The only thing worse than bad food is bad food with prices fit for top tier resteruants. I'm truly disgusted by the food that was presented, I ordered the tacos and I must say I have never had a worst taste in my mouth than the after taste of these tacos , I mean for starters the meat was very dry and it lacked spices but had an outrageous amount of barbecue sauce in the meat so it was very sweet, and after I took one bite and juices leaked from the meat which was very unpleasant. Secondly the drinks, you pay 12 SAR for drinks and they give you a 2 SAR Pepsi can, I mean come on, that's just wrong, lastly the resteruant decide to bring the main course before the appetizers and by that time we had no room for of it. so another big waste of money. In conclusion this resteruant deserves nothing...